You don’t develop individual strategies for different communication media — you develop a promotional strategy that uses multiple media, such as email, direct mail, or trade shows to achieve certain marketing objectives. The point is, you pick the communication medium that lends itself well to your marketing objective.

Social media is another communications tool that you integrate into your marketing paln to achieve certain objectives. For example, you might set an objective to improve brand awareness in the financial services industry, hence you invest more in relevant trade shows and advertising in select financial publications that your audience reads … and you communicate to relevant groups on LinkedIn, Facebook or you assign people to participate on select financial services-related blogs that have high readership in your target market.

This is often called a hub and spoke model. The hub is your center, which in most cases is the company web site. The spokes drive traffic to the site with techniques such as email calls-to-action or links from a blogpost, LinkedIn discussion or Facebook announcement.

The beauty of social media of course, is interaction, listening, monitoring .. all of the things you note. But social media applies to more than just the promotional P of marketing. With things like crowdsourcing, we can get input into new product plans, reactions to pricing, or we can use sites like PartnerPedia to help fortify partner and alliance plans.

My advice is to not treat social media as a separate strategy, rather dovetail its unique capabilities into the greater marketing strategy.

Perhaps the most effective approach is you focus on the customer’s perspective from the very beginning of the process — their buying-cycle, as opposed to your sales cycle. That ultimately helps to accelerate the adoption and consumption, once the technology solution is deployed.

A case in point, we launched the “Business Technology Roundtable” to provide information and guidance to Cisco’s managed service provider end-customers who clearly craved this type of actionable insight.

Maybe there are others that are already experimenting with this flipped-around model — as Laura refers to it. I’m really not sure.