Social media marketing is a trend, not a fad.  Moreover, it’s a terrific extension of your content marketing strategy.

What’s clear from current research is that when we evaluate social media, we are not talking about the marketing longevity equivalent of the hula hoop or the Lambada.

Social media marketing is here to stay.  If you are not already active in venues such as a business blog, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Slideshare, and YouTube, you should be asking yourself whether it’s way past time to jump in with both virtual feet.

The answer to the question is yes with an important caveat…

…Before making the commitment to one or many possible social media outlets, it is vital to determine whether:

• you understand the target audience that you intend to reach
• you have something valuable to communicate to that target audience
• you have someone with the time, skill, and enthusiasm to execute a consistent social media program–either inside or outside your organization
• you will make the time to listen and respond to your social media audience.

There is nothing sadder than a business blog whose most recent post was a year ago. And, there is nothing less impressive than a Facebook fan page with only a few fans and hardly any messages to or from those fans.

Yes, social media can be an extremely effective marketing tool. But, you will need to make a serious company commitment to ensure that it is effective for your organization.

Social Media is the First Cousin to Content Marketing

Social media is really all about content marketing. We have often written about the need to develop a content marketing mindset. This requires companies to think like publishers.  And, that sounds an awful lot like social media as Wikipedia defines it:

Social media is information content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. At its most basic sense, social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content. It’s a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologue (one to many) into dialog (many to many) and is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers.

Because social media is in a constant state of flux with new technologies and tools coming and going you might feel intimidated at ever trying to understand the essence of social media. But as Paul Gillen explains in his excellent book Secrets of Social Media Marketing, “there is nothing mysterious about social media. The practices that we all use to maintain meaningful relationships in our personal lives apply just as well online. It’s just that the media is different.”

In a sense, social media goes back to the earliest times, when people gathered together in the marketplace and shared information about crops, food, neighbors, the evil King, and rumors of a scary dragon lurking in the forest.

In the 21st century, we talk about the same sort of stuff, but much of it has moved online and become highly mobile thanks to the Internet, iPhones, iPads, and a host of other leading-edge devices.

Just a few years ago, social media was a relatively marginal phenomenon. Today,  just like the Internet, it is absolutely mainstream and therefore belongs as a core part of your marketing mix.

Five Reasons Why You Should Begin Your Social Media Marketing Efforts Now:

1. Your customers are using it to make buying decisions. Millions of web users, both in the business to consumer and business-to-business markets, are reading blogs visiting Facebook, and tweeting daily. They are relying increasingly on social media for buying information in both the b2b and b2c worlds.

2. Smart news organizations are with the social media program. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal and your local newspaper have made social media fundamental to how they learn and how they report.  If it’s good enough for their information gathering and sharing where it really counts, it’s certainly good enough for the rest of us.
3. Your competitors are using it. You’re almost certainly paying attention to your smartest competition.  I’d be surprised if most of them haven’t already dived headfirst into social media waters.  Organizations as diverse as law firms, interior designers, real estate agents, and roofing companies are using blogs, podcasts, videos, and user communities such as Facebook to demonstrate their expertise and thought leadership. Don’t let those tough competitors outmarket you via social media.
4. It can be your most cost effective marketing strategy.  The required financial investment in creating a blog, for example, can be close to zero.  The real investment will be in time and thought required to craft a content marketing strategy which provides valuable information to your customers and prospects.  You may need to hire specific content creation resources either internally or externally.
5. Your old-style marketing is less and less effective. Because buyer behavior has changed, you cannot expect traditional advertising and public relations alone to drive buyers to your business as it did a decade ago.  You may certainly want to use those traditional tools to drive them to your online home. That’s where you can prove to prospective customers that you are a reliable supplier who can be trusted, based on your knowledge and understanding of your their problems.  A regular blog, a Facebook fan page, an uploaded Slideshare presentation or a series of informative YouTube videos may be just the ticket to prove that you are the best choice to provide essential solutions.

Summing Up the Social Media Marketing Imperative

You can use core social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, both effectively and inexpensively to compete against competitors large and small. But, as with every content marketing effort, it’s vital to make a consistent long-term commitment and to build your social media strategy on a solid understanding of your target customers. By understanding those customers, you will be able to communicate and to interact with those customers in a meaningful way.

We’ll be writing more extensively about the how and why of social media marketing tools in the weeks ahead.

Image hazel.estrada via Flickr CC

[This is a perfect example of what John is discussing. We have curated his post via Scoop.It.]

Written by John Jantsch

You need lots of content, you know that, but you also know that content creation is one of the more time intensive marketing activities you have to tackle.

While you do need to create your own content as the foundation for your total content and teaching strategy, you can – and should – supplement your content with that from other people.

One of the best services marketers can provide these days is to act as a filter for all that’s being produced out there and aggregate the best of the best on behalf of our communities.

Finding and sharing consistently high quality, relevant content and adding insight to this information is not only a great way to increase the volume of your content, it’s a great way build trust in the value of your content.

Here are 5 ways to go about it: Go to DuctTape Marketing Blog

Content Marketing Beats Social Media

A report from BlogHer suggests that tech businesses targeting American women can be most effective with blog content marketing.

Content marketing campaigns including blogs can be especially useful for consumer electronics companies targeting women. A report from BlogHer found that 69 percent of adult females in the U.S. rely on blogs when they research smartphones, computers, tablets and other consumer electronics.

Social media marketing is also effective, but to a lesser degree, with 53 percent saying they turn to Facebook, Twitter or another social network for information about potential purchases. Additionally, they are sure to check manufacturer websites, but blogs weigh more heavily into their eventual purchase decisions.

Click  for highlights of the BlogHer Study.
Via www.brafton.com

Get content. Get customers.,has now sold more than 10,000 copies in its hardcover, paperback, and eBook editions.

Even though Joe Pulizzi and I wrote and updated it in the early stages of the content marketing revolution, our book’s vital lessons and detailed case studies are just as valid and valuable today. The range of organizations that we analyzed extended from huge multibillion dollar public companies to midsize companies with a few hundred employees and even to very small single owner organizations.

If you haven’t yet read Get Content Get Customers, we know that you will want to run out and buy the book because it is chock-full of content marketing knowledge that you can put to work immediately.

But, just to wet your content marketing whistle, here are the top 10 takeaways we gleaned from some brilliant content marketing practitioners. These represent the themes that we recognized again and again as we examined how organizations are putting content marketing to work.

1. Only content that is intrinsically valuable to your customers will work as a core component of your content marketing strategy.

2. You must have a thorough understanding of your customers and what is most important to them. If you do not understand the problems and challenges they face, you cannot hope to create content that is truly relevant to them. Without understanding their problems, you cannot provide solutions.

3. A comprehensive content marketing strategy may provide a complete or partial replacement of traditional advertising and marketing. Such a strategy can be both more effective and less expensive than doing things the old-fashioned way.

4. Print magazines can be a powerful weapon within your content marketing arsenal. They enable you to reach out with precision to your customers with carefully targeted messaging that is totally under your control.

5. Great design adds significant value to content marketing by making it more accessible, more appealing, and more actionable for your customers.

6. Your best content marketing investment may be in the creation of a dedicated internal or external team who understand how to produce great content and who live and die by the success of your content marketing program.

7. Drink your own Kool-Aid. Whenever possible, use your own company’s products or services to prove their worth to your customers.

8. Get your customers to participate actively with the content you create in print and online. Begin a conversation and keep it going in order to earn their loyalty and trust.

9. Relevant and valuable content is just the first step in turning a prospect or visitor into a customer. You must then make it easy for them to buy.

10. Most of the best practices from the larger companies we profiled can be emulated in whole or in part even by very small organizations. It’s not the money. It’s the content marketing mindset that counts. Big ideas can trump big bucks.

These lessons are fairly simple to express but much harder to put into practice. That’s why we know you will want to buy the book.

Get the paperback edition for overnight delivery. Perfectly priced at $13.74!

Or get the Kindle edition for instant gratification. Only $9.71 with the Amazon discount!!

Beautiful blog design and compelling, relevant content by historical novelist Catherine Delors.

This is one of the best websites I’ve seen from a novelist. It brings us deeper into the 18th century period about which she writes. The engaging content and simple, but elegant style are a perfect match. Kudos to Catherine.

More about Catherine and how her writing journey may inspire budding authors:

Catherine Delors was born and raised in France. She graduated from the University of Paris-Sorbonne School of Law and became the youngest member of the Bar of Paris at the age of twenty-one.

She later moved to the United States and passed the California Bar. She worked at a few large American law firms before setting up a solo practice following the birth of her son.

She now splits her time between London and Paris, while remaining a partner in an international law firm based in Los Angeles.

Her second novel, For The King, was published in July 2010. Catherine is currently writing on a third novel, a prequel to Mistress of the Revolution. She is also researching a fourth one, which shall revolve about Jane Austen and her French connections.

For those of us who are authors–or would-be authors, she traces her journey from unpublished to published:

From unpublished to published: the journey

“What does it take for a first-time novelist to find a publisher? There must as many paths as there are writers. My advice here is based on own experience. Follow it or not, at your pleasure.

First have fun writing Enjoy every moment of it, the exhilaration, the bursts of creativity, the times of crushing self-doubt, of discouragement, the passion. Watch what happens to your characters. They are like kids: they grow up before your eyes, they become independent, they take off, they live their own lives. You think about them while driving to work, in your bath, at night during your moments of insomnia.

This is what I experienced with the character of Villers in my story. At first I conceived him as a pampered aristocrat, what we would call nowadays a womanizer, a brilliant, vital but shallow man. I wondered how on earth I would be able to make him interesting. In fact, he was the character who surprised me most. He gained in complexity, in bitterness, in violence as I wrote on. Now I realize that my readers like him far better than I do.”

Read the rest on her website: CatherineDelors.com

Enjoy her blog: Versailles and More.

Via Scoop.it – Content Marketing Now

From the Hubspot Blog, by Karen Rubin

HubSpot launches a free new tool to help you evaluate and improve the effectiveness of your entire marketing program.

Since 2006, HubSpot’s award-winning free tool, Website Grader, has graded more than 4 million websites. Website Grader has given marketers advice on how to improve many aspects of their websites and encouraged millions to bring their website presence to the next level, all for free.

But now the time has come to replace Website Grader! A lot has changed since 2006, and these days, marketing is about much more than just your website.

Why is Marketing Grader Replacing Website Grader?

In 2012, marketing is about more than just your website. It’s about social, mobile, blogging, email marketing, lead nurturing, and analytics. As a marketer, you need to be aware of how your marketing impacts your entire sales and marketing funnel from the top of the funnel to the middle of the funnel. Marketing Grader does just this by analyzing all aspects of your marketing efforts and letting you know where you’re succeeding and what you need to spend more time improving.

Read more: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/29274/HubSpot-Launches-Free-Marketing-Grader-Tool-to-Replace-Website-Grader.aspx#ixzz1hBsjpKyg

Read more: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/29274/HubSpot-Launches-Free-Marketing-Grader-Tool-to-Replace-Website-Grader.aspx#ixzz1fnkZP9xW
Via blog.hubspot.com

Content Marketers Can Deliver Great Information Products to a Targeted Customer Base

Fortune 500 companies have long had the technological resources and investment capital required to build sophisticated content marketing solutions—and to manage huge amounts of demographic data relating to their prospects and customer bases. Many of these firms, such as Best Buy, Proctor & Gamble, Microsoft, and Amazon.com, probably know more about us than some of our relatives do. They also do a terrific job of delivering relevant and compelling content to different segments of their prospect bases.

Smaller companies, however, have had to rely on media companies to deliver their message to their targeted buyers . This has certainly been true with print publications and, until  recently, online as well. Affordable technology is now changing all of the rules.

Just a few years ago, it would have been laughable to imagine that a very small organization could create and maintain a Web site that could be updated daily—and that would allow visitors to interact and even buy products and services. Today, this is not only possible but pervasive. In fact, a 10-person company may be able to outmarket a 10,000-person company in a carefully chosen niche.

There are four core components underlying the shift in the technological balance of power away from media giants and toward companies of all sizes:

• The ability to create sophisticated online publications such as Web sites, digital magazines, and e-newsletters
• The ability to manage huge amounts of data relating to current and future customers
• The ability to leverage social media to engage targeted customers
• The ability to do each of these simply and inexpensively

A sophisticated Web site that would have cost $500,000 in 2001 can be replicated today for $5,000.  Even solopreneurs with a modest amount of talent and training can put WordPress to use to build a blog-powered website. Ann Porter with KitchAnn Style : Unique Design for Distinctive Living delivers a simple but image rich website/blog that illustrates her design knowledge and visual sense. She did this on her own at no cost.

The same is true with the online equivalent of circulation development and management. Print publications must still invest enormous amounts of money in acquiring and retaining subscribers. But, online, mailing list and eNewsletter software that integrates with social media costs less than $100/month even for a sizeable mailing list of 10,000 or more. Constant Contact powers the NextBus monthly newsletter which reaches 1000s of transportation executives at a cost of less than $50/month. This technology powerhouse delivers sophisticated transit solutions that benefit millions of bus and rail passengers. And, their small staff and modest marketing budget can achieve results that outshine much larger organizations. They also use WordPress to power their news site.

Social media may be the ultimate leveling force as small company content marketers can use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ to build an interactive community of customers and prospects. Often, as with George Bowers Grocery in Staunton, VA, they can outcompete Kroger on Facebook in the local market. Click here to read more about their creative approach to social media. In fact, they have increased their Facebook fans/likes by almost 40% since we first wrote about them in January 2011.

Low-cost, easy-to-use Web technology and the emergence of business-friendly social media solutions now enables medium-sized manufacturers, small companies, or one-person service firms to build online content solutions that are more sophisticated than what most media companies were putting online just a few years ago.

In fact, with focus, creativity, and a little outside help, these smaller organizations often do a better job of providing targeted content that fully engages their best customers than do some of their billion-dollar competitors.

George Bowers Grocery Makes a  Fun 1 to 1 Connection That’s Impossible for the Big Chain to Match

The right niche and the right approach enable a two-person company to outshine a retailing giant on Facebook. That’s true of George Bowers Grocery in Staunton Virginia where owners Katie McCaskey and Brian Weidman have created a delightful grocery store that focuses on high-quality foods and other specialty products.

The couple knew they could not compete head-to-head with the local Kroger supermarket in their community. Instead they have captured the spirit of the original 19th-century owner as a provider of "staple goods & fancy groceries."

They offer wonderful local meats, cheeses, wines, and craft beers as well as a variety of specialty items. They target the diverse mix of neighborhood residents, local food enthusiasts, and culinary tourists each with their own distinctive interests and needs. The atmosphere of the store itself is an eclectic blend of the old-fashioned and the modern.

And, they have a lot of fun with their marketing, in person and online.

Meeting The Marketing Challenge: Content Marketing, Social Media, and Live Events

Newspaper, TV, radio, and Yellow Pages advertising were out of the question given their tiny marketing budget. Instead, online content marketing and the judicious use of social media became the obvious marketing solution.  In particular, their use of live events and of Facebook demonstrates how small can be beautiful when it comes to 21st-century marketing.

Live events are the one traditional marketing tactic they employ successfully. They feature plenty of free goodies for foodies to entice them into the store week after week.  Each event is tightly integrated with their online content marketing efforts.

Facebook is particularly effective because it gives Katie and Brian the chance to interact with their local customers and to alert them of the latest fun, free events.

The grocery has hundreds of fans drawn primarily from their small town of just 25,000 residents. There is a consistent level of interaction between the company and its customers. In fact, they estimate that 75% of their customers connect with them on Facebook or read their blog.

Best of all, on Facebook they can battle local giant Kroger toe-to-toe. That would’ve been impossible in the local newspaper, radio or TV station. They can’t out spend Kroger with traditional advertising, but they certainly can outmaneuver them on Facebook.

Although Kroger has thousands of Facebook fans across the United States, they average only 10 fans per store–while George Bowers has 429 at their single location. And, Katie manages to stay just as current on the George Bowers Facebook page as their billion-dollar competitor. At the same time, this micro marketer’s Facebook page has a much stronger visual appeal on a daily basis than does Kroger.

George Bowers Grocery has achieved outsized results by leveraging content marketing and social media components that are either free or very inexpensive. Facebook is a cornerstone of that strategy. .

Great food and great Facebook have proven to be a winning combination.

Simply Combine the Two Online Personalities to Get a Very Happy Ending

The frightening story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde wove the tale of a saintly doctor whose alter ego was an evil murderer. Sadly, there was no happy ending.

In a parallel but more modern context, I found a company that suffers from a similarly split online personality.

If you first meet the good half—the blog, you will want to spend more time getting to know them. But, if you first meet the bad half—the website, you’re likely to head off as fast as you can.

The company in question has a website with very little content. At the same time, it has an excellent but completely separate blog, that lives, like Dr. Jekyll, under a different name.

By integrating the two separate content components, this company could deliver compelling content that immediately engaged visitors. The result: a happy ending.

A Company Website That’s Starving for Content

As you can see in the illustration below,  the homepage has almost no content. The minimal information offered is all text without a single image to enhance its appeal. And, the reverse type makes even that small amount of text relatively difficult to read.

Here’s the total amount of information that the company conveys on its homepage:

Business Performance Consulting, LLC, provides structure and feedback to business leaders, teams and managers in their efforts to design in and improve business performance.

The text is vague, but, does say more or less what the company does for its clients. However, it would be impossible to differentiate that description from dozens of other comparable companies.

Even interior pages are similarly sparse and not much more helpful. None of them has more than 100 words.

On the Other Hand: The Company Blog Delivers Content Customers Care About

Just like the good Dr. Jekyll, BPC’s blog has a completely different personality and name, "Manager by Design."  It provides the kind of content that all of us should be emulating. The bold tagline promises quite a bit, "pioneering the field of management design."  But, the blogger and owner, Walter Oelwein, delivers on the promise by providing a rich compendium of relevant content that benefits both managers and employees.

What this blog might lack in terms of an elaborate layout or fancy design is more than balanced by its substantive value.  Its content engenders trust among potential clients who need exactly the expertise that his blog posts illustrate so well.

The welcome page delivers exactly the kind of descriptive information that would have made his primary website immediately engaging:

Welcome to the Manager by Design blog.  This blog was created to help team managers improve in their ability to run teams.  I’m talking about all sorts of managers, in any industry and at any level.  This includes those just starting out as managers and those who have been doing it for years.  I have seen too many managers struggle to run teams well. I have seen too many managers “freestyle” their way through the management tasks, and ignore others entirely.

Being a manager is tough, and managers develop their practices mostly through ad-hoc means.  Management practices, whether good or bad, tend to be by accident rather than by design.  It’s time this changes and we develop a new field I’m pioneering, “Management Design.”  The idea is that we can create and develop great managers by design rather than by accident.

I love those two paragraphs. Mr. Oerlein says it colloquially and well. This is the kind of guy that I would trust to help me solve tough management issues. His sincerity shines through.

The Bottom Line: Integrating Your Blog and Your Website Benefits You and Your Visitors.

Although this may be an extreme case of a split website and blog personality, you can see how  powerful the company website would have been if it fully integrated the Manager by Design blog content to bring it front and center on the company site.

Fortunately, because of tools like WordPress, that kind of integration today is both easy and inexpensive. If your organization is suffering from a similar Jekyll and Hyde personality split between your blog and your website, integrating the two will lead to a happy ending for your business.

Read more about integrating your blog and website.

[Updated Version]

If any self-described search engine expert tells you that comments like the following actual example will get you SEO-friendly links back to your blog or website, I suggest you neither pay for nor follow their advice:

"Great site you have here and great insight. No wonder so many people flock on it with comments. Keep it going. Cheers!"

I must get 10 or more of these junk comments each day on my site and countless more on client sites.  Of course, they never make it live on the web.  Finding ways to build back links is important.  But, these are a complete waste of everyone’s time.

On the other hand,  on my site, I always welcome and always approve genuine, thoughtful, amusing, and even intelligently argued negative comments.

It’s not that much extra work to find blogs and bloggers you enjoy. That’s where your comments can begin real dialogue. If you can add value to the original blog post, your blog or website will almost certainly get a look from the blogger. After that, you may get a comment back and perhaps an inclusion in their blogroll.

Like everything else in life, the only comments worth doing are worth doing well.

P.S.  Great update: A big thank you to a junk commenter (who is apparently in the SEO biz) on this very post who makes my point beautifully, albeit unintentionally with the following ‘comment’:

Search engine optimization that is process of promote site on the search engine like Google. Yahoo. MSN. Thank You .