Social Media Marketing is now getting a lot of interest, not just from the companies operating at the edge but by some mainstream brands. Given this level of interest it is important to determine if the hype is matching the rhetoric and give you the facts should you want to make the case for your own company’s involvement.

The Society for New Communications Research recently published their report titled, “New Media, New Influencers & Implications for Public Relations” that provides several case studies illustrating how social media has benefited organizations like the American Red Cross, the Mayo Clinic and Quicken Loans. Among their findings, “Social media is rapidly becoming a core channel for disseminating information. Fifty-seven percent of this group of early social media adopters reported that social media tools are becoming more valuable to their activities, while 27% reported that social media is a core element of their communications strategy.”

Real Fresh TV has been conducting a study of social media usage amongst FTSE 100 companies in the UK. The website has some interesting information about the largest UK companies and their adoption of social media. I will continue to review and give commentary once the findings become clearer.

Another report that is doing the rounds in the blogoshere is the Universal McCann’s Social Media Research Wave 3 research report. As a summary, this report looked at 17,000 Internet users in 29 countries. One finding in this study was that social media can have a dramatic impact on your brand’s reputation. “34% post opinions about products and brands on their blog and 36% think more positively about companies that have blogs.”

The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research recently released the results on the usage of social media in the Inc. 500. Of note here, “Just over one quarter of the Inc. 500 reported social media was very important to their business/marketing strategy in 2007. That number has increased to 44% just one year later.”

Comscore released a report the growth of social networking worldwide. This report stated that social networking use grew 25% year over year worldwide, with significant increases in Europe and the Middle East.

Moreover, Rapleaf released the results of their study examining the gender and age of social network users. Note that these two studies were conducted independent of each other, so don’t confuse the results between them.

Chris Kenton wrote a post called, New Social Media Marketing Adoption Report where he provided a marketing whitepaper entitled “12 Essential Tips for Success in Social Media. This report showed a clear acceleration in adoption of social media as a marketing practice, and is fairly balanced about its value and application, despite all the frothy hype and counter-hype in business reporting.

Anyone that has additional reports then please post the links in the comments section for others to review and feedback.

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