If you’ve been in business for a while (or ever taken a marketing class) you’ve probably heard of the 4 Ps of marketing: Product, Price, Place and Promotion. These are the four basic concepts to consider when marketing a product. Product: what IS the product? What features does it have, how does it look, how is it packaged, what accessories can it go with? Price: how much does it cost? Seems simple, but requires much consideration: are we trying to penetrate the market or with low prices, or skim some off the top? Are there potential discounts? Can pricing be uniform across various sales regions? Place: where is it sold, and how do you get it there? Where and how will the customer interact with the product? Promotion: how will you promote it? Direct sales, advertising, sales discounts, PR?

All are weighty decisions, and certainly are tweaked over time. But how are these essential questions applied in the social media world? How can we use the vast array of social media tools and websites to further our aims? Chris Brogan, President of New Marketing Labs (view his site here: http://www.chrisbrogan.com) wrote a great article recently about just this. His main point: the new technology can be bewildering, but at the end of the day we can still look through the old prism of the 4 Ps to get our bearings on how we should use these tools. Read the full article here: http://bit.ly/3c6DfB.

If nothing else, read the bullet points at the end, which summarize the way in which social media HAS changed marketing. In essence they all point to one fact: with social media it is about building relationships, not hawking your product. Once you learn that, those relationships will become more valuable, and you will see your business grow.

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