What would an effective social media marketing campaign entail? According to me, there are 4 key quadrants that we especially need to take care of.

1. Monitoring mechanism: Have a listening capability and understanding what the various stakeholders are talking about our brands and organizations is critical. Without this, we would be just another me too and shooting in the dark. How do we build an effective monitoring mechanism in place. We can use blog search engines like Technorati and Google Blog Search to monitor the blogosphere, subscription on email and RSS on influential blogs around your industry/ subject, setting news alerts, and monitoring social bookmarking sites like Delicious, Digg, and social networking sites like Facebook, YouTube, etc. There are host of tools to monitor micro blogging platforms, read Twitter. For blog comments and monitoring the social media space in real time, we have free tools like Social Mention. What about the citizen journalism sites and consumer review sites. Lastly but not the least, not forgetting to monitor the search engines.

I attended a social media workshop by Dave Evans of Digital Voodoo and author of Social Media Marketing, An Hour a Day, earlier this week at Delhi organised by 2020 Media, and I loved the way he talked the new marketing cycle with the emergence of the social media. Dave also talked about how organisations need to identify various touchpoints that define their products, brands, or service and analyse the performance of each touchpoint in the social media space, how important is each touchpoint , how consistent is their delivery, and how talk-worthy are each. I wanted to have a chat with him at the venue but given the number of people waiting to talked to him, I quickly exchanged cards with him, and requested his inputs on few questions I would later send. I sent Dave eight tricky questions frequently asked by clients. His answers are below.

Ashwani has been reporting from Cannes and he has put up an interesting post on how to produce winning PR campaigns. What he said that I like the most was that any campaign has to be built around a central idea, an idea that is simple yet executed well. I also remember having a chat with Prema Sagar before she left for Cannes (she is the only Indian member to be part of the jury) that one of the core things that she look for will be a clear and simple idea and how that has been executed.

What 3 digital marketing channels & tactics will you emphasize in 2009?” Here are the top ten tactics selected: Blogging (34%), Microblogging (Twitter) (29%), Search engine optimization (28%), Social network participation (Facebook, LinkedIn) (26%), Email marketing (17%), Social media monitoring & outreach (17%), Pay per click (14%), Blogger relations (12%), Video marketing (10%), Social media advertising (7%)

If public companies are not proactively analyzing these guidelines and establishing internal policies, frameworks, and penalties, then they are exposed to the dangers that loom in the form of overly enthusiastic employees who are enamored with new and shiny social tools and objects. One wrong, irresponsible or casual post, comment, tweet, or status update can produce a domino effect of consequences that have yet to establish precedence. While a tweet, for example, may seem harmless, the activity and response sparked by an update could result in repercussions that trigger SEC investigation and shareholder retaliation. Corporate and marketing executives who normally rely on self-restraint and common sense across the organization aren’t employing common sense at all.

We are creating Newscast, a news release distribution site at India PR Blog. Everybody is free to register and submit their company/ client press releases. This is how you can start.