Find me on Twitter at MarCom4SMM - for Social Media Marketing

The Aberdeen Group recently published a report, “The ROI on Social Media Marketing,” which was sponsored by Visible Technologies. The report affirms that marketers have developed the methods and tools to drive return on investment (ROI) for companies via social media. It's just one more reason why I now have a Twitter account for MarCom - twitter me at MarCom4SMM.

This just affirms what Marcom New Media, a Los Angeles social media marketing firm, has been doing for the last five years, which entails listening to customers and influencing prospects. Actually, we keep telling clients that in order to compete online, flourish and be more profitable, there are three key steps:

Phase I - Online SEO
Phase II - Offline Link Building and Pay per Click (PPC)
Phase III- Social Media Marketing

The research report said 63 percent of the companies in their survey (defined as best-in-class) planned to increase their social media marketing budgets this year.

The truth is, social media networks started around the spring of 2007, and today, memberships in platforms like Facebook, or My Space, are in the hundreds of millions. We started doing tactics like forum posting back in the year 2000.

But there is something else know as social media optimization. This includes offsite optimization strategies with the intent of distributed content across multiple social media networks. Tools for this include adding links to services such as Digg, Del.icio.us or Readdit.

MarCom writes unique content (all articles must be 30 to 40 % unique or different than any other document on the Web) that's embedded with your key words and phrases, so when people search online, there’s a better chance of finding your content via the search engines.

We are also a Los Angeles Search Engine Marketing (SEM) firm, and helps clients audit and determine search marketing strategies for increased lead generation online. We use a many different social networking platforms for branding online.

A couple of the areas that have grown for us includes ghostwriting blogs for clients. We also shoot video shorts, edit them and syndicate them online in places like Google video or YouTube, and record and manage podcasts. We recently completed a number of online videos for our client The Wiley Protocol, which are also on YouTube, and syndicated around the Internet.