Page 309 Social Media

• Facilitate community building. Customers and other audiences can connect with your company and each other. Can be very simple such as activating the commenting feature on a blog, or it may involve having a more elaborate social commerce system.
• Listen at least as much as you talk. Listening is very important for online conversations as it is for in-person conversations.  A variety of tools can help you with this.
• Initiate and respond to conversations within the community.  Through content on your website, blog postings, social network profiles and messages, newsletters, and other tools, make sure you provide the information customers need in order to evaluate your products and services.
• Provide information that people want. This strategy of content marketing helps you build trusted relationships with potential buyers by repeatedly demonstrating that you understand and care about meeting their needs.
• Identify and support your champions. In marketing, champions are enthusiastic fans of your company and its products. Champions are so enthusiastic that they help spread your message, defend you against detractors, and help other customers use your products.
• Be authentic; be transparent; be real. Do not try and fool the public through fake blogs and other tactics.
• Don't rely on the news media to distribute your message. Marketers have to try and persuade the news media to distribute their message to consumers and other audiences by producing news stories. These are important, but you can speak directly to these audiences by blogs and other electronic tools.
• Integrate conventional marketing and sales strategies at the right time and at the right places.  AIDA and similar approaches are still valid for specific communication tasks, such as conventional advertising and the product promotion pages on your website.