Takeaways from TiE Social Media Marketing Panel

We had an awesome panel yesterday at the TiE office in silicon valley. If you missed the event, here are some key takeaways from this panel.
Panelists

'Social' is old but happens a lot faster and at a larger scale now.

'Social' is where people shared their likes and dislikes with friends they met. Word-of-mouth marketing has existed since ancient days. The new twist on 'social' is that it happens faster and reaches a larger audience.

'Social Media' is about building relationships.

The best thing that social media marketing has brought about is the two way communication in real time. A great example of a well done social media marketing is the Old Spice commercial. It is important to engage and get your audience to participate to increase the effectiveness of your campaign.

Content  calendar is helpful

Having a Blog, Facebook fan page or a Twitter a/c is simply meaningless unless you can constantly refresh them with new content. The worst thing you could do is to have presence on one or more of these channels and not update  for a long time. So, having a content calendar forces you to think and be disciplined about your social media activities.

Goal should not be virality; instead try to touch your audience

When you make a video or blog about something, your goal should be to try and touch your audience. Your article will go viral only if it touches your audience.

'Like' is social proof

If you are on a table with 10 other people who use iPhone, then you fall into the social proof trap and think that you should get one too. 'Like' is a tool to display social proof. If a website has 800 likes then the 801th visitor will feel more inclined to like the website.

'Like' is light weight sharing

Like is also a very powerful and simple tool that could be used to share. Before socialmedia, people shared links via emails and this was not public. But, now when you click on the 'Like' button, you are sharing with your social graph in public and this carries more weight.

Who's winning ? Google or Facebook?

The answer to this was very clever and interesting. It is both because your use of these tools depends on where you are in the purchase cycle. If you are still discovering, then you would go to Google but if you have identified a product then you would go to FB for social proof.

What is one idea that entrepreneurs can work on?

Priority Inbox for all social media channels.

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TiE is the largest network of entrepreneurs and organizes many such events through out the year. TiECon is the largest conference of entrepreneurs and is happening in May. If you are an entrepreneur, this is one event you don't want to miss.