1) Social Media is about people. Customers and Prospects and Partners are connecting, sharing and growing with each other, never forget this. Do it authentically, openly, and knowing the world is watching. Prospects trust consumers more than you, now they are talking to each other using Social Media tools.

2) Communities are the goal, conversations are the verb. Social Media can be used to reach and connect with customers, you can participate in communities. An obvious output of this community are the digital and real life conversations that will manifest. You can read, join, and even measure those conversations, this is your currency.

3) Let go to gain more. The participants of these tools are in charge, typically customers are using these tools long before corporate types do. Thereby, you must participate to be in charge. The more a corporation controls the less effective this will be.

4) Measurement will be important. It will be important to measure the interaction between people. Such terms such as Engagement, Participation, and Attention are rising. Qualitative responses that happen are what is important, not page views or downloads. Teach executives that Web Marketing has left the corporate .com site and has now spread globally and to small islands of conversations. I’ll be on the forefront of this industry need, stay with me, I’ll be your resource.

5) Organize internally. As much focus on internal communication about community should empower a fast, coordinated response. Some employees will be more passionate about one area over others, reward them, and support them.

6) Risk of the unknown. Human conversations are great, you never know where they will turn. For companies that are very logical, planned and methodical there is some elements of the unknown. One thing is for sure, the more you get involved with a conversation in the start, the less risk you’ll have over time.

7) Social Media goes deep in the organization. This tool will change how executives communicate to employees and the public. Support teams will start to engage customers using social media, Middle Management will integrate these tools into program plans, and the rank and file will often be first generation adopters, it’s often bottom up and distributed. Social media is already beginning to be a line item in the 2007 budget.

8) Social Media goes wide in the organization. It’s not just about Marketing or PR, the Internet, Extranet and the Intranet will be impacted. You can reduce support costs, build better products with engineering in near-real time. Decrease the sales cycle through education, and even reduce recruiting costs and attract the top talent. This web by nature is global, there are more Chinese internet users than all of North America, and for some time, Japanese is a more common language in blogs than English.

9) Social Media spans time. Savvy companies are learning how to use these tools across all phases of the customer life cycle. Awareness, engagement, education, pitch, negotiation, deployment, support, product research, customer feedback, market and competitive intelligence, and then repeat. This public conversation will be archived through as long as the internet is accessible. Google is the memory.

10) Social Media is not magic nor voodoo. Use these tools to open and reach out, use these great web tools to reach and connect to customers, everyone can contribute. Learn the tools, experiment internally. This is Web Strategy.

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Marketing automaton is still a relatively new technology. Many companies overlook the benefits it provides and it is often the last thing included in the budget, especially when the higher-ups making budgeting decisions may not know about the value marketing automation offers. What they don’t realize is that most companies are using multiple tools to do what ONE marketing automation system can do. When it comes down to it, marketing automation can save you time and money.

Here are the top five reasons to start using marketing automation:

Productivity – Marketing automation makes marketing and sales teams more productive. The sales team will receive more qualified leads and can spend less time educating prospects and more time closing deals. The marketing team benefits both from seeing which campaigns are most effective and from automating daily tasks, like email responses and lead assignments, that used to be performed manually.

Integration – Integration with a CRM system continuously syncs data between the two systems and allows the sales team to view updated information of prospect activity from within the CRM system. Integrating with familiar systems means less barriers to company-wide adoption and also makes day-to-day use easier.

Greater ROI – The ability to track a prospect from the point of origination gives companies the capability to see what efforts in converting prospects are working and therefore spend more time and money on techniques that are generating profit.

Simplify – Instead of using sometimes upwards of 10 tools for lead-scoring, e-mail, landing pages and more, a marketing automation system puts it all together in one place. It is much easier because data and marketing tasks are consolidated in a single tool, and you don’t need to worry about what is where and having access to all of the different systems.

Relationship Building – These systems make nurturing easy, helping build the relationship with both current and future customers. They allow you to determine exactly what the customer wants, based on their tracked activities, and enhance that data with tools like a Linkedin connector. Marketing automation also makes segmenting and personalizing emails easy, giving a personal touch to emails that were sent out in an automated blast.

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Reputation Smart was born through a need to keep track of my own online reputation and my growing stable of products.

Monitor the your keyword result from below sources:

Sources: Google News* Google Blog* Yahoo News Live Search Twitter Flickr YouTube Technorati Del.icio.us Digg eBay BlogPulse BlogDigger BlogLines IceRocket GoArticles

Find the url and try: http://reputation-smart.com/

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