Talking Social Media with Dell's Amie Paxton

Recently, Dell's Channel Community Manager, Amie Paxton, was nice enough to ask me my thoughts on social media and especially the marketing impact it can have on small businesses.

We talked about some examples of small businesses that are effectively using social media in their marketing efforts, and this is the key point I tried to drive home:

But in all of these examples, each SMB is growing itself by using social media as a communication tool, not as a marketing tool. This is a subtle, but terribly important distinction to make. In the future, the businesses that utilize social media to grow will be the ones that view these tools as ways to better connect with and form relationships with their customers. Instead of viewing social media as simply a new set of channels to push marketing messages through.

In short, don’t focus on the social media tools themselves. Instead, focus on the connections and relationships with your customers that these tools can help facilitate.

You can read the interview here. I first met Amie and several of Dell's finest at this year's South by Southwest. Great people that are passionate about the potential that social media gives them to connect with and learn from their customers.

Tags:The Viral Garden, Marketing, Dell

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