I cant claim experience of putting this into practice (yet), but the essential idea is to build community on a social networking site who have an interest in your organisation/product/etc which them helps to funnel people to your site.


For instance say you set up a facebook page for Widgets'r'us giving a basic overview of your company etc.


Which is all very well, Im sure a few dedicated Widget users and will join it and click on the link to visit the main site. What you need to do is to take it step further, to mesh the social networking site and the website. So set up a blog on the website (latest product news, general advice and industry thoughts etc) with rss support. Now add an rrs reader application to your facebook page so that the page will display the rss feed from the website, now people have a reason to visit your site, to read the articles on the blog.


Its not simply about facebook and their ilk, you could make your own Youtube channel dedicated to your Widget (reviews, hints and tips, unusual uses). The videos can appear both in the blog and by syndicated to the facebook page. You could create a WidgetWiki, become the definitive source for info on widgets and their use, build up a little community of widgetwiki readers and contributors. Perhaps a Flickr page with amusing and artistic shots of your widgets.


Google Friend Connect lets you take this a step forward, rather than simply using social networking as a funnel GFC apparently lets you imbed social networking features into your website itself, so that it can build up its own community. Its in prerelease at the moment, but could be an interesting tool.


The idea behind this approach is to make use of viral marketing (e.g. friends of people who are members of your Widget Facebook page getting curious about what the fuss is about and taking a look) and link building (e.g. lots of content rich pages linking to your site).


What you dont want to do though is spam blogs, treat wikipedia as an advertising space, or even set up fake blogs praising your widget (astroturf) or pose as fake widget fans and rave about them (sock puppetry), more than a few major companies have been caught out doing this and been subject to the fallout, plus its going be illegal in in the EU soon too.