Pros and cons of social media marketing

• It’s proven way to reach a target audience—whatever audience that may be.
• It’s fast. Set up a Typepad, Blogger, MySpace, or LinkedIn account in minutes.
• It’s cheap. Most social media platforms are free. Your only investments are your time and reputation. (I don’t intend to minimize those investments!)
• It’s an easy way to develop a web presence. No IT expertise required.

Cons

• It takes time. Like networking and marketing in the physical world, social media marketing requires time and sustained effort to yield results.


• It’s not guaranteed to work. Like traditional marketing, there are no ROI promises.


• It requires making yourself vulnerable. Anytime you put yourself ‘out there’ you risk damage to your reputation—either from self-inflicted wounds or from external sources.


• It can be overwhelming. There are many social media outlets. It can be difficult to pinpoint which one will work for you.

Since you’re still reading, I’ll assume you’re still considering adding SMM to your marketing quiver.

The best thing to do is to familiarize yourself with the various media. Below is a list of sites to check out, most of which incorporate at least one of the following elements:

Media sharing—sharing music, images, videos, articles, web sites
Professional and personal networking—creating profiles and pages and meeting people in your industry or interest area
Idea and expertise sharing—writing or commenting on a post, Listserv, wiki or other kind of open forum, recording a podcast

• Del.icio.us http://del.icio.us/
• Digg http://digg.com/
• Flickr http://www.flickr.com/
• LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/
• Ma.gnolia http://ma.gnolia.com/
• MySpace http://www.myspace.com/
• Reddit http://reddit.com/
• Squidoo http://www.squidoo.com/
• StumbleUpon http://www.stumbleupon.com/
• Technorati http://www.technorati.com/
• Wikihow http://www.wikihow.com/
• Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/
• Yahoo! 360 http://360.yahoo.com/
• Yahoo! Answers http://answers.yahoo.com/
• YouTube http://www.youtube.com/

A few guidelines for social media marketing

SMM is not for the hard sale.
The language of social media marketing is more conversational than persuasive. Very few in the social media world have a tolerance for the hard sale. On the flip side, they love good content. And more than that, they love to pass that content to their friends.

As you may have noticed, we don’t use this blog to sell our leads (as great as those leads may be). We use it to add value to the InsureMe experience. We’d like to think that some of the tips we provide on this blog help you become a better agent—one who’s more likely to sell a lead purchased from us. We know we’ve hit a home run if we write a post that helps you sell an InsureMe lead and inspires you to tell your friends about this blog.

Offer something of value.
Remember, you’re trying to tap into the viral potential of the internet—the mundane and uninspired won’t cut it. If people wanted traditional, they’d be watching TV, not reading a blog or Squidoo lens. Your targets are the funny, the informative, the bizarre, the novel and the remarkable.

Play to your strengths.
As a licensed insurance agent, you’ve accumulated a mountain of knowledge that most don’t possess. That’s your competitive advantage. Share that knowledge in a compelling way—and with no strings—and you’ll develop some goodwill and likely pick up a few customers along the way.

Start conversations, add to existing ones.
Don’t treat the internet as your own personal bully pulpit. While traditional marketing has typically gone in one direction, social media marketing requires two-way interaction, as much listening as talking.

Suggested reading
In researching this post, I came across so many good sources of information on SMM. Here are just a few of the ones that stood out:

Seth Godin “Memo to the very small”
SEOMoz “Social Media Marketing, eh? Let's See What's in Our Bag o' Goodies.”
Search Engine Land “Social Media Marketing for Small Business”