At Social Media Group, we work with our clients to deploy programs to add scale to social media efforts. We’ve had some amazing results with DiggAds, so we teamed up with our friends at Digg to co-author a brand spanking new whitepaper: Best Practices in Online Conversational Marketing to share the core tactics for success in this emerging space.

From the whitepaper:

Even though media and communications technologies are changing quickly, smart marketing best practices still hold true. Great marketing has always been a conversation; a conversation that companies need to listen to so that they can learn how to join in the discussion appropriately. More and more, that dialogue directly involves brands, including yours and your competitors. Digg users are already bringing you into their conversations on their own. For example, 166,000 pieces of content about the iPhone, 10,000 about Nike and 19,000 about IBM have been submitted by users over the last three years.

The fact that people interact, share and create content with their families, friends and communities is a core foundation for social media-fueled digital communications. The Edelman Trust Barometer tells us that  recommendations or content from “people like me” are trusted almost three times more than your marketing materials.

It is also true that generating earned media takes work, but is so worth the time and investment because earned media is such a credible social object and asset to the brand. Companies spend gazillions of dollars creating whiz-bang digital properties for marketing campaigns.  All too frequently, these high-quality assets aren’t given the right kind of support from paid media to drive interaction and engagement with the customer.

Sixty-two percent of advertisers say their traditional ad channels are not working as well as they have in the past.

We need new approaches to drive intent and consideration and conversational marketing to add scale to our social media and digital marketing programs. And for the love of Pete, in doing conversational marketing we must remember what we know to be true about social media – we listen first, we enter conversations to add value and we participate respectfully in an honest and transparent manner.

Over the past while, our team here at Social Media Group has been experimenting with various approaches and platforms to add scale to social media campaigns. One of these experiments was with DiggAds, in their closed pilot phase last year. We learned a tonne and had a blast generating some pretty cool results.  Chas Edwards, publisher and chief revenue officer at Digg, Maggie Fox, Michele Husak, Director of Communications at Digg, and I put our heads together, had great chats about insights and trends and wrote up “Best Practices in Online Conversational Marketing“, a whitepaper to share with you.

Please check it out and let us know what you think.