In The New Rules of Marketing and PR, David Meerman Scott Talked about the web as if it were a massive city.  Corporate sites act as the Main St. businesses, Craigslist and similar sites are the bulletin boards in the markets, eBay and other auction sites are the weeklong garage sales, mainstream media acts like our online news centers, the forums and chatrooms are like the coffee houses where people hang out - and of course there’s even the “wrong side of the tracks” with the adult industry online.

Scott used the metaphor to place social media as the private clubs and cocktail parties in the big city.  It’s where everyone is gathering for fun and soaking up the good life.

When you consider how true this is, you begin to realize that there are thousands upon thousands of parties going on across the web on a daily basis.  Do you remember your younger years and the nights you tried to go bar hopping?  If you were industrious, you might have made it to a half dozen bars or parties.  You might have gotten into more than that but that didn’t lend much time for anything other than downing a shot, high-fiving someone and rushing out the door to the next place.

If that’s your practice, you’re not engaging anyone in that party.  Same goes for social media.  You can’t be active in every social networking site, it’s just not possible.

Once you finally do choose the few parties you want to get involved in within social media, it’s not really possible to engage with everyone.  At some point you have to admit that there is a mass of conversation going on around you and you can’t join all of them.

The best thing you can do at a party is have a few, very deep conversations that are engaging to choice people.  You know you can’t talk to everyone, so you should make the most of a few conversations and really get involved with just a few people.  Those people will have a stronger, more lively impression of you than if you acted as if you were suffered through while looking for a better conversation or you jumped around the party having a bunch of little self-serving and superficial conversations that went nowhere.

For most businesses and individuals, the better choice is to get involved in a small number of social networking sites instead of trying to lay down and cover them all.  Considering there are thousands of social networking sites…

• Nexopia
• Bebo
• Hi5
• Friendster
• FourSquare
• OrKut
• CyWorld
• SecondLife
• Xing
• Myspace
• Facebook
• Twitter

Shall I go on?

You just can’t make it to every party, so it’s important to do the research necessary to find out where your customers are gathering.  A business shouldn’t just opt to jump into Facebook because Pepsi did it.  If that business has few or no customers to actively engage in that social networking site then it’s just a wasted effort.

Keep in mind that just because there are a ton of people on sites like Twitter, that doesn’t mean that your buyers have an active “buyer presence” there.

Where do you want to be?  Where can you be most helpful to your targeted buyers?  Where are your customers hanging out

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