Alternative Marketing Connections

If you know how to turn on a computer, you've probably heard of the popular social networking sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and MySpace. While it's critical for businesses and organizations to develop a marketing strategy for these popular sites, it's also possible to create a social media site for your own entity.

Alternative Marketing Connections can build a social community as a part of a website that it designs, or as an independent community link to your existing or new website.

Corporate Uses

Here are just a few examples of how a community site can benefit your business:
 

• Customer Service -- A community site can give you a moderated discussion and feedback area where your customers can interact with you. Your customer service staff can each have individual profiles in your social community so that your customers feel that they're getting personal attention.
   
• Customer Feedback -- Giving your customers the ability to interact with other customers about your products and services in discussion groups will give you valuable feedback on how to better your brand.
   
• Customer Involvement -- By giving your customers and potential customers the ability to interact both with you and others interested in your product, you will increase the level of trust you have with your audience. Since people prefer to do business with others that they know, like, and trust, this can be an indispensable tool for your business.
   
• Customer Demographics and Preferences -- As people sign up for your community site, you can include a sign-up form to collect valuable information about your users, including their names, demographic information, and e-mail addresses. You only have to send messages to your entire social community with one click. In addition, your community site can include surveys, polls, and focus groups.
   

Non-Profit Uses

In addition to the features mentioned above, nonprofit organizations, including benefit organizations, cities, religious entities, and others, can receive these additional benefits from community sites:
 

• Uniting The Cause -- having an interactive community is a great way to unite your followers.
   
• Affordable, Interactive Websites -- it is possible to create an entire website using a social community engine. Alternative marketing connections named based sites are fast to deploy, and require less development time than many other web design solutions. As a result, this is a great way to build not just a community site, but an entire website for organizations on a tight budget.
   
• Fundraising -- Alternative Marketing Connections can build affiliate links, click-through advertising, and even whole online stores right into your community site.  These are all great ways to turn your site into a fundraising profit center.