marketing | Social Signal

When you're talking about yourself, your brand or your organization, you may have first-person credibility... but you also have a pretty obvious conflict of interest. Add that to the growing distrust of advertising and public relations - in fact, of institutional communications generally - and you have a challenge.

These days, your audience is putting much more trust in their personal networks: their friends, family, neighbours and colleagues. When they hear a personal message from someone they know, it punches through in a way that organizational communications can't.

In 2008, companies woke up to the power of Facebook as a way of engaging customers, building brand, and selling their products or services.  Today, the hottest new marketing tool is Twitter: a social network that consists entirely of people exchanging 140-character messages with their friends, family and colleagues.

Just like black-and-white photography can reveal depths you’ll never see in colour, the short length of a Twitter message encourages new levels of creativity and effectiveness in marketing.

Don’t believe me?  Here are my top tips on getting started with Twitter…and each is 140 characters or less.

Asked on LinkedIn: Has anyone had success using social media to market B2B?

The business-to-business versus business-to-consumer dichotomy can be a bit of a trap when thinking about social media. To achieve a critical mass of participation on a social media site, you need to be drawing on a potential audience of tens of thousands, ideally at least hundreds of thousands; this will be rapidly narrowed by the relatively small percentage who are interested in checking out any social media presence, let alone actively contributing to one. There are very few business niches in which you have a large enough, or techie enough, audience to achieve that necessary critical mass.

Reach each of your audiences with the message that speaks to them.

That's one of the central appeals of social media: the ability to target your message, affordably and appropriately, to each of the audiences you're trying to reach. Create a YouTube clip with an edge to hook your under-25s. Create a business-value app on LinkedIn to reach your b2b audience. Sponsor a mom's group on Facebook with your most family-friendly lines.