eSearchVision Official US blog

In the world of marketing, we are dominated by the digital media all around us.  The evidence is everywhere: the rapid growth of mobile search, branding campaigns spawned by YouTube and of course, social media tools.  If you don’t buy into it, try having a discussion with someone about current marketing strategies without the focus turning to Twitter.

Social media as a whole has gained instant popularity among marketers and advertisers – and why wouldn’t it?  The tools, including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, Technorati, FriendFeed, SlideShare, MySpace and many more, encourage instant brand updates and have the capability to reach gigantic audiences all at once.  Brand perceptions can be improved almost overnight with strategic messaging and blasting.  To top it all off, they’re completely free!

Social media tools have some serious benefits, but getting the most from these tools isn’t always a piece of cake.  Today, it is becoming more and more difficult to be the cutting-edge marketer the industry expects.  With the continuous growth of the online social network and introduction of new web tools, simply keeping up with the latest development in the social internet world is a feat.

In spearheading our internal social media marketing effort, I have come across a slew of sites for uploading photos, sending out messages, sharing bookmarks and more.   Though it’s exciting to find these different branding opportunities right at my fingertips, the question has become, how do I keep up with all this while still doing the rest of my job?

Registering my company’s name on the sites is continuously the top priority as “squatting” (brand stealing) is one of the negative byproducts of the free flow of information provided by these social tools.  However, once I register our name on any and all applicable sites, I still have to spend time writing for and updating each site as taking full advantage of my social outlets is an ongoing effort.  In this case, I struggled for a few weeks, trying to post regular updates across a few of the main sites and constantly debating how much time I should dedicate to this particular marketing instrument.   And then I learned about Ping.fm at a local marketing meeting in Ann Arbor.

Ping.fm is a free site that allows marketers to update all social sites at once.  I created an account and was presented with a list of over 40 different websites that I can add to my ping.fm network.  Not only were all of my sites listed, but I got ideas for new social websites as well.

I registered my top messaging websites and can now “ping” multiple outlets all at once!  Of course, Ping.fm permits selective pinging, if I should want to ping only a few of my sites for a particular post.  Ping.fm also allows users to send updates via text, email and through many of the social sites themselves.  The customization options appear to be endless.

Ping.fm has saved me a ton of time already, and until the next tool comes along, I would recommend giving Ping.fm a try to achieve an efficient and consistent use of social media.

Rebecca Nathan

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 23rd, 2009 at 9:26 pm and is filed under Trends, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.