Delivering social media solutions for your business requires a commitment on the part of leadership, but the rewards for creating a social marketing process can far outweigh the discomfort of charging ahead into unchartered waters.
As the fifth of a series of six articles on social media, today’s post again explores social media by use of the analogy of a shopping mall. If you have not yet done so, I would highly recommend you read these four posts prior to beginning this article:
- Social Media – The Shopping Mall Analogy
- Social Media For Business Applications
- Businesses Need Social Media
- Choosing Social Media Solutions For Your Business
In our analogy, we parallel the internet with “the mall to end all malls.” The internet is where the world is moving to engage in commerce, and the best stores in the mall are setting up to take advantage of the known traffic patterns and consumer shopping behaviors.
Yesterday, we saw how Forums, Twitter, Digg, Stumbleupon (and more) fit into the shopping mall analogy, today we’ll discover a more key players in the mall and see what opportunities they unfold for an internet marketing plan:
- Blogger And WordPress – Don’t forget to grab the penny-pincher magazine in the racks outside of every store. These are tiny little publications that serve the mall as a news source that works outside of the traditional media. They are self-sponsored news outlets that are held to no journalistic standards, so proceed with caution. Often times though, shoppers learn everything they want to know about a product in the mall before they make a purchase, so the prudent marketing manager ensures that his company’s products and services are reviewed often by the blogging community.
- Paypal – Most everybody at the mall has some sort of debit or credit card, but the smart shoppers use a security procedure to ensure that their information is kept a secret. When they find the item that they want to buy at a store, they allow Paypal to consummate the transaction for them. The process is similar to using a credit card, and the cost is born by the shop keeper. Safety and security are always a concern for shoppers in the mega-mall, so the smart company ensures that shoppers see a Paypal emblem at the cash register.
- Alexa – Mall security does a good job of putting up cameras and tracking where everybody is going inside of the mall. In the real world malls, security is focused on deterring criminal behavior and monitoring or capturing those who have committed a crime, this service in the mega-mall uses similar processes to determine where people have gone and what actions they have made. Smart marketing people talk to mall security several times per day, hoping to catch a trend before the rest of the shops in the mall sees it coming.
[Continued Here with the final post in this series on social media]
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