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For years I have fol­lowed and learned from one of the big­gies in inter­net mar­ket­ing, Joel Comm. He has really got­ten on the social media band­wagon and on his lat­est site he is teach­ing about Twit­ter. Now I admit I am a total Twit­ter new­bie but that is about to change. I recently pur­chased his book, Twit­ter Power, and with that pur­chase I was enrolled in a 4 week Social Media Boot­camp start­ing next week. Yes­ter­day he Tweeted about me and my How­ToSel­lY­ourVideos web­site to his 13,500 fol­low­ers. How about that for some huge exposure!

You want in on this lat­est phe­nom­e­non… and a chance to win an iPod Touch?  Join Twit­ter, then go here — http://twitterpower.com/win/ and fol­low Joel.

Be sure to fol­low me on Twit­ter as I take this jour­ney. Let’s all Twit­ter our way to success!

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It took a while, but I think I am finally get­ting it…why these new social net­work sites can be so pow­er­ful and impor­tant in your mar­ket­ing efforts.

My wife is way ahead of me on this. She started by attend­ing a ses­sion offered at a video con­fer­ence we went to last year on the sub­ject of social net­work­ing. There she learned about LinkedIn. Although I had heard of social net­work­ing sites, I never saw a way to incor­po­rate them into our mar­ket­ing efforts. Late in 2008 things started to fall into place …

First my wife got us on Face­book and we joined up with fel­low video­g­ra­phers we had met at the WEVA Expo in August. About this time we started to get sales on one of our new prod­uct lines and noticed that the traf­fic had come from YouTube. I’m big on web stats and am always mon­i­tor­ing where my web­site vis­i­tors come from, and so I started see­ing a trend. Then I started to notice how many peo­ple came into my web­sites  from a gui­tar forum I par­tic­i­pate in because they fol­low the links I pro­vide in my sig­na­ture file, even though none of my sites have any­thing to do with gui­tars (I wish they did). I don’t know if these peo­ple buy or not, but it is gen­er­at­ing a lot of addi­tional traffic.

What social net­work­ing has done is take your local Cham­ber of Com­merce mix­ers, neigh­bor­hood par­ties, water­cooler con­ver­sa­tions, clubs and pro­fes­sional asso­ci­a­tions and made com­mu­ni­ca­tion inter­na­tional and instan­ta­neous! And the beauty is that they are free. You can now find like-minded peo­ple who want to con­nect with you about any topic out there, and if you can­not find an exist­ing group for a topic you can eas­ily cre­ate your own. I have sev­eral now and you may be inter­ested in join­ing my Spe­cial Inter­est Video group on Face­book. This means that tar­get­ing your mar­ket is much eas­ier and more eco­nom­i­cal in social media than it is in any other tech­nol­ogy I can think of.

More­over, social net­work­ing pro­vides an oppor­tu­nity for mar­keters to get close to their clients and cus­tomers so much so that they can even com­mu­ni­cate directly with them. Dell and sev­eral other major cor­po­ra­tions have cre­ated Face­book groups and allow direct com­mu­ni­ca­tion with cus­tomers, and we’ll see this trend esca­late. It is also very pow­er­ful in estab­lish­ing cred­i­bil­ity and trust­wor­thi­ness. Peo­ple want to buy from some­one they can see and ask ques­tions of. Like it or not, this is cur­rently a wave that is too big to ignore.

Now I am just start­ing on the Twit­ter band­wagon and I admit, I am a total new­bie at this. Stay tuned for more about that jour­ney and as I learn how it can help me in my busi­ness, I’ll share that infor­ma­tion with you.

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