The article has really peaked my interest. I’m going to bookmark your blog and keep checking for new details about once per week. I subscribed to your Feed as well.

For Tier 2 vendors who are “not charging everything” (as point 6 above), it seems not making sense as they must find some ways to recover their cost or otherwise their financials would not work. They may not charging “everything” at the first place but they would eventually need to do it in long term.

Audiences also divide themselves into Groups on LinkedIn. Get active without being overly promotional on these Groups to establish yourself in those desired niches. Provide value. Have people connect with you. Then, consistently provide status updates with occasional self-promoting links via your personal profile to communicate with potential clients off LinkedIn.

Google+ provides self determination of Circles of contacts. This type of categorization and keyword search of contact information will grow in usefulness as Google sifts through demographic data for G+. You can target only those in specific Circles for messages.

As for doing your own segmentation, I’d suggest offering actionable content to your followers that a specific sub-niche target market would find useful. See what kind of response you receive. Then, take those respondents to a different modality like email, text, phone, and your CRM system for follow up.

Once companies determine the metrics upon which they can judge the success or failure of social media marketing campaigns, and see how they can improve their bottom lines, they will wholeheartedly invest in those types of campaigns. The difficulty comes in trying to measure the causal effect of a social media campaign. How did a prospective customer find us? Did an existing customer decide to re-purchase because of our social interaction? How viral was our campaign hashtag and how strong was its influence? These are just some of the questions an organization might want to gauge.

The expense of social media marketing comes in tracking its effectiveness. Once a tracking system is in place, it’s possible launch numerous and nimble campaigns. In traditional marketing, the creative piece and the placement of that piece on the media are major expenses. In social media, its more about spending to track the metrics, and to have enough human resources to interact with those that respond to the campaign.

If a company can determine that properly budgeted social media marketing can result in strong ROIs, you sure will see high dollar expenditures toward these campaigns.

Could you elaborate more on the Extended Organization Form (EOF)and perhaps site examples in the real world?

Thanks,
David.

Thx!