How Your Social Media Capital Can Get You Closer to Your Market

The recent awareness, or lack of, depending upon your company,
of the massive spike in "digital word of mouth" in the
marketplace has led many firms to rush out and "get a blog".

In many cases the conversation goes like this - "We need a
blog, go hire someone and have them start writing good and
clever things about us!"

They have already gotten it wrong in relation to social media.

Social Media is first and foremost created by individual people, not
businesses. Thus the term "social". Businesses are not social
in and of themselves, but require social interaction at key
points to truly grow and flourish. Personality is a requirement
of the most prevalant railroad track in social media today
which is the blog.

These blogs require an identity of a person with a name that
is at least the primary writer, as readers will not necessarily
appreciate a simple company identity  Thes same readers will be
people that want to "talk back" or converse with comments back
to the writer, or keeper of the journal. Entries should not be
made with the typical company pontification or corporate speak,
as no one will read it - at least not for very long. The more
authentic you are in speaking to your circle of friends, the
better response you will receive. This should sound familiar to
your social relationships.

The lines between public relations, advertising and marketing
have been criss-crossing for years. Their new re-defined, yet
watered-down counterparts include "alternative pr, online
advertising and brand marketing". Each of these silos have been
forcibly melded together as the digital social consumer has both
commandeered and mastered the very same toolset used by these
groups today.

Beginning to get the picture?

Well, if you're not, the big risk is that someone else might be
getting (or painting) it for you. If that's the case, you
probably need to act fast as I described above.  So, as an
assistant in your cause to not wrinkle your firm's reputation
in the blogoshere, or perhaps to help fix it if you already
have, I'll be posting a detailed a must-have roadmap for any business to
keep it's social media capital properly budgeted in the next week.