Haven’t you heard? Social Media is the media channel to be, nowadays. Millions of people use it everyday, although most of them aren’t even aware of it. Speaking of this, what’s this social media mambo-jambo everybody’s been talking about lately?

Well, in a nutshell, social media is a democratized media form, that has its users and community at its center - here, the community members are the ones who create all the original content, who find out first about anything topic, who interact with fellow social media users with similar interests and so on.

Here’s a few examples of social media channels: social networking (myspace.com, facebook.com), social bookmarking (digg.com, del.icio.us, stumbleupon.com), blogging (wordpress.com, blogger.com), micro blogging (twitter.com), media sharing (youtube.com, flickr.com) etc.

Now that we’ve had this aspect covered, let’s get down to the point.

How Can Social Media Help My Business or Online Presence?

Marketing. Think of social media as just another form of promoting your business - of getting your brand up ahead, into people’s minds.

Now, when thinking about social media two words should pop to your heard: community and conversation - these are the two most common words you’ll run into when dwelling in the social media sphere. The question, however, remains - how can social medial help me and my business?

• Branding. Nowadays, every respectable company wants a slice of the SM sphere, simply because it’s an awesome tool for promoting its products, brand and ideas. Social media is so packed with so many niches and demographics, that it’s virtually impossible for a brand not to find an audience so that it may signal its presence to it.
• The viral effect. Few environments are so volatile and fast moving as social media. It’s enough to post a controversial blog post for it to be picked up by thousands of publications, thus spreading your message to even more thousands of minds. This, of course, will only happen if you create something truly remarkable -  there are more simpler ways of getting things viral, like a youtube video. How many times did receive on your IM or e-mail links to funny/awesome/badass/uber videos on youtube? I thought so, and it’s not so difficult to make one for yourself either, you just need a good idea and the right push.
• Buzz (Traffic!). The level of exposure one can get over social media is incredible! If you provide something of real value and user friendly, you can easily get popular across multiple networks.Let’s just take a look at digg.com for a moment. A front page on the social bookmarking service can bring in tens of thousands of new visitors, as well as hundreds/thousands of links from other websites. If your campaign is done right and, hopefully, with a bit of luck you can also benefit from the notorious snowball effect. It’s simple, your story gets popular on digg, but most digg users use other services too, so you might get popular on similar bookmarking services like reddit.com, del.icio.us, stumbleupon.com and so on. You might even break the 100k visitors barrier, and all this in a matter of a few days.
• Feedback. Getting your customers opinion about your products or services provides very valuable insight on how to further improve them. By using social media, you can now easily interact with your audience, hear out their thoughts and, even, build relationships. Actually, here’s another important word you need to keep in mind when dodging around social media - LISTEN. On the opposite front, never underestimate your customers, especially in the digital era. A customer might be very offended or simply unsatisfied with your services and decide to write a post on his blog. In some cases, what happens is it gets some attention and ranks on google. Imagine a potential customer querying your product’s keyword or even your brand name on Google and finding a negative post among the search results. What happens next is pretty obvious - you’ll lose clients.
• Fast pace. Press releases used to be an efficient way of propagating in-company news and the release of new products or services. Now, with the help of corporate blogs, microblogging (like twitter, which enables you to get your message across thousands of people in a matter of seconds) and RSS, news travels fast, and I mean REALLY fast!
• It’s cheap! Our development and consulting work is, primarily, focused towards small to medium sized companies, so we greatly understand the need to keep all costs at a minimum. Social media is perfect for this, because it can easily provide a business with the necessary exposure on a budget for a maximum ROI.

Where We Fit In

“OK, you’ve had me convinced, social media is awesome! How can you guys help me, though?”

Simple. We have a team of social media experts, with a vast experience working in the social sphere, that will help you to optimize your website, such that it will be easy to link to, more visible to social media users and a lot more interactive.

We’ll do this by analyzing your website or various other online presence, after which we come up with the proper social media campaigns (proper social channels and audiences), such that you’ll gain maximum exposure and visibility.

How We Do It ?

• We first work around the content. Immediately after we finish analyzing your website, we ccome up with relevant solutions to make it as appealing as possible to social media traffic. Meaning we help re-write the copy, train your bloggers on how to write for social media (finding a good subject, wrapping the content into a tight form, etc.) and make the content easy to link out and bookmark. We can also work around the design, if we find it inadequate.
• We create you a social presence on the web. You want your message to get across as many people as possible and, hopefully, to the right audience. That’s why we’ll take over the web and help you get to the right people. To elaborate, we’ll create various virtual renditions of your website/company on various networks, so that you can get to connect the right people. This means you’ll get to have elaborate profiles on myspace, facebook, youtube, digg, twitter and anything else that might be relevant to your target audience.
• We work ETHICALLY. If you’ve worked with an internet marketing or SEO company before, chances are you’ve been told they’ll use SM to improve your business and sales. Thing is, though, like a lot of marketers out there, they promote your online presence purely at a SEO level, spamming the networks for links. This is BAD, especially if you somewhat have a reputation. We’ve seen a lot of companies get a lot of negative press, because of this.We work diferently. We work ethically. We don’t go tramping everything in front of us, so we can get what we want (i.e. links). Don’t go around acting like Ghenghis Khan; be more of a Ghandi. Stop, listen, participate and contribute. Then we can reap the rewards (ROI), which consist of more then just some links. Think of branding, awareness, traffic (loads of it), community building  and, maybe most importantly, a message sent to the masses.

How about that, huh? Seems like social media is awesome after all! If you’d for us to embark together on social media campaign for your product/website/company or want to talk more about social media or simply say ‘hi!’, then, please, feel free to contact us!