Attention Conservation Notice: The following post provides an overview of the Social Media landscape and important tips for making it work for both brand awareness and lead generation.

The marketing analysts at Sirius Decisions just came out with a decent high level view of the Social Media Landscape in today’s SiriusPerspective newsletter. Some of the categories and descriptions seemed a little “old school”, so I’m adding my own edits to their categories here:

• Blogs/Blogging including the creation of a blog and participation in other writers’ blogs.
• Social networks such as MySpace and Facebook where people can network with other parties who are interested in a particular topic.
• Forums such as Yahoo or Google Groups that are moderated and focused on a particular topic or function.
• Podcasting or Vidcasting which simply means syndicating your digital or video messages via sites such as Odeo or YouTube.
• Media sharing on sites that let users upload and rate content such as contributed articles, videos and images.
• RSS/Web feeds that distribute blog articles or other content summaries which readers view via an RSS reader. Users then click through to read content.
• Wikis. Collaborative documents that are created using a Web browser. Contributors can add, delete or edit content, and notify other authors of their changes.
• Social bookmarks: Sites such as del.icio.us (owned by Yahoo!) and Digg that enable users to store, rate and recommend bookmarks. Many bookmark sites provide Web feeds to notify subscribers of updates.

The newsletter states that, according to their research, roughly 50 percent of B2B organizations are utilizing some type of social media. They also warn that social media may not be a good tactic for demand generation unless marketers play by the rules.

Let me first say that while I am typically not one to “follow the rules,” I do agree with that statement. It is vital that marketers have a solid conversion strategy for social media that is not “in your face” or overly aggressive. The important point in the social media arena is to network, build awareness, establish your expertise, provide high value content that buyers can easily find and make it easy for them to contact you when they need your product or service. The results of the NetQoS viral video campaign show that it works.