As a social media fan examples like this are so much fun to see, but imagine if you’d never ventured into Facebook or LinkedIn? How would you feel about seeing it creep in everywhere? Would you feel anxiety that you’re missing the boat or would you look at it as a fad that will soon die out?

I’ve long subscribed to a newsletter called the Pragmatic Marketing Update which focuses on information geared towards the technology product manager and marketer. Until recently I wouldn’t have considered the newsletter innovative in any way. It simply provided some good information that is relative to my career. Then, I saw this recently in the corner of the newsletter:

Obviously, this caught my eye. Pragmatic Marketing jumped into the realm of social media with a prominent LinkedIn and Facebook profile. I’d guess that most people that read this blog or other similar blogs are familiar with these social media sites and probably aren’t that surprised to see it. At last check, their Facebook site had close to 400 members. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like their using it for much more than allowing members to post job openings.

But, what about the Pragmatic Marketing subscriber that doesn’t engage in social media? What do they think of that? They’re seeing sites like these creep into their everyday life more and more.

A recent article on the MediaWeek website also highlighted a similar trend in their article Is Social Media Killing the Campaign Microsite? The article focused on the new method of companies not waiting for customers to come to their campaign landing page or microsite but rather jumping out and engaging the customers where they’re hanging out. From the article:

The growth of social media is causing marketers to realize they cannot expect consumers to always seek them out. Web widgets and video-sharing tools make it easy for any user to take content that formerly might have lived only on a brand site with them wherever they go. And social media sites help them share that content with friends.

Sprite Sips is an example of a Facebook campaign that is aimed at taking the Sprite marketing message to a popular social media site. It looks like the marketing campaign got off to a great start, but has since tailed off. Regardless, kudos to them for realizing that people probably weren’t going to seek out the Sprite website to see their latest campaign.

My belief is that social media campaigns such as the ones I’ve listed above are creeping further and further into people’s lives. I believe the more touchpoints people have with these types of marketing, the more likely they’ll be to jump in and figure out what this is all about.

The small business marketer should be looking at social media marketing tactics for 2008!

What are your thoughts? Do you think people not currently involved in social media will start to get into the action or will they think this is all one big fad?