A lot of people have asked me about what I am doing on the web, using technologies like Twitter, Facebook, etc.. It’s something that is hard to explain and is a bit nebulous. I use it to help build my social reputation on the web because of the industry I am in, but I also talk about its implications in marketing, and business value. This is where things get a bit dicey for most people. They have a hard time grasping this concept. Most people think of a company having a twitter account that blasts coupons out to people following them. To me that misses the big picture.

Social media is playing an important role in an emerging landscape that is destined to blur lines of what traditional marketing was aiming towards. What does that mean? In a nutshell, things are moving from corporations from “pushing” product ideas to us, to “pulling” them from users and customers and building a community around the product.. This business model flies in the face of what we normally think of with TV ads, newspaper ads, and other forms of traditional media. For a good example of this, take a look at what Threadless.com is doing. Products that are totally built around the community deciding them. This example is a bit to the extreme, though, since they have become established around the last 5 years. So how do big companies use these tools to their advantage? Well, it isn’t pushing coupons through media outlets like I stated above.

Big companies need to get creative. Social web outlets can go a long way to create buzz about your products without “pushing” them. For example, have a your product manager “plugged” into communities you might think your product is designed for. This can be twitter, pownce, or any of the dozens of services out there. Chances are, you will get people to start looking at your product through these media channels. Especially the early adopter types. This will help build a community around what you are selling. From this community, you’re going to hopefully get a lot of ideas to “pull” information from to make your product better. You don’t have to completely abandon your traditional strategies, but incorporating some form of social web strategy is the important part. Start moving your marketing strategy from “push” to “little bits of push, and mostly pull”.

Using this information to hone your product into something your customers want and like, is a helpful recipe to making something people are willing to use and possibly even pay for. The paradigm is shifting, and companies big and small are going to need to recognize it and capitalize.