The new buzz word in marketing at the moment is, “Social media”. It’s relatively easy to start and cheap, but not many people understand how to correctly utilize it and also the pitfalls surround this type of medium.
The most popular platforms to begin social marketing are blogs, forums, Facebook and other social network sites and Twitter. It involves promoting your products, services and brand on these sites, which are all free. But the main key area which people forget is that the information which you supply needs to be useful or interesting and needs to capture the audience that you are trying to sell too. It is pointless Tweeting where your staff are going to on their xmas night out. The best method of promote a brand is to position yourself as a voice of authority and market leaders. So if there are changes within your market place, you are the first to declare this.
Another pitfall are in blogs and forums. If you  are writing about how good you are or what great promotions you currently have, remember that people of the beauty of freedom of speech, people can write comments back. People are more likely to write something negative than positive about a company/product or service. Even if you do not allow comments to be written, they can always blog somewhere else linking back your original post