Social Networking versus Social Marketing

As you might well know, I'm happy to be a faculty member at Stompernet, a completely new idea in the world of Internet Marketing, a consortium of top marketers pooling their knowledge and expertise to create a single place where you can learn about search engine optimization, search engine marketing, ecommerce, keyword research, proven techniques to improve your PPC campaigns and close rates on your sales pages, leveraging blogs and podcasts for marketing, and even discuss and compare notes about such mundane topics as shopping carts, web hosting companies, designers, and copywriters...

In addition to an extraordinarily active set of forums, Stompernet also has a library of literally hundreds of training videos - with free access for members - and a few times a year we have on-ground events where hundreds of people get together and brainstorm, while the faculty experts do back-to-back site reviews for attendees.

I will also candidly admit that I've learned a lot from the other experts, people like Leslie Rohde, Don Crowther, Jerry West, Dan Thies, Frank Kern, Sherman Hu, David Bullock, and our fearless leaders Andy Jenkins and Brad Fallon. With this many neurons firing in sync, it's always exciting to see what's coming next, and finally I can share a bit of that with you...

What's coming next is Social Marketing, the idea that while social networking (a la Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc) is fun and entertaining, there's a marketing facet to social networking, to the world of "Web 2.0", and instead of just pussyfooting around it, we can actually leverage it to strengthen our brands and improve our site traffic and product or service sales.

No, don't panic, we're not talking about spamming the social networks. (c'mon, I'm not going to put my name on anything like that!) It's also clear that spamming doesn't work anyway (though plenty of people continue to fill my MySpace email, Facebook friend requests, and more each week), but smart, legitimate, straightforward and, yes, ethical approaches to simultaneously promoting your business and yourself in your ever-growing social network is a smart program.

The SMARTS program, to be exact.

Click to watch the video at Stompernet

Hosted by my long-time friend Don Crowther (who also runs the terrific site 101publicrelations.com) this short video is well worth watching, and it includes specific tips and ideas that can help you start to grow your business immediately. If you do opt in to the SMARTS program, well, you'll doubtless find me behind the scenes helping out there too.

Check it out, and please leave a comment to let me know what you think. Just don't point out that Don tends to talk rather fast. I already know that. :-)