One of the key ingredients in the marketing mix is the kind of media that you use. The media has to reach the target audience. It has to be cost effective. Above all, it has to be persuasive. Social media seems to offer all these ingredients together in a neat bundle. There are blogs, written by individuals and read and subscribed to by a set of people. If you want to influence that audience, you can reach them simply through the blogs themselves. As the content of the blog and hence the influencing message is also created by the blog owner, it is something like getting the TV channel itself to create the ad for you.

There are sites such as payperpost and IZEA which are actively involved in this space. They actually pay the blog creators to occasinally write one piece of article which is an influencing piece now and then. The social media marketing, though very nascent right now, has all the potential to become really big.