White Collar Social Media

Going shopping? Want to virtually try on some clothes to see what they look like? Target came out with an app called Merona My Look Maker last summer and plenty of other clothing lines have done the same or similar things. Target also has a Facebook, Twitter and even a Foursquare site.

Social media is well known nowadays for its potential influence on businesses and the way they market to their customers. I can’t think of any current business that doesn’t use social media in some form, and for good reason. (That is unless your target customers are 95 years old, but even then…) There are so many people on social networking sites it is a great opportunity to get your company involved with some free publicity and advertise your brand. But there is a right way of doing it and a wrong way. Below is an example of how viral good word can spread about a new business. It's actually an ad for ConstantContact, an email marketing solutions company.

By choosing the right information to put out on the public sites, businesses may get just what they want. Say for example a business needs more employees so they use social media to recruit new employees. On the wrong end of using social media you could annoy and lose customers. By not being consistent with keeping up the site or being too prolific of a poster you could potentially scare off consumers.

Calvin Klein has barely used social media in our new digital age and that’s part of the reason they have fallen from the top of the clothing market since the 1990s. But they are about to launch one of the best planned multi-platform “digital campaigns” of recent history. They’ve revamped their website to allow for more interactivity. They created new apps for the iPhone, Android and Symbian markets. (I downloaded it and so far it looks really cool)

Mashable.com

Social Media Today, a blog done by social media experts, gives 5 new trends for 2011 that will change and shape business strategy. Number one on their list is:

1. Online video. Everywhere.
Online video is not a new phenomenon; however, what’s new about this avenue is that it is increasingly everywhere. The bar has been set high for the level of consumer interaction and this must include valuable interactive video. Video engagement is continuously increasing and in October alone, 5.4 billion videos were viewed -  2 billion of which were on Facebook.

The other trends for businesses to take advantage of are being able to market to a mobile audience at specific locations, dishing out special deals to social media users and being able to monitor what users are saying about the brand.

In closing, I leave you with some new thoughts on how a business should apply social media for a profit.

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