How to Leverage Social Media for Non-Users

You and your audience may be perfectly happy in your twentieth-century communication web of phones, brochures, and even email, but don't be surprised if you soon lose a prospect who found a great online recommendation to your competitor's product. You just can't depend on your audience to stay in the bowl, no matter how isolated they seem from the Web 2.0 world of blogging, sharing photos, and short text messages.

Keep an eye out for changing behavior in the marketplace, and use the ReadWriteWeb article below, written by professionals immersed in Web 2.0, to learn a variety of methods to monitor what's going on, and to be ready to help your customers and prospects navigate their way through new social media to your company. Before your competitor does. 

ReadWriteWeb: Five Ways to Use Social Media to Reach People Who Don't Use Social Media, 2008-Sep-11, by Marshall Kirkpatrick (via Bloghound)

Sometimes it feels like social media is just not relevant to the people you're trying to reach. That's a common dilemma, but we believe it doesn't have to be that way. In this post we discuss five strategies for using social media to reach people who don't use social media, and we've listed specific tools you can use to do it.

1. Develop relationships with people who bridge the gap inside other organizations.
2. Use Web 2.0 tools to learn about real life public events.
3. Make your blog an email newsletter and promote it elsewhere.
4. Look harder, your audience probably is using social media that you aren't aware of.
5. Use the internet to make yourself smarter in real life.

References:
ReadWriteWeb article by Marshall Kirkpatrick: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/five_ways_to_use_social_media.php
Lois Kelly's bloghound articles on Social Media: http://blog.foghound.com/category/social-media-strategy/