I want to "enlighten" you for a moment to a new wave of Outsourcing I see happening presently and moving into the future. A week or so ago, I listened to a great webinar on "Harnessing Social Media" by Marketing Experiments and it confirmed a few things that had been percolating in my mind!

It is evident that in this new Web 2.0 (and 3.0) frontier, many web companies have yet to fully tap the potential of Social Media for maximizing their exposure and enhancing brand recognition and awareness. I would highly recommend taking some time out of your busy schedule to listen to the "Harnessing Social Media" as it speaks to an experiment that was done using standard Pay Per Click Methods and some new social media strategies. In a nutshell, the folks at MarketingExperiment.com hired a "Community Development Coordinator" to tap into a variety of social media channels over a month period to see how much traffic and repeat traffic would be generated for their particular test site. In tandem, they ran a Pay Per Click campaign to compare cost and volume of visitors.

What they discovered at the end of the test was that the cost and site volume was basically about the same to run a PPC campaign and hire a "Community Dev Coordinator" to leverage social media channels. But, the interesting thing they found was that with the Social Media Campaign, they saw a greater degree of "Repeat Traffic" of users returning to the site then for the PPC campaign. In addition, it was evident that the Social Media Campaign further ignited their SEO potency which would inevitably lead to a more longer term and steady-stream of traffic, even after the experiment was completed.

Now, I don’t do justice to communicating the whole experiment, so do listen the webinar, but here are a couple points I would like to glean as it pertains to Outsourcing:

Web Companies that do not actively join the "Online Conversation" and leverage social media will be seriously missing out on a great stream of consistent targeted traffic that will develop through natural means. Now, depending on the size of your company, you may not have anyone in house with either the expertise or time to invest in running a Social Media experiment of your own, so I might suggest you consider Outsourcing a "Social Media Coordinator" for a set period of time to perform some of these types of social media tasks:

1. Monitor and Review a targeted list of RSS Feeds from particular blogs based on particular topics or custom keyword searches.  You can create custom feed searches through such sites as Technorati, Feedster, and Google.com/blogsearch.  You might also sign up for alerts using desired keywords through Alerts.yahoo.com and Google.com/alerts. The bottom line is you want to look for opportunities to share comments and join the conversation.
2. Review other discussion boards, Forums and social networks where your target audience might be talking. Use such tools at Boardreader.com and forumfind.com to help in your efforts
3. Provide regular contributions to targeted Wikis

Essentialy the Social Media Coordinator would get engaged with the target audience you are trying to reach to learn more about them, dialogue with them and ultimately look for natural opportunities to promote your company. Now, as much as I try to keep up with reading all my favorites blogs and participate in social networking sites, other priority items keep getting in the way. So, I have plans shortly to look at hiring a Social Media Coordinator on a pilot project basis to evaluate the potential of leveraging various social media channels.  There is certainly no shortage of cool and innovative ways to bolster your web exposure through social media channels. The reality is that few companies are maximizing the potential - I am one of them, which is why I am going to be doing a pilot project shortly to compare the performance of this channel versus other mainstream avenues (PPC, Affiliate, Email etcc…)

In our Internet Marketing Services Portal, we have a category for Social Media Services. I anticipate this category to be a very popular outsourcing channel as more and more companies begin to really understand the great potential Social Media has for their businesses moving forward!

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