For marketers struggling to jump in and join the social media revolution, these thoughts are for you.

Beyond the “promotional” P (from the Four Ps), social media and the online space can help marketers and organizations in two important ways.

The first, which is obvious, is to tackle the “product” P – to identify a need within the community that the organization can fill with a product or service. Because you identified the need from the community, it stands to reason that the community will want to talk about it – as long as you are agile enough to create the product before interest wanes.

This is *fairly* easy to do but, as with all things social media, takes time and commitment through deep ethnographic research.

The second, which is not so obvious, is to identify a group of people, a whole demographic that are undeserved. That’s breaking out of the four Ps and providing real strategic, business value. Then identify the need and then create the product to cater towards it in such a way that it can spread.

This is the sort of social media work I want to do. In both, you need to have a laser focus on what you are creating and why. Or you will create something mediocre and you will end up howling at the moon.