Social Media 101: Tactics and Tips to DevelopYour Business Online

Chapter 3. Social Media Does Not Replace Marketing Strategy

In yet another moment of informational threading, here's a post by Dan Kennedy^[5] about hyperproductive markets. Kennedy points out that knowing your rough sales target is one thing, but knowing the most productive and yielding part of the whole bunch is worth so much more.

Thread this together with Robert Middleton's^[6] post about a karate model for marketing. There's a lot to it, but the key point was something he took out of another presentation he'd seen, which was this:

1. You first have to get your clients and customers to consume what you've already sold them.

2. You need to offer new services in progressively more complex stages if you are going to truly serve them.

I'm working on launching a few new things at work, and they are projects that have strong social media and new marketing elements to them. In so doing, I'm thinking a lot about what these tools can do for the communities we serve, and I'm also thinking about the marketplace elements that my business will need to sustain all this. My company is in the business of helping people connect, learn, and do business together. We do this through creating content, building online and face-to-face events, and enabling a marketplace between people selling emerging technologies and people looking to understand which of these technologies will help them next.

Kennedy's point about understanding that there's a group of people you can sell to, but within that group lies a more ...