Lets take a few steps forward from the last post since I am sure most of the previous information is old news. How can you take advantage of the next generation of the web to promote your products and services to better brand yourself in the industry.

You have to see the internet as a big community. People are getting more involved and becoming more interactive than ever with the products, services and industries they are in. Being a marketer you should be looking for ways to harness that community and let them help you focus your energy and draw in more people.

Forums are great for this. There has got to be an online forum for just about everything. If your company does not have one put together, start getting involved in someone else’s. These are not for standing on a soap box and preaching about your particular product, but you can have links to your company website in your post signature and even have a login name that reflects your company. Instead of talking about your product, start getting involved in discussions that you know about. Build some credibility for yourself and answer peoples questions about the industry as you see it. They are going to check out your company site, they may even ask questions, but instead of spending 20 minutes typing out a response, write something short that gets the point across and send them a message to contact you off the board to go into detail. Eventually you can start your own forum and do nothing but promote your product and build a special community around your company.

Linkedin is an online social networking site. I call it the professionals MySpace. Get an account and get others in your company to join. Other than the obvious ability to get your company name into another round of search engine hits, you can work on building your network of professionals in your industry as well as find some new leads for the sales group.

Get links added to partner websites. Your business probably works with other companies in some fashion or another. Ask to have a banner or a link added to their site if do the same. Cross marketing online is free and helps spread your name to people that you may not have been able to reach otherwise and shows that you work with other leaders in the market.

Get the brains of your company to start writing some content. Not just anything, start writing about why your company is special and unique. Talk about your product to the general audience and then start using free services to start spreading the word.

Start a company blog. Get a couple people in your business to start putting together posts about what your company is doing. Hit a couple different departments. Get an executive to write something. Get posts from different departments to give your company a well rounded look. Give a personal feel to each post, try not to censor the posts too much unless confidential information or over the top language is used. You want the readers of the company blog to relate to the posts on some level. Start building on the content and spread the word to your current customers as well as prospects that this information is available to them. Encourage them to leave [moderated] comments and become involved in the future posts. The idea is again to start building your community. It takes time, but if you keep building content and are smart about how the posts are created and published, readers will find you and their opinions will be made. Listen to them. Understand your customers and the people that are interested in your product/services.

Get viral. Put together some creative videos and other media on your product. Something as basic as a kitchen appliance can become viral. For example the blender. Everyone owns one, but when you put together a set of videos and ask the question “will it blend?” throwing some of the most random and expensive items into it and showing the superiority of your product, your name will spread like wild fire like it did for BlendTec. As of today the video that was uploaded to YouTube that shows this blender disintegrating an iPod has been viewed 4,098,741 times in 7 months. What advertising are you doing that gets that much attention? (That’s a rhetorical question.)

The overall theme is this. You may think you have the greatest product or service since sliced bread, but unless you can build a community of like minded people around it, then your external support will fail. These community members are the hive that will bear the greatest fruit.

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