I just published a social media blog post for the Fortune Brainstorm Tech blog entitled I'm not knocking Facebook or Twitter, but...

After speaking to a number of prospects and customers, it became clear to me that the more that things change over time, the more they stay the same. Take for instance the role of the Marketer. Since the dawn of man, the role of the Marketer has always been to Reach, Engage and Influence their prospects and customers. Doing all three successfully substantially increases your chances of monetization.

The marketing world is experiencing a major transformation. While traditional online marketing channels such as email continue to serve your business well, a proliferation of new online channels is creating multiple paths to your audience, making it difficult and complicated to reach them as effectively as you did only a few years ago. In particular, the challenge for marketers today is that prospective buyers are spending more and more time in social networking sites, where individuals – not businesses - wield influence over brand perception and purchase decisions. Consumer reviews of products, purchase recommendations from friends and negative comments about customer service are now directly affecting your business. In these forums, traditional marketing approaches that work well in channels such as email and advertising, don’t work - and aren’t welcome.

To be an effective marketer today, you need to leverage and monetize both traditional online channels and emerging online channels to reach and influence your audience. This requires not only technology for creating, delivering and monitoring your campaigns, more than ever it requires expertise and understanding in how to use emerging channels appropriately and in cooperation with traditional channels.

Check out my Fortune blog post for some good examples of how companies have successfully monetized social media, or add your own in the Comments section.

Last week, the E-Commerce Times ran an article I wrote entitled, “The 4 Biggest Motivators for Social Media Marketing.” The gist of the article is that simply enabling your customers to share your email newsletter, web page or promotion is not enough.

In order to fully leverage the power of social media to reach new audiences, you need to first understand what type of social motivators would prompt your customers to share something and then devise a campaign in support of it. In addition to outlining the four principal social motivators, I also talk about the importance of being able to measure the impact of a social media marketing campaign and leverage that data in future campaigns.

Bottom line: social media marketing is much more than sharing functionality. You need a well thought out strategy. You can read the article here.