It’s viral, it’s catching and you need to know what it is and how to use it to your advantage if you’re going to ride the wave of profits it’s yielding.

What used to be word-of-mouth has been turned on its head with the click of a mouse.

Now, people who used to recommend a product or service to their friends can click away to send the same referral to literally hundreds of people in an instant, and they’re doing it.

Take a look at myspace.com and youtube.com

It’s the fastest, greatest, and in many cases, cheapest way to get your company noticed that exists today …

Viral emails and videos are flooding the in boxes of literally millions of your prospective customers every day …

And, where word of mouth used to take weeks, months and years to really penetrate a market place, word of mouse can do it in hours …

And the best part, small business can actually do it better than most big companies can adapt to the technology and ideas.

So, let’s get to the basics first.

Content is king now on the net.

And content is taking the form of everything from web-logs (commonly know as blogs) to libraries of articles, Press Rooms, videos, audios and as much information as you can imagine about your products and services as well as how to buy them, how to choose them and how to differentiate the good suppliers from the bad …

We’ll take a look at each one separately, but suffice to say the more you can upload, the more places customers, researchers, buyers and journalists can find you.

Blogs – These started in about 2004 in any form or reasonable volume and today you can very cheaply and easily build your own blog into your site. Essentially it’s a way that ever week, two weeks or even day if you like you can upload a new article, point of view, story or even journal of your day to day business.

Many companies are using blogs to communicate with their customers, gain feedback, or even build volume of searchable content on their site.  Remember, the web is building every day and the more you have on your site that is both targeted at your potential customers and Search Engine Optimised the better your results will be.

Press Room – This is where every day, week or two weeks you can submit a press release about your company, one where you control the message as you are the journalist. Think about this:  an article in a newspaper is what we pay PR people big money for and may reach tens of thousands of people. Well, if an article is placed on the web, how long will it be there and how many people may find it over the next 10 years?

Put in the time and energy to build a solid Press Room filled with everything from an online press kit to copies of articles that have been published, but also every single release you have ever written. Remember, the Press Room is as much for your customers as it is for journalists.

Article Libraries – If you provide a service this should be a large part f your online marketing, scientists can upload, everyone can write article about their products, their industry and advice for their customers. Imagine a Real Estate agency with literally hundreds of articles on how to buy, how to sell and how to invest in real estate.

Then it’s over to video and audio.

Let’s first look at the Social Network sites of youtube, facebook and myspace. All so massively big, so cheap and so powerful to use. Again, content is king. The more video, the more pictures and the more you write about yourself and with others the better. You can even have every employee in your company build their own @work page showing what they do every day, who they work for and the products, etc.

This is obviously where the power of “word of mouse” really start to show up easily.  I’m sure you’ve been sent a video or two, a funny picture and so on.

You see, today when you make a video, it doesn’t need the world best production techniques, massive camera expense, just a regular digital home video camera and a whole bunch of imagination …

Just think of how many people started to buy Mentos, after the diet coke and mentos fountains were posted and then emailed globally.  If you haven’t seen this, then Google it, you laugh so hard.

Put simply, there is a massive benefit for a few hours learning and a few days site designing here.

This article is reprinted courtesy of My Business magazine, one of the leading business publications in Australia.

Let's get to the facts ...

Facebook has more than 58% of all Social Media traffic or as I call it, Interactive Database traffic ... and it's growing just like any business owner would want it to.

Twitter has less than 2% and falling ... that doesn't accurately reflect Twitter's real growth but percentage decline ...

Myspace is dying at a rapid rate of knots ...

WHY ...

Let's go back to E-Bay ...

E-bay showed you how you could make money using it's system ...so we all signed up and used E-bay ...

Facebook allows us to find and create customers, it allows charities to raise funds, as well as allowing friends to communicate and meet each other ...

Twitter helps us grow our business, LinkedIN helps us grow our business ...

The benefits here are why companies hire people to sit all day and work on Facebook, Twitter and so on ...

As for MySpace ... if they could find a way to help business people make money, then I tell you, MySpace would have it's fortunes turn around pretty dang quick ...

Think of it this way ... business is the engine room of your customers, no-one will spend as much money with Myspace and business people, now maybe the music industry is a good  place to do that, but going after iTunes, Rhapsody, Zune and other music sites and systems that are firmly ingrained would be like saying I want to beat uTube when they already have such a massive lead ...

Something new MySpace, something new ...