It’s almost impossible nowadays to read an article or get into a conversation about marketing without the topic of social media coming up. That’s because social networking can be an effective way of disseminating information about your brand, creating goodwill among customers, and learning about what your audience thinks of and expects from your company.

You may think that every business out there already has a Facebook page and a Twitter feed, but that’s not the case—yet. So if you haven’t made any inroads regarding social media, it’s not too late. But as E-inbusiness, a provider of online marketing solutions, declares in its white paper “The Voice of the Customer: Harness the Power of Social Media”, “Those who don’t put social-networking technology at the core of their ecommerce strategy and [instead] dismiss it as simply a passing fad do so at their peril”. Here, then, are some pointers to get you started.

* Find an existing social network you can add value to. Which one or ones you choose depends on your business and your target market. If you sell fashion to young adults, you should check out Facebook, MySpace, or Bebo first. If you’re a business-to-business marketer, look into LinkedIn or some of the niche networks. Once you’ve settled on a site, don’t just slap up a page with your logo and some selling copy. As E-inbusiness notes, you shouldn’t talk at the customer but rather with him: “These spaces are highly personal, and so it’s important to actually talk with people, by engaging them in an adult-to-adult conversation.” For instance, you could create a forum and encourage users to post comments—positive and negative—and queries.

* Create community on your own website. This doesn’t necessarily mean adding a forum to your site. Start by enabling visitors to bookmark your pages to outside networking sites such as Delicious, Digg, Facebook, and StumbleUpon. In addition, you could add a wish list application that enables visitors to share their lists on their own social-networking profiles. Adding user-generated product reviews is another way to foster a sense of community.

* Accept the negative as well as the positive. Many merchants hesitate to add social-networking capabilities to their ecommerce sites for fear that negative comments by users will cost them sales. Anecdotal evidence, however, shows such is not the case; if anything, visitors view sites that share negative as well as positive user comments as more credible and trustworthy.

* Monitor and learn. You can gain a wealth of knowledge about your audience by regularly reviewing visitors’ social-networking activities. Which products are the most added to wish lists? Which items have the highest and lowest customer ratings? What sort of questions are people asking on bulletin boards? Because such comments are by and large unsolicited—as opposed to a customer survey that you’ve pushed out to consumers, for instance—they’re more likely to reflect your audience’s immediate needs, likes, and dislikes.

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