When I spoke about Facebook marketing strategies at SMX East, someone asked the panel of speakers this question: “If you had to do only one to help your business, would you start a blog or focus on social networking?” The answer, I feel, is not necessarily a black or white issue. Obviously, if you can handle running a blog and social networking, the easy answer is “both,” but there are situations where one is more suitable than the other.

Why You Should Blog

Adding a blog to your site can be beneficial to your business in a multitude of ways, a few of which I’ll highlight below:

• It builds unique content. By posting new entries on a regular basis (daily, weekly, etc), you’re creating new, unique content for your site. You’ll get more pages indexed, meaning popular posts can pull in some good search traffic and other posts can rank for long tail search terms.
• It’s a great launchpad for linkbait and viral content. If you’re developing linkbait or viral content for your site, a blog is a great, easy way for you to launch the content. Deploying a piece of content via an active blog makes it seem less orchestrated/intentional than if you were to set up a separate page just for a list.
• It’s a good brand builder. Giving your company a voice via the blog can make your business stand out among the competition. If you provide really helpful information and stand out as an industry leader, your blog will become a valuable resource. Also, establishing a personality on the blog will create emotional ties to the reader and you can develop positive relationships with your audience (which can lead to sales!). You can also use the blog to address any reputation management issues and share company news with the public.

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The following article was written by Gretel Going, a partner at Channel V Media, a marketing agency in New York City. 

Need fuel to get the green light on a social media or content marketing project you’ve been pitching? Or maybe you’re looking for backup in your plea to increase your customer retention budget.

A new marketing survey conducted by King Fish Media, in partnership with HubSpot, Junta42 and Upshot Institute, might be exactly what you’re looking for. (You can skip the overview and download the complete study here.) 

The 2009 Survey on Marketing, Media and Measurement offers hard data that confirms our collective hunch that companies are focusing on communicating directly with existing and prospective consumers with methods made ubiquitous by the social media and content craze.

At the same time, it shows that traditional advertising is alive and well, but that its usefulness is limited to certain initiatives. And if you’re wondering how to gauge “usefulness” in the first place, well, the study’s got an entire section on metrics and how they’re being used by marketers to make important budgeting decisions.

As recently as a year ago, companies were diving into social media and content not always because they wanted to or believed it was effective, but because they thought they were supposed to.

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SEE THE REST

If you’re launching a new product — or even just putting new energy into an old product — the holy grail of marketing is a hearty endorsement from a popular independent blogger.

But how do you do that? What can you as a marketer do to get bloggers talking about your product?

In the video below, Sarah Pinnix (@RealLifeSarah on Twitter), a popular and prolific independent blogger based in Boone, NC, explains. 

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by Erik Sass

A new survey on media usage from the Opinion Research Corporation confirms what newspaper publishers have long feared: Americans are abandoning print daily newspapers for information in favor of online news.

The OPC also found a slightly smaller decrease in the number of people turning to TV news. However, there were also some unexpected gains for traditional media, including a greater reliance on radio for news and information.

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The concept of Social Search intuitively makes intuitive sense.  We know a lot of people and know that some of them have specific knowledge and wisdom that is useful to us.  However, locating the person in our networks with the specific intelligence to aid us in a specific task can be difficult.

In the digital world, the problem has been extended to more types of information including documents, graphics, audio and video.  The more skillfully we are able to navigate through complex webs of data and concepts the greater value we can derive from the networks that we create.

Our Vast Networks

On LinkedIn we can all see our own network statistics.  I have a few hundred contacts.  However, my 2^nd degree contacts (friends of my friends) number over 100,000.  Amazingly, my 3^rd degree contacts (the friends of my friend’s friends) number in the millions- as large as some countries – all of whom are just two introductions away from me.

Theoretically, my network on LinkedIn contains almost anything I would like to know, from where to get a good latte in Budapest to what are the latest developments in cancer research.  The concept predates the internet, as people who want to search for information often intend to “ask around,” but online it has been expanded to an astounding degree.  Everything we want to know is at our fingertips – if we can find it.

Yet, with so much information so close, how do we navigate and find what we need in our networks when we need it??  How can we benefit from information contained in our own private information treasure trove? As Duncan Watts wrote, “Searchability is, therefore, a generic property of social networks.”

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Today we’re going to tell you about 8 free sites that’ll help you explode your traffic…

AND get a better search engine ranking…

AND build a name for yourself as an expert in your field…

AND maintain better customer relations…

AND get new ideas for growing your business!

The sites we’re talking about are the ‘Net’s most popular social media sites. They’re online gathering places where people meet to share information and build relationships with each other. They’re also great places to meet potential customers and business partners.

… Plus, you can also build up a huge network of loyal customers who will do a lot of your advertising for you simply by raving about your product to all their friends and family. (And as you probably know, word-of-mouth advertising from a trusted source is the most effective kind of advertising you can get.)

And if some of these loyal customers start linking to your site from their sites, that can help you get a serious boost in the search engine rankings.

Here are the top 8 social media sites you need to know about: >

• Facebook: The world’s biggest social networking site. Members go to find other people who share the same interests or activities. You can build your own online profile and share different types of information with each other, such as pictures, videos, blog entries, links to other sites, and music clips.

  A good marketing strategy is to create a Facebook “Fan Page” for your business and encourage your customers to join. Then you can easily alert them whenever you have updates to share about your business.

• Twitter: A “micro-blogging” social network site. Members send each other short text-based posts of up to 140 characters. When you find members whose “tweets” you like, you can subscribe to their feed and be updated whenever they send a new message.

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by Rebecca Kelley

Today I saw this piece on Mashable about how resistance to social media is beginning to fade. The article mentions that while 59% of marketers use social media in some capacity and the figure will jump to 82% next year, some companies are still resistant to social media marketing.

Mashable’s article features a chart that lists the biggest deterrents to social media. They are (in descending order):

“We don’t know enough about social media to know where to begin.”
“There’s no established way to measure the effectiveness of social media.”
“There’s no funding for social media in our budget.”
“We don’t have the time to invest in social media right now.”
“Social media isn’t a proven, tested strategy.”
“We’re hindered by legal constraints/corporate policies.”
“It’s not a good use of employee time.”

In my opinion, reasons 2-7 directly correlate with Reason #1, which can be boiled down to a lack of social media education. Social media marketing is fairly new, although it ties the basic principles of marketing into a new medium/environment. Many companies are likely intimidated or confused by social media marketing — they have a lot of questions about it and don’t want to devote time or marketing dollars on something they’re unfamiliar with. The problem is that social media is only going to get bigger and more common, so sooner or later companies are going to have to have some awareness of it…and the sooner, the better, because by the time your competitors catch on and join the social media marketing club, you should have already established yourself as being fairly social media-savvy, forcing them to play catch up.

A lot of our work with clients involves educating them about the value of social media marketing as well as the ins and outs of various social media platforms. We’ve written lots of introductory guides for our clients about Twitter, Facebook, social news sites, blogging, social networking, and more. The absolute first line of offense for us is education, because when a company is uneducated about something, they don’t think they need it, they don’t think it’s worth their time, they think it’s a fad and a waste of money, they believe misconceptions they hear, you name it, they’ve got an excuse as to why they’re not adopting a tactic that can prove to be extremely valuable to them.

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