Business Social Networking Platform

If you're a small business or startup looking to jump onto the social media bandwagon to increase your online presence, you probably have limited budget and resources to do so and have plenty of questions in mind. How do you jump into social media smartly? How deep do you go into social media technology? Is social media even worth it?

There are many reasons for small businesses to adopt a social media advertising strategy:

• Increase brand awareness for your company
• Drive improved customer relationships and better corporate reputation
• Gain a better understanding of emerging issues and trends
• Enhance product development and improvement efforts
• Generate increased sales and incremental revenue

While businesses have pratically forever recognized that these goals are essential to the success of any company, the advent of social media marketing has made achieving these goals more accessible and potentially less expensive.

Social networking technology has made it easy for people to share their opinions, rate favorite products, research the dirt and communicate easily with others. That's happening for practically every product out there. No matter how big or small your company is, if you have customers, you can bet they're talking about your brand somewhere. So what are you doing to influence that conversation?

You could tap into online social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace to build a fan base for your brand and communicate directly with "friends" to glean the data you need to the business goals above. Many companies do, to mixed results, but ultimately that network doesn't belong to you and you have no control over the conversation around your brand. It's Facebook and other mass aggregate social networks that own these assets and even monetize them. You don't get a dime.

So what's the alternative? How about launching your own branded destination where the users are yours? What about being able to offer the mix of social networking features that is appropriate for your community? And what if you could make money via advertising, sponsorships, or other means?

Reality Digital recently introduced an affordable business social networking platform, Harmony, that enables you to quickly build your own online social networking sites and start developing a community around your brand. It's easy to set up a site using preset themes and it includes over 30 configurable social media widgets to customize the site with online video and photo galleries, mobile uploads, blogs, forums, ratings, comments and other popular social networking features. And it includes a host of business administrative features to monitor critical metrics about your community and site traffic for return on investment.

Harmony is a smart choice for you if you want to create your own branded online community for whatever reason:

• Fan site for your product or brand
• User generated video contest
• Interactive customer community for product feedback

It's also priced affordably for businesses who are serious about social media. And while the possibilities are endless, the important thing is to map your ideas back to your business goals (like the ones above) and with a little planning, you'll find social media can be a very lucrative program for your marketing efforts.