So how do you jump into New Media marketing when you have been depending upon traditional marketing methods for as long as you can remember? Do you need to post a video of the last office party or play Farmville with all of your clients to have an impact on your market? Before you Tweet what you had to eat for breakfast, take a look at a few tips to get you started.

1. Social networking for business is all about getting people to follow you. However, you want to get the right people to follow you, namely your target market. If you don’t know who your target is, define them before you start. It is true that there are a lot of Baby Boomers who are getting connected to Facebook. They are one of the fastest demographics to join the FB revolution (Facebook has more members than all but three nations in the world!) However, are the Boomers using social media to connect with business or are they simply using it to connect with old friends? Boomers tend to segment their life into work, family, social, religion, etc. and don’t like one area to cross the other. Gen Y, on the other hand, does not compartmentalize like this. Everything is one continuous stream of life, with all things holding equal importance and happening at the same time. A little demographic understanding of your target market will go a long ways. The great thing about a social networking site is that they can give you a lot of good demographic information. So if you are trying to sell auto insurance to 45-65 year old males, you would do yourself a lot of good by checking the number of FB users in your target who actually accept insurance ads or like insurance related information.

2. Everybody loves video! It seems that everyday there are new YouTube celebrities, from cute babies who cannot quit laughing to college students who have created the latest spoof video. For business, keep in mind that when you post on YouTube, anyone can leave a comment. This includes disgruntled customers. So while you may be driving people to watch your product or service work, they may encounter someone saying something nasty about your company. The same is true of other types of New Media, including blogs, Facebook pages and Google Maps, to name a few. There are ways around this. You can put video up on your own site without the ability to comment, however this is the coward’s way out. You need to maintain administrative control of each medium. Most sites give administrators the ability to delete comments. However, I would suggest you create some sort of customer service method to deal with these types of complaints quickly. The driving force behind business social networking is that it is immediate and it has a great impact. You need to counter this with quick customer service resolutions.

3. But how do you make money? This is one of the most common questions I am asked when a company is considering New Media as a marketing tool. This is where the old marketing techniques get a new delivery system. If you are promoting a product, such as a lawnmower, in the past you might have had a lawnmower sale. You might have promoted this lawnmower sale by putting a print ad in the newspaper or broadcasting an ad on the radio. You can still put on your lawnmower sale, but distribute your coupons via a social network. E-blast systems have caught on as great ways to distribute deals of the day. Online specials attract more and more users to your business site. Mobile apps and RSS feeds allow your customers to know instantly when you have a new deal. Radio and TV spots are being replaced by short videos promoted on Twitter, blogs and other social media. Don’t get too hung up on the old delivery method. Try to use your old marketing methods with a New Media twist.

4. Stay in touch. The biggest impact the New Media has had is an instant way to stay connected with customers. This can be exhausting as you try to keep content fresh each and every day. If you are a company that sent out a newsletter to clients in the past, why not take the contents of the newsletter and post each article on a blog? You can take an article a day. In this way, you will have approximately 20 posts per month. The beauty of putting this kind of information on a social network is that you can track how many people are reading it, following you day-by-day and week-by-week. It helps you understand what your clients are thinking.

Before you jump into all mediums at once, I would encourage you to start with something simple. Create some content that is important for your customer to know. Find a New Media method that gives your customer quick and easy access to this info. Post new information on a regular basis. Let you customers know what you are doing. Ask them to contribute their voice to your information. Then measure your success at getting people to connect with you.