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“We really believe in fishing where the fish are,” said Carol Kruse, vp of global interactive marketing at Coca-Cola. “The old model is to build your own site, then spend media dollars to bring them there.”

Tell me about your most successful social media campaign? Thankfully we’ve had many successful social media campaigns, so it’s hard to isolate just one. We believe very strongly in developing and fine tuning a REPEATABLE process, regardless of what you’re doing.

That’s one of the reasons why I tend to think that social media (by which I mean actual conversations and relationship building exercises, not widgets and Facebook fliers) is more aligned with the goals of a PR program than it is with marketing.

Mixx is a relatively unknown Social Bookmarking site.

Obviously most people are going to ask how much traffic it sends. On that score it is not brilliant in comparison to Digg or even StumbleUpon, of course not, it is early days, but it does send a bit. It fact for me it has performed better than Reddit and Sphinn, which are sites often recommended in the SMO space

However, while I’ve written numerous times on getting and leveraging traffic from social media sites I have increasingly begun to see numerous other benefits of being an active participant in these spaces.

Social media describes the online technologies and practices that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives.

I assert that self-promotion is vital to the launch of any new social media endeavor. Whether a marketer or an individual, whether starting a blog or making videos, you have to be your own #1 fan and evangelist. There are plenty of people out there who will love your content, but you have to help them notice it. There is nothing wrong with this, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. However, there are some things you can do to help obfuscate the paradox and take those vital steps to gaining a foothold in the wild west of the internet.

So I want you to do something that many traditional PR people think is nuts. I want you to design your online media room for your buyers.

Sites that serve as a comprehensive and reliable filter of information on a topic will be read, but they’ll always have to compete with other fast-paced news publishers. To aggregate information is incredibly easy. To process, analyze and situate it within a big picture context while offering an intriguing/unique perspective is considerably more difficult. Those who can do so will be trusted: they are a valuable knowledge asset for any reader. Detailed, unique content immediately stands out on its own, even without extensive  marketing efforts. People don’t just want to be informed, they want to better grasp a topic in all its nuances. The joy of consumption lies not only in the skimming of a news story but the processing of new perspectives to enrich a personal worldview or professional need.

StumbleUpon – you know, the one you are so happy to use to drive traffic to your site – belongs to eBay.

TechCrunch reports that eBay is trying to sell off SU are at least distressing if we are to consider the potential buyers Microsoft and Google.

Once they were your printing presses; now that humble device, the blog, has given the press to us. That’s why blogs have been called little First Amendment machines. They extend freedom of the press to more actors. Once it was your radio station, broadcasting on your frequency. Now that brilliant invention, podcasting, gives radio to us. And we have found more uses for it than you did. Shooting, editing and distributing video once belonged to you, Big Media. Only you could afford to reach a TV audience built in your own image. Now video is coming into the user’s hands, and audience-building by former members of the audience is alive and well on the Web. You were once (exclusively) the editors of the news, choosing what ran on the front page. Now we can edit the news, and our choices send items to our own front pages. A highly centralized media system had connected people “up” to big social agencies and centers of power but not “across” to each other. Now the horizontal flow, citizen-to-citizen, is as real and consequential as the vertical one.

Here is an example: User tracking for month ending 12/31/07: Action Desired step % completedLogin Log in in to site 15 times 10% Engagers Log in 6 times 15% Underachievers Log in 2 times 35% Nomads Log in 0 times 40% Slackers

Here’s a collection of 115 social bookmark and news sites ranked by PageRank, number of links and value of each site. We used dnScoop to gather the data for all these sites. This is what the dnScoop data is based on:

Euroblog, the conference which focuses on (the only) scientific research on blogging, social media and communications in Europe will take place in Brussels on March 13/14/15, 2008.