Honesty. I believe that to create and maintain a relationship with your market, you need to be honest in all of your interactions. This creates trust which is no less important in this virtually connected world than it is face to face. It may seem useful to fabricate an image or a persona on a platform such as MySpace and use it to advance a portion of your goals, but this fragmenting actually leaves you with less of a foundation to stand on.

You or your company’s personal brand is what needs to be marketed from the beginning. Social media marketing is a slow process and, if for no other reason, you should avoid dishonesty as it takes time and effort away from growing the “real” you, the one that your audience will inevitably find out about anyways.

In a supporting vein, Harry Hoover with THINKing proposes “to thine own self be true.” Here, here Harry!

The inspiration for this post is credited to Mitch Joel’s Six Pixels of Seperation - The Twist Image Blog. Check out his challenge to come up with social media marketing’s best practice.

In an interesting move, HBOlab, an online-focused offshoot of HBO, has created a Web-based reality show out of some popular YouTube personalities. By banking on the character’s existing virtual stardom, they are hoping to promote the Web series in some of the primary social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.

The show is called “Hooking Up” and will feature well known YouTube entertainers such as “lonelygirl15″ and “sxephil”. If you don’t know who these people are, you are part of the Internet minority, or so the show’s producers would like you to believe. Sensations like Tila Tequila have already made the leap from social networking to mainstream celebrity and with “Webisodes” like this one, we look to be entering a whole new realm of online marketing.

Not only is it more cost effective to create and promote shows online through social media, it engages an entire Web-based community that is spending more and more time cruising sites such as YouTube and Twitter to get the latest news and determine who has the goods to become the next big celebrity.

If you want to view it for yourself, Hooking Up will premier on October 1st. Check it out at hookingupshow.com.

Barack Obama is getting ready to announce his running mate.  Instead of going through normail mainstream media, he will be announcing it with a viral campaign.  By signing up at his website you can receive an email when he announces it or you can text VP to 62262 (OBAMA) to receive a text message.

This is the first time that a presidential candidate has bypassed mainstream media for such an important announcement.  By utilizing this social style announcement it really appeals to younger voters as it lets them feel that they’re getting the news first and it allows them to easily spread it around to their friends instantly creating a conversation around the announcement.  It also shows that Barack is not dependant on mainstream media and realizes that his target audience isn’t dependant on it either.  It’s also very convenient for people that don’t read the newspaper or watch the daily news (me!).

On a side note, does anyone else find it interesting, and not so awesome, that the presidential candidates don’t announce their running mate until this late in the race?  I think it should be announced during the primaries… but I guess thats a whole different post!