Social Media Marketing

SMM Definition
Social media marketing (SMM) is defined as exploit of social networks like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Flickr, Wikipedia, Orkut and YouTube. SMM includes online communities in the form of Forums and Chat system, blogs like BlogSpot and Word press, Wikis, Yahoo Answers or any other online collaborative media for marketing, sales, public relations and customer service.
In the context of Internet Marketing, social media refers to a collective group of web properties / web documents whose content is primarily published by web users, not by the direct employees of the property (e.g., The majority of video on YouTube is published by non-YouTube employees i.e. Web Users).

Concept
Social media marketing has three important aspects:
1 Creating buzz or newsworthy events, videos, tweets, or blogs entries that attract attention and become viral in nature. Buzz is what makes social media marketing work. It replicates a message through user to user contact, rather than the traditional method of purchasing of an ad or promoting a press release. The message does not necessarily have to be about the product. Many successful viral campaigns have gathered steam through an amusing or compelling message, with the company logo or tagline included incidentally.

2 Building ways that enable fans of a brand or company to promote a message themselves in multiple online social media venues. Fan pages in Twitter, MySpace of Facebook follow this model.

3 It is based around online conversations. Social media marketing is not controlled by the organization. Instead it encourages user participation and dialogue. A badly designed social media marketing campaign can potentially backfire on the organization that created it. To be successful SMM campaigns must fully engage and respect the users.

According to Lloyd Salmons, first chairman of the Internet Advertising Bureau social media council "Social media isn't just about big networks like Facebook and MySpace, it's about brands having conversations.

Social network marketing
Social network marketing or social level marketing is an advertising method that makes use of social network service and to increase their web presence. This ranges from simply advertising directly on social networking sites, viral marketing that spreads throughout the web, email, and word of mouth or providing niche social networking sites focused around the item being advertised.

Many sites include features where companies can create profiles. For example, on Facebook companies can create "pages" where users can become fans of this company, product, service, individual, etc. Many companies create MySpace pages for themselves.
Companies sometimes invest in internet presence management, which can include social network marketing.