Welcome to www.SocialMarketingDirect.com

Josh Bereano, founder, specializing in Ning & WordPress Platforms

Link to our Social Media Network

SocialMarketingDirect.com is in Beta until May 1, 2009. We are actively looking for strategic alliances and partnerships. The website will be under development for the coming months. Please contact us at socialmarketingdirect@gmail.com.

What is Social Marketing Direct?

Social media is the new way information gets exchanged. People are looking up their favorite blogs, references, forums, friends, colleagues, and gurus for recommendations on what to do, where to go, who to talk to, and what to buy. Search is giving way to browsing. People listen to conversations instead of ads. The way to engage potential customers, clients, and partners is by building relationships and starting a real conversation.
There are many out there who understand social media, but few who are able to implement it on behalf of a company or brand for the purpose of marketing. Community engagement must have a few key elements: credibility, relevance, and convenience. Brands usually fail in engaging audiences when they force ads onto social communities, hire spokespeople to spam blogs and forums, or offer money to thought leaders to evangelize. That’s all just another form of the same old interrupt and solicit model. It backfires.
What we offer is training in social engagement of customers, clients, and business development contacts. There are a few ways to go. The best is to train your core brand experts on how to communicate directly with their audience. You can also have your agency do this, and we can train them, but the farther from the core of the company you go, the less authentic the message. Or you can outsource your social media marketing entirely by building a team, training them on your brand and strategy, and let them rip. We’ll consult, but that direction is up to you, your timeline, and your budget. Leave the rest to us.

SMMdirect is your resource for the social media marketing community.

So you know you need to “do” social media. There is a boom in social media services and consulting. Their capabilities are spreading to many niche specialties within social media. However, companies and marketing professionals are finding it difficult to know where to start. Social Marketing Direct will put you in touch with the right social media experts and service vendors to help you meet your business goals.

  • Is it a Facebook expert? Twitter champions? A community manager? Blog design? SEO functionality? Mommy bloggers? Viral content production? There are more niche specialties and directions to go than ever.

We are actively looking for strategic alliances and partnerships with successful social media companies, bloggers, experts, internet marketers and social media mavens to provide clients with consultation and web 2.0 services for reaching target audiences. Our product line including consultation and vendor services will launch May 1st 2009.

We will continue looking for new partnerships:

  1. Vendors – Web 2.0 service providers and experts ready to meet client needs
  2. Biz dev – Affiliate marketers to spread awareness of services and bring in new clients
  3. Joint ventures – to grow the directory of vetted resources and exchange capabilities, tools, and services

If interested, sign up to our Ning network and in your profile, include your site(s) and your specialty within social media and marketing. Meet other social media connectors and learn more about what we do.

Please create a profile on our Ning network and get involved!

Partners and clients of Social Marketing Direct will both benefit from the network we build together. As traditional marketing and advertising become less effective at reaching target audiences, companies are looking to social media for its potential as a way to get the word out. Word of mouth is the primary way most people are now learning new information, whether it is about products and services or culture or interests and entertainment. However, creating buzz and causing something to “go viral” takes much more than just an interesting website or YouTube video. It requires social media marketing, and it requires those well versed in its application.