What is Social Media?
Social media sites are primarily composed of user-generated content which create subject and theme based communities. In contrast to traditional media which is often a one-to-many broadcast format, social media is a many-to-many interactive format. Examples of social media include Wikipedia.com, MySpace.com, Digg.com, and YouTube.com.

Why is Social Media Important?
Marketers constantly clamor to lump consumers into large, easily definable, and stable groups based on demographics and most importantly, interests. Social media websites allow these groups to organize themselves and the result is often more accurate and reliable than some of the most sophisticated market research. The groups that congregate around social media sites create like-minded cliques of people who can be—and should be—of paramount importance to businesses.

How Can Social Media Help My Business?
There are several ways to utilize social media sites. One of the simplest is to establish which sites most closely affiliate with users of a product and market the product directly to this group. Potentially more useful, however, is the ability to work with influencers—those users of abnormally high influence on the site; this can be administrators or widely respected users—to disseminate information about a product either directly or virally through the group.

Whatever strategy is chosen to take advantage of the communities social media websites create, the ultimate goal is to drive web traffic to your site. By identifying one key set of interests that defines a group, other parallel interests can then be gleaned from their community. The branching tree of interests that results from social media research illuminates the keywords and topics that are most interesting to the people you want to reach. These words can then be integrated into your company’s website, daily lexicon, and culture; as well as increasing the relevance of your viral marketing efforts and the effectiveness of your direct marketing.