Reap huge rewards in social marketing with these 10 steps to starting a social marketing campaign.

Social marketing is a relatively new, often misunderstood form of online marketing that is reaping huge rewards for website owners who incorporate it into their marketing plans. At SinoTech Media, even our clients and customers that are new to social marketing have gotten good results in the following areas:

1. Higher search engine rankings for their top keywords.
   
2. More rankings of additional keywords or "long tail" keyword phrases.
   
3. More link popularity from sites linking on their own accord.
   
4. More link popularity from social media sites.
   
5. More activity on their blogs, such as more commenting and interaction.
   
6. Direct traffic from incoming links on social media sites (One good StumbleUpon.com submission can net thousands of visitors alone.)
   
7. Significant traffic increases and steady growth in unique visitors month after month.
   
8. An increase in subscribers and sales. Social traffic, properly acquired, is very receptive to your message and products.

When most people think about social marketing, they become overwhelmed and paralyzed by the magnitude of sites available on the web. There is however, a growing set of best practices that reduce the 'trial and error' of using social networking to drive company/product promotion.

Try to think about buzz marketing as needing a longer-term strategy than some other marketing tactics.

With the right approach to blogging and online community building, a company can established a "social authority" in a specific area. Social authority cannot be achieved over night; rather, it is a gradual process of building awareness in the blogophere. Without careful management and a planned strategy, using buzz marketing in a social networking context will be considered spam and worse, can result in a backlash of your products and brand by the other community and blogging members.

What I encourage my clients to do is set aside enough time each day to get one more link, participate in one more conversation, or sign up for one more account on a social site.

With consistent attention to building a blogging reputation, your company and brands will eventually establish themselves on the major social media sites. An increasing number of companies are now outsourcing the management of this strategy to advertising firms, but if you wanted to undertake this yourself please consider the following points:

10 steps for starting a social marketing campaign

1. Schedule regular time slots for contributing to blogs each day.
   
2. Sign up for the major social news sites: Facebook, Spinn.com, Digg.com, Propeller.com, Mixx.com. Don't submit anything to these sites until you have filled out your profile completely, and submitted news from elsewhere on the web to generate a real presence and avoid being labeled as a spammer.
   
3. If you don't have a corporate blog then you must install one immediately. This is not an option. It is an absolute necessity on today's social networking environment. I recommend Wordpress which can be downloaded and installed by you or your webmaster.
   
4. Once you have your blog set up, join the following networks. (These are blog communities that will help you generate visitors, authority, and links and most bloggers belong to them.) MyBlogLog.com (install the widget on your Wordpress blog), and BlogCatalog.com. (They also have a widget to install).
   
5. Join professional networking groups like LinkedIn.com, make friends, and interact with other bloggers on these networks and community sites. Especially the people who you want reading your blogs. You can even start your own, promote it in the network, and send "shouts" to the group when you have announcements or need attention to a new post.
   
6. Once you have established yourself on all the sites above -- meaning you have a decent profile in each that shows you've been active and involved -- move on and search for networks that are more specific and fit your particular market niche. Continually monitor and look for new "vertical" social networking sites that will fit your target audience. This membership will give you a greater opportunity in also promoting your ideas, products and brands as they understand the subject matter far better that a general blogging community. Also, be sure to add new sites into your social networking strategy as often as you can. Doing this will allow your company and brands a broad reach and with back-links allows your site to be indexed by the search engines for greater visibility.
   
7. Join a group dedicated to social marketing to pick up tips from other social marketers, and find new places you can sign up with to continue building your social authority. New sites pop up every single day. Check out social networking directory's like Go2Web20.net that list the latest social networking sites.
   
8. Join blogger.com and put content there that is good, just not good enough to go on your main blog. This serves two purposes: 1) you get to use more of the great content you find as you travel through all the social news sites and 2) it gives you another place to link back to your main site and pass on traffic and link popularity over time.
   
9. Track your website diligently. You need to have a web analytics tool that you can use to monitor your sites traffic and get a view of your reader's location and how they got to your site. We recommend SinoAnalytics, a low cost but powerful tool for providing this information.
   
10. Don't stop! Once you proceed down this path of promoting your company and brands in a social networking setting you need to keep going to maintain momentum and continue to develop community awareness.

Social networking marketing is one new key area that should be reflected in a digital marketing campaign. We advise our clients that this area is as critical in supporting brand and call to action campaigns as search marketing and online media advertising.

Social marketing, once you've established some authority, can replace some things you are currently doing to promote your site. Some clients will reallocate online budgets from search engine marketing (SEM) to other areas once they see the organic, natural traffic and search engine rankings get more highly ranked from a social marketing campaign.

Until then, start to plan, do your research and execute your buzz strategy -- this is truly an exciting new digital area.

Dr. Mathew MacDougall is group CEO and chairman of SinoTech Group Limited.