New Internet Marketing Trends 2010 – the Social Tribe and Partnership Marketing

There’s an interesting Internet Marketing trend and concept being born and practised by a few savvy Internet Marketers over the past few months and currently – something referred to as the ‘Social Tribe’. I call it ‘Partnership Marketing’* or ‘Shared Marketing’ - essentially it’s all about marketers grouping together to increase and multiply their online efforts (with a ’1+1=3′ synergy).

Now, we’re not talking here about Social Networking groups, such as those found on Facebook or LinkedIn, for example ‘Income Through Social Media’ (a Facebook group). These types of groups tend to be formed from a variety of people, some who are in the group to learn from others, some who want to increase their Personal Branding by sharing content with others, and many who want to promote their own products/services to other group members. These groups are often not the perfect online communities, because although there’s a sharing spirit amongst some, often there’s also competitive conflict within the groups.

What we are talking about with the ‘Social Tribe’ concept is a step further than Social Media groups - it’s an alliance of online marketers with similar values and ideas, who may be marketing very different products/services (ideally, to avoid competition), agreeing to partner up, usually via a group or membership website, and then helping each other market all their products/services together, and/or drive traffic to each other’s individual websites.

One of the most obvious platforms for ‘Partnership Marketing’ is Social Media, like Facebook and Twitter, because of their social/group and viral nature. An excellent example of utilizing Social Media in this way is Katie Freiling’s The Unified Tribe, which members join (for a monthly fee) and then promote each other’s websites/content and products/services via various Social Media, thus multiplying their Social Media reach and their individual website traffic. One of her tribe members has this to say about the benefits of this particular ’tribal marketing’ model (click the link).

Another good example of ‘Shared Marketing’ is shared blogging, for example the TribeMastermindFormula blog, which is co-written by a group of 6 Internet Marketers. Not only does this take the heat off one blog writer, because many are contributing; but the blog is always fresh and current, and will thus be more likely to get higher search engine rankings. Also the blog and each marketer’s content/products/services can be promoted multiple times on each of their own websites/social media platforms too. However, clearly it’s important that blogging partners must have established relationships with each other, because they need to trust each other, and that the shared blog’s posts will conform to the group’s value system and purpose.

Of course it’s also possible to have a shared online business and website, which each partner promotes separately via their own marketing channels, and together on the website. Although there are many examples of this, because it’s possibly one of the oldest business models, even on the Internet, there are variations to this model. For example, a loose partnership of professionals and online businesses who each market their own products/services from one website, but who have not formed an individual business entity. This works best if the products/services are related but not competing, so that visitors and clients get the impression, and have the convenience of, an all-in-one service from the website. An example of this is The Marketing Tribe – an alliance of marketing services professionals offering SEO, graphics, email marketing, etc - all under one roof, so to speak (although the individual companies/professionals might be spread geographically around the world, and might not even ever have met each other in person).

I think the ‘Social Tribe’ is an exciting marketing concept, in a world where there are more than 206,000,000 websites (according to Netcraft). Increasingly, to be seen and noticed on the Internet, innovative methods need to be employed, and what better than to use the power of groups to do so? 

Read some more interesting stuff here about web marketing trends for 2010.

*’Partnership Marketing’ is an old-school marketing phrase, which refers to linking two brands together and marketing them together so that the returns are greater than their separate inputs. I think it’s a term, though, that applies well to the new ‘Social Tribe’ concept too.

Please note that I will no longer be updating this blog. Instead please visit the new home for this blog, http://AztecInternetMarketing.com - for all these articles, plus many more recent articles and updates. See you there!

Pictures:
San Bushmen on sand photo courtesy of:  http://www.chinafrontier.com/cmc2004.html
Social media friends and group members picture courtesy of: http://www.whatmakesthemclick.net/page/2/
San Bushmen around a fire photo courtesy of: http://www.goyamagata.com/gallery/people/bushman06E.html

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