Currently there are many social websites that have created a platform for you to speak directly to and with your current and future customers. There are also many tools that help manage this relationship, pushing the same content out to all platforms at once, or changing it slightly using built in rules. There are no hard and fast rules for the Web 2.0 landscape because it is all still so new, but what we can do is look to those businesses who are having success in these new areas.
We measure success by the three methods, “know, trust, buy.”:
- Brand awareness. (Does the customer know you?)
- Brand favorableness. (Does the client trust you?)
- Increased sales. (Does the client buy from you?)
Blasting your message out to one or as many social media sites as you can will help get your brand more noticed, and so achieve more awareness, but you also need to be genuine. The best Internet marketers make sure to engage with the customer and not just try to sell them something at every turn. The medium lends itself to this sort of engagement and turning down the opportunity to do so may break the trust, or the brand favorableness. Once you have established both the know and the trust, then the customer feels free to buy from you, but there is value to both brand awareness and brand favorableness even if the one who you are impressing does not buy. Once the goodwill is out there, the person you engaged with may refer you to someone else. Like the butterfly flapping it’s wings, even the smallest twit on Twitter may lead to a hurricane sale on the other side of the world.