“While the overall goal of marketing remains the same, the advent of social media has changed the role of the marketer from a broadcaster pushing out messaging and materials to an aggregator who brings together content, enables collaboration, and builds and participates in communities.”

Paul Gillin, author of “The New Influencers,” suggests four books on social media. He gives a short and sweet description of each.
Everything Is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger
The New Rules Of Marketing And PR by David Meerman Scott
Marketing to the Social Web by Larry Weber
Join the Conversation by Joseph Jaffe

Marshal K has a very interesting post about “putting social network functionality on top of existing sites.” He describes a conversation with a startup that was trying to decide if they should build a social network and he advised them they didn’t need the “baggage.” Instead, just provide the kinds of tools that would enhance […]

Ideablob.com is near and dear to my heart. Here’s the best article we’ve seen written about us yet. Jennifer Laycock from Search Engine Guide really nails it. I don’t think I could have written a better piece myself. She actually “tested” the site by encouraging a nonprofit Mother’s Milk Bank to enter the monthly $10k […]

Alex Iskold, on AdaptiveBlue’s blog, has a really good post on PR tips for startups. It’s pretty long, but well worth the read. My favorite quote was in the section titled, “Community - The Best PR Strategy.” Here, he challenges the value of going after top bloggers to score ‘big hits.’
“By building community of passionate […]

Marshall Kirkpatrick, who I’m sure I’ll be linking to quite a bit, did a post a little while ago about how to simply explain the value of Blogging & RSS. I’m aspiring to find ways to explain social media tools and approaches as simply and as succinctly as possible. I like Marshall’s first effort, but […]

Using simple quotes, metaphors, anecdotes, images, etc. can really help when we try to articulate the basic distinctions between new media marketing and traditional marketing. Rod Amis on ‘Leverage Social Media‘ succinctly describes two very different ways marketers can perceive their ‘target’ groups:
“What is too often missed is the distinction between an “audience” (Old School […]

“Bottom line, there is no silver bullet or secret formula. To be successful in social media is much harder than ’starting to Blog.’ It’s about building a real relationship. That’s hard for Marketers to do and it’s not something that all consumers want.”
(From a comment in ‘The Top 3 Problems of Social Media’)

It certainly was a big year for social networking — and, it’s a good bet that there will be lots of excitement in 2008.
So what about some predictions?
Gary Hall, who is the president of Pringo (a social networking platform), has some thoughts on it:
1. In order to maintain stickiness in 2008, brands will need to […]