Socializing your marketing communications initiatives is nothing new. Any good marketer understands a holistic approach must be taken, and socially empowering your campaign is a given.

If you’re a little uneasy with that last statement, consider this:

Your audience dictates your approach – yes? Your audience is a diverse, savvy group who are active online. Neilsen confirms that over 80% of people trust the recomendations of their network. Less than 20% trust advertising. So smart marketers are finding relevant ways to become part of the conversation of a social community. Right? Right!

So… you’re socializing your marketing campaigns. Great! But what else can Social Media do for you?

1. Businesses all over want to engage their employees. Have them collaborate, innovate and work together for a far better end result. We is better than me – remember? Social Media has an answer for that… gone are the days of the ho hum intranet. Meet the Employee Community! The community that allows employees to get to know each other more efficiently. Work collaboratively in an open space, solicit input and allows your internal comms dept. to do their jobs that much better – disseminate information easily while soliciting input, votes, polls, rankings and more on things that matter most to your business.

2. Your channels! They’re crying out for a less cumbersome, more interactive platform to hear about the latest products, breaking news and the incentive program you’ve just cooked up for them to shift even more of those cameras. Give them a space that allows them to converse and collaborate and receive timely information and while you’re at it… pull in the RSS feeds from the key sites they frequent most so they can get it all in one. You give them more of a reason to come to your branded space and they’ll love having everythin in one place. Potential Red Flag being raised – this is a community for the people, of the people – so if the brand has more control than the community members – it’s a dictatorship.

3. Stalking the evolution of consumer behavior. Smart marketers know that we must stay on top of emerging media, marke trends and the evolution of consumer behavior. But what do we do with all this information? Analyze it. Use this information to evolve your Social Media activities. There are some very smart and sophisticated monitoring services out there that not only tell you about the buzz regarding your product, brand or service, but derive some solid insights as to the behaviors of your audience.

Smart marketers also:

1. Monitor Industry trends.

2. Keep a close eye on consumer behaviour

3. Perpetually ask themselves – Why? What does this tell us?

<Take a deep breath here…>

4. Analyze emerging trends as they relate to their cosumer to create kick ass solutions that the consumer falls in love with furthering the smart marketer’s cause of not only acquiring and retaining customers… but by making fanatics of them. <exhale>

Seriously, what better way to promote your <enter product or brand here> then by having everyone else do it for you! … Duh!

or knowing your market. Or knowing the need or knowing something! Can one really benefit from stalking current and emerging trends? Yes!

When you know who the people are, what’s important to them, what they like, don’t like and how they like it said – well chances are, if you connect the dots, you’ll be closer to them then most would get. Asking questions, watching market trends, and observing consumer behaviour reveals a whole lotta opportunities that would otherwise be missed.

So where does one start? Well what information are you looking for?

Here’s some resources I find really useful:

www.trendwatching.com

www.bnet.com

www.marketingdaily.com