I have long been telling clients to shoot more video and use social media to market their business. I have told them that it is going to be big, (why else would Google have paid a zillion dollars for YouTube?).  Well after years of talking about it, I finally got a client that I have been trying to work with for years to use video. Posted on YouTube regularly, they will use it on almost all of the main pages of the website that we are building for them. They will have their employees shoot their own videos, and upload them to their Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn accounts.  This is a big deal because companies, especially smaller companies, are not using social networking sites to their advantage.  I read this article about social marketing and how big companies are using it. DAVID RANII of McClatchy Newspapers says companies realized the importance of a good social marketing campaign during the Olympics when Lenovo used it to market their laptops. I would say that if you are a business, and you are marketing to the public, you HAVE to include this in your marketing budget. It costs you only time and energy in most cases and that is cheap compared to the click costs on the same sites. Larger companies are just throwing money at the banner ads and ad links for these sites. The problem is that due to the way it is being displayed, most browsers don’t display all of those ads to customers. So you may be throwing money out the window. You can pay your assistant to find people on social sites that have interests similar to yours and ask them to become “your friend.”  This lets you market to them on a whole new level, as a peer.

There are so many ways to use social sites that I cannot even begin to break it down, but I am going to try to show one way you can use one of these sites to market your business in an unobtrusive way.

Let’s say your company makes really comfy socks (I love comfy socks).  Everyone is potentially your client because, well, everyone wears socks, or at least they should.  A website like MySpace is a perfect place to find potential buyers of your socks since it is such a wide cross section of America.  You create a MySpace account for Cushy, (he’s a sock). You take pictures of your company sock Cushy hanging with his homies, (other socks of course.) and doing crazy things like base jumping, posing with a Elvis impersonator in Vegas, all that.  Maybe even create some video of him talking about how to get stains out of him, using household items like baking soda. (I don’t know if that works - I just made it up.)  Post all of this on your MySpace and ask people to be Cushy’s friend.  Of course, Cushy is a sock from your company so there will be links to your website and where to buy him and his friends and family (you get where I’m going with this).

You may say, look man I don’t have this type of budget. I can’t hire a large agency to come up with this. It is not as expensive as you think as long as Cushy stays in the social media world. Once you start traditional means of marketing it does get expensive, but I would encourage companies to contact a local online marketing company, (like ARC Design, Hint, Hint.) and find your target audience online. They are there, I promise.