Let’s say you’ve got a great product or service and you want to promote it using social media and you also know you can’t approach the social web as if it were old-style marketing.

Targeting prospects, talking about consumers and audiences, crafting and broadcasting your messages – that’s not the way it works. But as you explore social media sites and communities you can see what it’s all about. Successful brands are the ones that get recommendations and positive reviews and ratings.

Ratings

Wherever there’s content, there are the tools to rate it. Think of all those buttons you see asking you to ‘rate this’ – be it a product, service, article, video, comment or just about anything.

All online communities have their own rating tools and ways of encouraging people to use them. Blip.fm is a free music service where everyone’s a DJ and is encouraged to ‘give props’ to other DJs if they like their music selections. On LinkedIn , members are invited to respond to the queries of other members, who then rate the answers according to how useful they are. On Ebay and Amazon Marketplace, after you’ve made a purchase you’re invited to rate the seller on a scale. A high rating on social bookmarking sites such as Delicious or Digg is taken by many as a measurement of good content.

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