Welcome to the Digital Marketing Inner Circle

Up early and checking into my various online accounts; facebook, linkedIn, twitter and finally my email. One thing dawns on me (apart from how sad it is to be addicted to social media) but my desire to get a  quick snapshot of what is happening in ‘my world’.  As much as some people would see this as abnormal, I also think a growing number of people will relate to this situation.

People are shifting into a rapid-fire culture that moves at Twitter time. Attention is a precious commodity and requires a personalized engagement strategy in order to consistently vie for it. The laws of attraction and relationship management are driven by the ability to create compelling content and transparently expose it to the people whom you believe benefit the most from it.

The emurging information and news ecosystem has moved from traditional source (newspapers, TV, radio) to utilizing online platforms/communities for sharing, discovering, and publishing updates and even serving  micro-sized content that reaches across many social networks and syndicated profiles, resulting in a formidable network effect of activity. It is the digital creation of relevant content that binds us contextually, where we can connect directly to existing contacts, reach new people, and also forge new ‘virtual friends’ through the friends of friends effect in the process.

Twitter, Facebook News Feeds, FriendFeed and other micro communities that are starting to define the news and information develivery services of the future.  It’s one of the reasons why CNN have resorted to i-reporter or some other form of instant citizen journalism to support their traditional coverage. It is inducing a more participatory, engaging, and enlightened community of media-literate information socialites.

While traditional media models lived and breathed through the sharing of content directly to the existing readership, new media will thrive from those individuals who reach people where they interact and engage with relevant information directly to them. This has significant implications in China, both for the control of information (and there are a lot of blogs dealing with this subject) and for marketers who can move with these new times and adapt/learn/evolve to integrate these tools into our marketing capibilities.

For those like me, who are becoming actively involved in social news consuming/gathering, we need to identify who these influencers are in order to establish an effective contextual network. With each new connection, we can appear in multiple, dispersed timelines to syndicate our content across the social networks. Worthy content combined with evangelism and clever promotion will earn visibility and expanded syndication through retweet (RT), link shares, Diggs, Stumbles, bookmarks, tweetbacks, HaoHao Report, and other forms of social syndication. With each new instance of sharing, content reverberates through extended social eco-system.

So my fellow social media additic’s …. what do you think? Twitter me and we can take this into twitter time: @sinotechian