How does one use social media, understand their online social marketing needs within this new paradigm. This is a primer for all those who want to explore this new area of online marketing.

1. How to use social media? Stratessence [email_address] http://stratessence.com

3. Do you really need social media ?

4. If yes, what are the basics you need to get you started ?

5. How much to spend on social media ?

6. How do you measure, if it at all works in your favor or now ?

8. Social media uses Internet and web-based technologies to transform broadcast media monologues (one to many) into social media dialogues (many to many)

9. Effectively, it becomes a new mode of communication with all the individuals involved in your project

11. They have become infinitely scalable marketing and sales channels for many companies.

12. Everyone, including your employees are already using social media to convey feelings about your product, service, & work environment to the whole world

13. In short, YES you need it

15. Social networking sites are a good example, where people express their feelings using status messages, direct messages and more

16. Emails have been the traditional protocol of communication, but that has changed to more real time messaging tools like twitter and facebook

18. What you need is mentoring and strategy about how to use your existing man power to push your band across to the world (Given that nearly everyone is on social networking sites)

19. Companies like Electrosocial ( http://electrosocial.com ) provide solid strategy suppport to SMBs looking to use social media

21. Tools like google analytics, google alerts, keyword tracking on various blogging and microblogging networks are some of the free ways of tracking your progress

22. There are vendors (like electrosocial) who specialize in tracking your progress into the next generation of internet marketing