The Economics of New Media, or Social Media, Marketing

As of this week, MarCom Broadband is transitioning into a new website that will be known as MarCom New Media. And I also have another blog that I have started to mirror the new MarCom corporate identity, called MarCom New Media. For awhile I will post on both my blogs. And as always, we try to instruct as we do, so just a hint here ... the content needs to be 30 percent or more different if you post the same topic in more than one place on the Internet. Otherwise only one gets the "credit" with the search engines.

There are several names in marketing for basically the same thing these days. We happen to prefer the term new media, as opposed to social media. During a recession, people in business often pull in their horns on advertising dollars, especially for branding and awarenhess campaigns. In fact, one of my new associates has been calling people who have big ads in the pages of local newspapers, educating them on how they COULD be spending their money on online tactics , which are measurable and bring better results.

New media, or social media marketing is more about people sharing information than awareness. And because of that, interactive new media marketing is here to stay. We believe it is almost recession proof. One reason is the cost factor. Social and new media applications include blogs, social media platforms like FaceBook or MySpace, article submissions, etc. which cost next to nothing except the professional's time to post. Even PRWeb releases, are only max. $360 per post as opposed to more costly wires. I also like using ProfNet -- a great way to find editor's who are writing about a specific topic. It saves in PR media pitching time. I have a ProfNet account under the health category for my client T.S. Wiley and The Wiley Protocol.

Furthermore, social media is also measurable, generating leads, at which point the conversion ratios can be measured. If 3000 people come to your website, and only 200 purchase a product, with the right social media tactics, you might be able to increase that number so that more peopole convert from lokkie lous to customers.

Search advertising, pop-up ads and email marketing might also be recession-proof, as would integrated direct mail programs that direct folks to a special website (which will measure who shows up). Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising even has its place until your SEO has time to take over, at which time you can reduce your PPC budget, and insome cases for our clients, we have illiminated PPC from the marketing mix. One client recently cut his PPC from more than $18k per mo to $0. And even more leads are coming in thanks to our excellent SEO efforts.

But, none of these new media tactics will work without the right search engine optimization (SEO). With Flash websites and content management software (CMS) -- they are often not SEO-able. My associate Mike Keesling says, embedded flash works, and some CMS programs are much better than others. But the bottom line, if you don't have an expert to do the keyword analysis, and recommend what keywords should be used to Meta and Title-tag your website, people who search for your product or service using search engines like Yahoo or Google, may not find your website. You want to be ranked withing the first page of the engines listings.

New media and social media marketing is about helping provide links from six ways to Sunday on the Internet, so people will find your website, and interact.