Erik Qualman wanted to get help promoting his new book, Socialnomics, so he made this video viral-bait (can I say that?).  It’s been kicked around the Internet so much I’ll be surprised if you haven’t seen it.  But if you are one of the few, this is a pushy, catchy, in your face statement that Social Media Marketing is HERE and NOW.

In case you were wondering why anyone would want to use it, here’s a great report from Lisa Barone on Twitter.  She’s literally reporting the content of speakers’ presentations at PubCon, a conference for Internet marketers in Austin.  It’s clean, cut to the chase kind of stuff.  Twitter is one of those innovations that seems inevitable — after the fact. (btw, this kind of post is sort of like a re-tweet, which you will learn about in her nice long story)

In an interesting bit of research recently published, the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that Internet participation has been increasing across ALL generations.  No surprise, the younger you are the more likely you go online using more channels (there’s a lot more 20-somethings at MySpace than there are older boomers).  But important to note that age is almost irrelevant to some kinds of online activities, like researching products:  all ages do that at about the same rate.

In other words, SEARCH and using online resources to learn about products and services is so common at all ages that it is a MUST for marketers no matter what you are marketing.

Greg Sterling over at Search Engine Land posted some nice graphics about Pew’s Generations Online project.  I’ll share a couple tidbits here, but you might want to check it out.

It wasn’t surprising to me that the Gen X (ages 33-44) and younger Boomers (ages 45-54) make up a big chunk of the adult Internet population (45% of it between them), although the younger Gen Y group is proportionally larger (ages 18-32 with 30%).  And it wasn’t too surprising to see the pattern of certain Internet activities across these generations:  the younger you are the more likely to play online games, use social networking sites, or create a blog.

But what was a little surprising, and encouraging, was that for some activities, there is very little difference in participation rates across generations.  94% of Gen Y use email; 91% of the Silent Generation (ages 64-72) do.  90% of Gen Y use search engines; 85% of Silent.  65% of Gen Y makes online travel reservations; Silent: 69%.  Research products online:  Gen Y – 84%; Silent – 73%.

You get the picture.  Why it matters is this:  the activities that are most likely to lead to sales are common across generations.  Until we get a better handle on how to use all the social sharing, social networking, social news sites out there for marketing products, this will probably continue to be true.  And the change toward social media marketing is not going to be an easy road — the participants in those networks are sophisticated about their independence, and they (mostly) do not want direct marketing appeals.

We are left with limited options for social media marketing.  One important avenue is brand development.  Companies that operate in niches where they can have an impact via brand can benefit from participating in social media.

Of course, then they have to actually participate actively and faithfully, and that’s another story.

Using social networks for advertising has proved to be a real challenge for marketers.  Users want the networks for personal socializing and dislike ads.  Yet, the personal recommendation of a product is the best marketing anyone can get, so marketers aren’t giving up.  Marketing Vox posts that in another attempt to harness the power of social networks, Facebook is introducting Connect.  Connect makes an existing third party website (like Hulu, Discovery or Digg) available to a group of friends to view and comment on together.  In other words, this external content becomes part of the conversation.  Want to watch a video together on Hulu?  Do it through Facebook and share the time with your friends.  This makes the event more valuable to advertisers, in theory.  As always, the ultimate force driving this is how attractive the content itself is:  if Facebook friends share an interest in content that is valuable to them, the ads will be seen.  If the content isn’t any good, forget about it.  So, leveraging the content of a site like Hulu makes good sense — and undoubtedly means Hulu will want part of the action.

Most online marketers I know are obsessing over social networks and social media. How do we market our clients using these autonomous user-driven networks?  Here’s Chris Brogran’s Best Advice about Social Networking with a nice list of links to resources — it’s a start.