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.

Most of us today are active on various social media sites and in fact, some of us use these sites in our day to day work. So what are the various sites we can get started with? One of the ways I have used social tools successfully in my PR job is in the media relations bit – forming new contacts, pitching to journalists, getting fast information about the media, etc. Below are the top five sites for me. Which are yours?

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.

If you are looking at getting your self involved with the social media marketing. These 7 Cs should come in handy!!
C #1 – Context
First you need to understand the context that you will be dealing with. This could be in the form of any social media platform. But before you start engaging with them, you [...]

At a recent communication seminar where I was speaking on social media, a beautiful lady participant asked me about how one could go about writing a blog. She believed that she is not a good writer and if I could give her few tips on writing…
I told her that I would write about it in [...]