Making the jump into social media

I profile a number of companies efforts in social media and point out their strengths and weaknesses in my Multichannel Merchant article on Social Disclosure that I co-authored with Stephan Spencer.

While SEO is itself a form of marketing, these tenets fall into the more general category of online marketing. It is along these lines that the terms social media optimization and social media marketing are also defined.

Social media marketing is primarily about knocking down your site’s walls so that content can be readily discovered, dialoged, distributed, and shared by diverse online communities and social media portals. Virtually every Web 2.0 site carries a degree of commercial usefulness. Yet some sites have built-in hindrances, such as “nofollow” links or pages accessible only behind passwords.

Before you embark on your journey into social media, you have to understand and implement some key metrics in order to track your success.