Trey Pennington comes to Scotland

If you need to get the attention of your prospects and customers (or the press), find out what people are willing to buy, or stimulate word-of-mouth promotion of your business, social media might just be your best marketing option.

Because there's no universally agreed upon definition of marketing, I'll offer my own: Marketing is the ongoing process of engagement whereby strangers are nurtured into advocates. The process requires that:

• strangers become aware of your existence
• strangers become aware of the problems you solve
• prospects connect your solution to some problem they have
• prospects realize your solution is the best solution for their problem
• prospects become customers by concluding some kind of transaction
• customers have a pleasurable, rewarding, satisfying experience with your solution
• customers have the information and resources they need to tell other people about you

Plot that process on a continuum from left to right. Social media performs admirably on both ends of the spectrum - making strangers aware of you and making it easy for advocates to talk about you. Social media is powerful marketing tool for meeting new people and helping them get to know you. It's also powerful for facilitating worthwhile experiences and making them easy to talk about.

Two generations ago, my hometown of Greenville, South Carolina was an economic powerhouse. Greenville was the heartbeat of the textile industry. Today the beautiful brick textile mills are either empty or have been converted to housing for rich people. There's still one bright spot in Greenville for this once glorious, now nearly dead industry - Carolina Manufacturing.

Carolina Manufacturing makes bandanas. Their bandanas are sold through an ever-shrinking retail network. Retailers have been steadily abandoning American made bandanas for the much cheaper Chinese bandanas. Last year the company stumbled into social media by searching for bandana pictures on the photo-sharing site Flickr.

What they discovered was an intense community of passionate bandana enthusiasts. Carolina Manufacturing began paying attention to them, asked for permission to re-produce Flickr photos in their printed catalog, and established a close bond between the company and end users. The attention they showered on users created a pleasurable, rewarding, satisfying experience for bandana lovers.

Now the marketplace can't get enough of Carolina Manufacturing's bandanas! Retailers are now calling the company and asking if they could be allowed to carry Carolina Manufacturing bandanas once again.

You might not be a member of a once-glorious-now-nearly-dead industry, but you probably need more people to know you exist, know what you do, love what you do, and willing to share what you do with their friends. Social media gives you the tools - most for free - to gain the attention of your marketplace and help them travel through your marketing continuum.