Social Media and Channel Marketing

I have started to draft a paper on the use and application of social media for channel marketing. While there is a lot of content available, most of it centers on the definition of social media and the various applications...answering questions like, "what is micro-blogging?". I am hoping to come up with a framework that can help explain and perhaps start to justify the use of social media for the purposes of channel engagement.

As has happened so many times, I was inspired by a recent post by Seth Godin where he has developed a simple model to explain various media by engagement level (asynchronous/synchronous) and density of information delivered (high bandwidth/low bandwidth). Please check out his post for additional context.

I borrowed his model and came up with the following:

You can now ask yourself, "what are our communication goals?" and "at what level of interaction or engagement is required to most effectively deliver our information?" If time is of the essence, then you might consider the use of email, blogs, or micro-blogging. If the amount, or density, of the content that needs to be delivered is great, then you might consider a content community (YouTube/flickr).

Calculating the cost/benefit is much more difficult. You will need to analyze your current process for delivering timely or content-rich information and determine if the use of social media will save time and money. You will need to consider concerns about lost productivity (or rationalize improved productivity) and security. I think most companies struggle with this and I certainly have yet to find the answer. I am open to ideas...

I am also very interested and excited to get more detail about GoogleWave. Potentially, this is the application that will get us close to the top-right of the grid.