Social media for marketing  is the hot new area for business marketing. Options run from blogging to video podcasts to social networking portals to Twitter, and participation in forums. There is a vast range of low-cost online marketing tools to reach your ideal audiences, interact with them for branding and to drive sales.

When crafting your company’s social media marketing campaign, your next step after identifying whom you are trying to reach should be to look at how other companies are doing it. What types of social media are they employing. Below are links to actual social media marketing campaigns being run by these 5 companies.

1. Adobe has a series of product blogs, social bookmarking on Delicious, social networking pages on Facebook and MySpace.
2. Dell uses a variety of social media platforms in addition to their corporate blogs.  This includes asking for ideas (crowd sourcing), multiple Twitter handles, an island in the virtual world of Second Life, Facebook and MySpace.
3. H&R Block uses a Facebook fan page to aggregate their social media marketing. They use (or used) MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, SecondLife, podcasts, slide sharing and blogging to interact and offer tax advice.
4. IBM was the first large corporation to embrace employee blogging. They now boast hundreds of blogs related to every facet of their business. IBM makes use of forums, Twitter, wikis, virtual worlds, presentation sharing, podcasting and online videos.
5. Zappos has set up 13 company blogs and they do lots of video blogging. They use Twitter for employees to communicate their love of footware. CEO Tony Hsieh and all400+ Zappos employees have their own Twitter account to communicate and engage customers.

Related posts:

1. Basics of Social Media Marketing (SMM)
2. Internet Marketing Using Social Media
3. Social Media Marketing Boosts Traditional Campaigns
4. What is Social Media?
5. Social Media Marketing