Seth Godin wrote an interesting post today titled "Scalingjacking", his point basically being that too many marketers incorrectly assume they should chase size or scale: How many followers? How many leads? How many visitors? etc... Rather than simply trying to do a great job building relationships with and providing information for the targeted subgroup they should really be focused on, even if that's only 100 people.

If you're still on the fence about social media, and how important it is to your software marketing efforts (and most of us are), then Seth's point is a really important one.

It's true that too many marketers count their success on Twitter, for example, in terms of how many followers they have. But does that really matter if most of your followers are fellow marketers and internet marketing wannabees? No, it doesn't... unless that's the target audience for your software product or service, of course.

I don't know the silver bullet for marketing using social media... like most, I am still testing the waters myself. But I do know that it seems to be a great way to learn more about your niche, and really really focus your target subsegment to identify those folks who could get the most value from what you have to offer. When you've identified them and built a following (and it may be a small group.... that's OK) then that's the time to figure out how (and whether) to inject a marketing message into your communications with that group.

Most of us could probably do with spending more time listening and learning... perhaps that's the best that social media has to offer us right now.

I'd love to hear your thoughts. How do you find the likes of Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook etc useful in your software marketing?