Depending on whom you ask, social media sites are either the progenitor or the progeny of the so-called ‘Web 2.0’ phenomenon. They have a democratic structure and rely mostly on user-generated content.

Social media marketing, or SMM as it’s known in nerd circles, capitalizes on the popularity and interconnectedness of social media networks.

Wikipedia: “The SMM goals will be different for every business or organization, however most will involve some form of viral marketing to build idea or brand awareness, increase visibility, and possibly sell a product or service. SMM may also include online reputation management.”

As it happens, InsureMe has engaged in some social media marketing—namely with this blog. Designed primarily to promote interaction with clients and spur conversations about the business of insurance sales, our blog also serves a marketing purpose. It generates brand visibility, builds trust and goodwill toward InsureMe and also keeps us on Google's radar screen.

Our now shuttered video operation, in which we made a rather silly video each week and posted it on YouTube, was also an exercise in social media marketing.

Our other notable foray into SMM involved an admittedly bizarre concept, particularly for an insurance lead provider: we created a fake Scandinavian band called Aurora Borealis. (You can check out Aurora Borealis’ MySpace page here.)

The idea behind the weekly videos and band spoof was to create a viral campaign to generate visibility for InsureMe. Our videos were quite successful in that effort. According to our online marketing guru, James Omdahl, our movie archives receives a few thousand visitors each month.

The campaigns were also designed to serve a search engine optimization (SEO) purpose: the more times people passed a link to an InsureMe video, the more Google and other search engines took note of InsureMe. In fact, many see SMM as an extension or kind of search engine optimization.

One of the attractive aspects of social media marketing is the low barrier to entry. It takes minutes to set up a blog or comment on someone else's. Roll the camera, upload your footage and you can be on YouTube in no time. Your very own MySpace, Flickr, LinkedIn accounts are just a few clicks away.

While it's relatively easy to get into SMM, it's not a sure thing. It takes work and involves risk. In the next post I'll talk about the pros and cons of social media marketing and offer resources for small business that want to explore this emerging marketing method.