Social Media on Internet has become too many of ‘me too’ type websites. With the improving bandwidth and technology, it has been easy for companies to get inspired by Facebook and start websites to ‘connect’ people. VCs have been investing the money and the Entrepreneurs have been burning it on crowd-sourcing. No doubt there are various web communities that have added value to the people. I have been really impressed by the likes of Mint, which have helped people in learning from the best practices of others and improve their financial situation.

Twitter have become a place for link building and sourcing more and more traffic to the websites. Every time I login, I find people sharing websites and content that is mostly not developed by them, but is RT or just shared. There are less people who are getting into a conversation, and even if they have conversations, they can always use IM, which is real-time! Why would someone use a service to shout out to the world, ‘what have you been doing’ and then raise all the hue and cry about privacy with Buzz.

Facebook, which started as a place to connect people, has turned into an online gaming site. There are more people who login only to play games than to reconnect with old lost friends. More and more people are getting on to Facebook but probably they do not know what is the purpose of signing up. They are getting on to the Facebook bandwagon because everyone they know is already there, or signing up. Most people on my friend list have not responded to any wall posts or messages because they do not login that often. It is easier to call them!

Social Media has to have a purpose. It is supposed to be an aggregator where people from different walks of life can come together and create, discover, collaborate and contribute. Websites that are only a place for people to signup and forget why they created a login are no good for the internet or for the society. Email has a purpose, IM is for real time conversations, VoIP is cheap telephony, Social Media similarly has to prove its mettle before it can be considered a medium. Social Media should be used as a facilitator to provide the solution to a problem. We have not identified any problem but are creating websites for people to come together and… do nothing!

Social Media is about engaging visitors in something that is productive for them. It is about providing a service, a solution to the visitors’ problem. It is not the ultimate panacea and neither is it the solution itself. It is only a medium for providing solutions.

My point of the post is: If you believe that a particular website or web-app can solve one of your problems, signup. Rest all is noise.

1. Announcing the launch of the website

2. General promotion of the website on the internet

3. Specific promotion of the website at relevant locations for lead generation

4. Specifically targeting the consumer for business generation

5. Business

6. Regular maintenance

Announcing the launch:

This needs to be done to ensure that the website is indexed quickly and is available in search results. It also gives the ‘big business’ feel to the customers who are researching for due diligence. The easiest way of such announcement is via Press Releases. A good strategy for press releases is ‘three’, where a release is issued before the launch, one on the launch day, and the last a week after, to celebrate the ‘fabulous’ launch. It completes the full circle. There are multitudes of free and paid PR sites, which can release the News Article. It is suggested to use a mix of free and paid agencies for the release.

Expected Budget: $350

Frequency: one time

General Promotion of the website on the internet:

This includes Pay per Click campaigns on search engines. It is particularly good for an e-commerce website, to know what the target market is looking for and to analyze the direction of business. The traffic from particular keywords can give an idea of the future of business and the demand. It also helps in designing the strategies for ‘Featured Product’ on the website.

Expected Budget: range from $600 to $3000 per month

Frequency: continuous

It also includes Search Engine Optimization. I consider it to be a general promotion category item as the SEO cannot be specifically targeting your customers. It is a means for generating traffic and optimizing the website for user interaction. The target of any SEO activity should be to ensure that the user can find the website at relevant locations, and not to improve the search engine rankings. For example, one of the newest ways for a user to find the website is via the image search options. It is important the ‘all’ the images in the website have an identifiable name, and they include the right tags (alt, title etc).

Expected Budget: $1200

Frequency: one time, annual suggested

Specific Promotion of the website

It is important that the website is promoted at specific locations like trade directories or online trade magazines. It gives the relevant exposure to the business and is a good way to generate leads. There are various trade websites for the purpose and it helps to get a paid account at the best performing ones. If required, advertising inventories can also be purchased at these websites to stand out among the crowd.

Expected Budget: $800

Frequency: annual

Specifically targeting the consumer

There are various ways of targeting the end customer. The most frequently used is via newsletter and email. There are various email lists available for mass mailings, and if the website has a newsletter, the list can be used. Trade magazines also have a periodic newsletter which should be used for promoting the business. The website should be designed to create a mailing list, which can be used to send promotional material.

Expected budget: $300

Frequency: Monthly

Business

It includes maintaining the website’s ecommerce system, to ensure that the system will respond in time and also tracks the buyer behavior on the website. It helps in learning about the business opportunity in the future and also allows for removing the non-performing items from occupying precious screen space.

Regular Maintenance

This includes blog posts, twitter and Facebook pages, and other social media applications, to crowd-source visitors. It is beta testing changes and also gives an opportunity to business owner to get an opinion on new product releases. It is an ongoing process to keep the visitor engaged and to ensure repeat visits from users, who are looking for new content on the website. It helps in making a fan-following, which results in word of mouth publicity and business generation in long run.

The first rule for any business remains the same. There has to be an inherent value in the proposition and the visitor to the store/website should learn about it in the first 30 seconds. There has to be an activity for visitor engagement (like designing your room in this case), which makes the user come back and ask for more.