There are subtle differences between online marketing that leverages social media to carry its message and the methods of traditional marketing. With online marketing, even though you're not re-inventing the wheel, you're still riding on a different vehicle. When marketers forget that, they land themselves into trouble. The gestation period, for one, is much longer in online marketing efforts. Building a MySpace is not the goal. Getting people to use it and draw their attention to your product is your goal.

One of the biggest areas that they goof up on is not having respect for the platform and the audience that they're trying to get the attention of by launching campaigns that do not speak to the demographic. Simply utilizing screen real-estate to make people click on your advert and download a white-paper is cost-prohibitive and isn't worth the social media effort and investment.

The two essential formulae to success with online marketing are -- building a community and carrying the message back with the metrics collected. Essentially these are two different functions requiring diametrically opposite faculties of the brain. They must be done by two different people. Creating a community must be left to an evangelist who thrives on the human factor. This is the most difficult part. Creating a website such as MySpace or Facebook where people put their pictures is not rocket-science. You have to have an evangelist work for you to build a community around your product and then exploit the attention of your audience once a community is created.

In this talk, Giovanni Gallucci, a search engine optimization and social media expert, a speaker, blogger and co-founder of Dexterity Media, spills out the secrets of a successful online marketing philosophy that leverages the communal strength of social networks such as MySpace, Facebook, etc. He contrasts social media against traditional marketing by providing case studies of companies that succeeded as well as those that've failed at it.