Social Media Marketing; Your Blog is the Center Hub

We have written before that the Directional Flow of Marketing Has Changed. No longer does buying a larger block of advertising work so well at increasing sales. If you harness Social Marketing, it can have an extraordinary reach for your product or business.

But Where to Start

Glenda Watson Hyatt has a great graph over on her blog titled Mapping My Social Empire, and does a nice job of illustrating how her blog is the center of her media empire with seven smaller territories

The directional numbers represent Glenda’s actions

1. Manually Tweet the blog post, bring readers back to the blog
2. New blog posts are automatically added to facebook
3. Tweets are fed automatically to facebook
4. LinkedIn profile brings readers to the blog, it theory
5. Videos posted to You Tube bring people to the blog
6. Manually Stumbling posts brings readers to the blog
7. Blog posts are automatically sent to email subscribers
8. TweetMeme on the blog enables readers to share the post easily
9. TweetMeme is also embedded in the email broadcast

Your Blog is the Center of Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

The above referenced is a pretty solid plan to increase and expand your digital reach. If you use this strategy consistently, your digital footprint will expand over time. the key though is consistent posting of relevant content.

The good news about all of this is, it really isn’t all that complicated. If you are a start up or a small business you can do it yourself. These Internet marketing services can also be outsourced. Either way, both take time, and creating a Long Tail doesn’t unfold overnight.

Google Juice and Social Media Marketing

A proven strategy for Moving the Google Needle is Consistent Content, which starts with a Content Strategy Plan. Dan McCarthy in his post titled A Case Study in Building Google Juice lays out how consistent posting, with relevant copy can and will  serve up some of that famed Google Juice.

Dan points  out some flawed thinking surrounding the Google Juice and Internet Marketing debate;

Say the words “Google Juice” and people are likely to nod their head knowingly. Getting Google Juice is a dark art, easy to understand and hard to execute. People hear Google Juice and they think, Page 1..

These conversations are flawed. Google Juice is an ongoing by-product of a consistent content strategy that connects with a specific audience. As my colleague Todd Dubnerpoints out, when you try to game Google, you end up gaming yourself. But when you try to serve a market with consistent content, even with a marketing emphasis, you’ll accrue a natural level of Google Juice that will differentiate you from the market.

Content Strategy

Valerie Maltoni, over at Conversation Agent lays out a the importance of a Content Strategy.

Static and often stale Web sites have been in dire need of evolution for a long time. Content formats shared in social media and networks suit the way we evaluate, talk, and socialize our decisions about products and services better, at this stage.

Although we all know that it’s still very early days. We’re trying to retrofit how we think and organize our knowledge, recombining and building on information, as well as out humanness, in a medium that has a long way to go on mapping to either one. Content comes close, but only when it’s activated with engagement.

Just like TV didn’t kill radio, the company Web site still plays an important role in the digital marketing mix. Razorfish highlighted the importance of Web content to provide experiences in their 2008 FEED report.

Instead of building a site around an organization chart, which in many ways mirrors the company’s hierarchy, we should build the context around customer needs in two areas of browsing:

(1) search – for answers
(2) sharing – of stories

These two desires and functions are the bread and butter of blogs, where more recent, or shared trump content win. Plus, blogs help with the relationship thing in ways that Web sites don’t – by humanizing the interaction with your company through conversation and relationship building.

Blogs Are the Cornerstone of  Your Digital Footprint

As both Valerie and Dan point out, a company blog is an excellent tool to Expand Your Digital Footprint, and create Google Juice. While your individual approach for your business may differ, the fundamentals are mostly the same.

Think about this, most companies create a web site, and then sort of forget about it. That doesn’t work for Google, as they are scouring the web for fresh content regularly. A blog, which is just another web site allows you to easily update content easily.

We would love to here what is working for you, and what may have been a challenge,