Pleasantly stunned by the reaction to my first post on the Wall Blog – including the hiding I got for a spelling mistake which will never happen again – I asked Gordon at Brand Republic if it’d be OK to share a social media story I wrote and published in February about how our team at Microsoft Advertising approaches interacting with customers, and potential customers, through social media marketing.

The premise behind the story – which was meant to be internal but received such a good reaction we decided to publish more widely – is that, although “social media” are the tools that help us communicate with our target audience across the web, “social media marketing” should be seen as the discipline that should pervade all parts of a business.

It’s not all about Twitter & Facebook. It’s about search and making your message discoverable. It’s about email and making your content shareable. Over 20% of Facebook’s traffic comes from Hotmail according to comScore, so ignoring what some might perceive as being “old world” digital channels, and not including them in your overall social mix, might be doing you a disservice.

I’ve included some tips on how to measure the impact of your efforts. They include lateral ways of thinking about the return on investment that might help tell the story better to those higher up in the management chain that need persuading the time - and money -you’re spending is of value.

Although entitled as B2B, much of the learnings are as easily transferable B2C as well.

Download the paper direct here – it’s a 304KB PDF – Social Media White Paper – I’d love to know what you think.

Cheers

@MelCarson