What is the foundation of social media? A simple question with multiple ways to respond, but I found a great post this morning that discusses the 5 C’s that make up the foundation of social media marketing.

• Conversation: Go where the conversations are taking place - Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, YouTube, etc.  Establish accounts and create your identity.  Stay up-to-date with your accounts and participate often.  Really get to know your followers and audience so you can actively participate.

• Community: Seize the opportunity to not only join and participate in conversations, but add your own value.  This is how you create a community, which you must work to maintain and earn the trust of your followers. A good site for community building (in addition to the ones mentioned above) is Ning.  Ning allows its users to create their own social websites and social networks. It’s a good place to create a form or community around your product, which in return can produce useful user feedback.

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How do you generate new business? This is very good question to ask yourself.  Through surveys and discussions, we have found that a significant amount of vendors in the industry rely on referrals from their happy customers (”word of mouth”) and networking groups for business growth.  Relying solely on these two ways of generating new business can make it very challenging for vendors to sometimes predict and control business growth.  This is where the internet can play in.

I found a good post that highlights some key things to consider when looking to use the internet to get more referrals.  Here is a quick summary:

• Great product and service = happy customer. Word spreads fast online so having happy and satisfied customers will help your business (subscribing to your blog, connecting with you on LinkedIn, following you on Twitter, etc.). On the other hand, unhappy customers can easily cause harm to your online reputation. So make sure to maintain a high level of your product and service!

• Be committed! Your clients have to be willing to refer you, so you have to be committed to making sure they see success and are please with your product and service. To do this, you have to know your client and develop a level of understanding and trust. Look for ways to always maintain and improve this relationship to make sure expectations are being met.

• Give good reason. Find ways to connect with your clients online by engaging in inbound marketing – create good, educational content on your website (that is easy to understand), blog about yourself and your business, engage in social interaction with your clients (via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.). All of these ways will help you connect with your clients and in return give them a good reason to refer you.

So I turn the question over to you, how do you generate more business?  Share in the comments section!

Last week WeddingWire’s CEO, Timothy Chi, and CMO, Sonny Ganguly, joined many of you at the 5th annual Wedding MBA convention and presented on the best ways to reach today’s wired bride. You might remember them best as “Harold and Kumar”! So many of you asked to have “Sonny’s Top 10 Places to Surf ” that we thought we would just share with everyone:

1. MySpace - 71,486,821
• Build a profile for your business
• Browse through your network and connect
2. Facebook - 42,777,397
• Create a fan page for your business
• Build a wedding group or participate
3. Ning - 3,757,563
• Build your personal niche social network
4. WordPress - 134,875,738
• Create your blog and build incoming links
• Participate and comment on wedding blogs
5. Twitter - 1,723,476
• Create a following with your micro-blog
6. YouTube - 73,537,222
• Showcase your business with video content
7. Flickr - 22,511,915
• Create online photo albums and tag your pics
8. Digg - 21,632,429
• Build incoming links to the content on your site
9. Upcoming.Yahoo.com - 3,419,626
• Broadcast your events and the places you will be
10. Answers.Yahoo.com - 23,386,964
• Share your expert knowledge with brides-to-be

Share which of these you are currently using and feel free to post links to your pages with your comments!