To really optimize your search engine strategy, you need to think differently about your search marketing and what will really make an impact. Here are five tips for how to get great search results in unexpected ways:

Use search language instead of keywords. For the longest time, search engine optimization advice has been heavily focused on keywords – use them often and you will be able to capture people through search. The only problem with this logic is that people have been moving away from using single keywords and towards using search phrases to find just about anything.

Maintain multiple websites. Forget the advice you might have often heard about just focusing on having one destination for everything. Though it will always be important to have a “home base” – you need to augment that with other websites so you can capture more spaces on search results. The simple reason why is because Google will typically present “nested” search results where they aggregate pages from the same site under one search result. Other sites could be promotional, they could be landing pages for campaigns that exist as their own sites.

Create lots of social profiles and populate them. Social networking profiles, like a page on Facebook for your business or a company Twitter account can be a goldmine for search results. Often these profiles get listed on Google almost instantly once you create and populate them, and it is relatively easy to link them back to a main website and present a cohesive set of web pages without confusing your customers about where you really want them to go. Think of it as adding rooms to your house, each with their own front door. The more front doors you can have, the more benefit you’ll see in search results.

Build an arsenal of “time bomb content.” The problem with social media content such as blog posts is often that they seem to expire almost as soon as you write them. With a date prominently featured right on top, it may sometimes seem like an invitation for people to ignore anything that is over a few days old. One way to counter this and positively impact your search results at the same time is to write what I call “time bomb content.” These are the types of posts that can remain relevant and answer a need only when people search for them. So, for example, you might write a post comparing your product to a main competitor. Someone may not find that until the exact moment when they search for your product and your competitors product. At that point, though, the content is found and answers a need so relevantly that the moment it was written matters less.

Make sharing a metric for conversion. When we talk about conversion, it is typically based on either sales or leads. In social media, you can track both of those things… but there is also a third metric worth considering and that is the idea of sharing. Sharing is all about word of mouth and unlike real life where word of mouth can happen without you ever knowing about it or seeing it, on the Internet you can watch this word of mouth referral happen in real time through sharing features that are built into almost every site. You can listen in and actually track how often your business is getting shared, and the most frequently shared content has higher inbound links and appears higher on Google search results as well.

“Oh I know,” I told my client this afternoon. “Many of the big brands really have no idea, and the reality is SEO strategy depends on who’s doing it, their knowledge or lack thereof of what’s most effective, and newest strategies. Yes, longtail is where to put the majority of your eggs (if this were your basket =). Do you recall when we were discussing the long and short without calling it that, and you were saying ‘.. but very specific/niche audiences are going to be searching for that’, and my response was ‘yes, but you can compete there, #1 or 2 rather than tackling hugely saturated short strategies out of the gate. Audiences are granular, and with several targeted strategies you have a better chance.”

Think about it like this: The difference between selling physical goods and digital goods makes the long tail possible. I.e. if you own a brick-and-mortar business, there’s probably enough people living within your store radius who are interested in your goods to keep you in business. So everything you stock must justify its position. That half-inch of shelf space has a price, and if what you’re putting in that space isn’t selling a certain number of copies, you’ll have to put something else there if you want to pay your bills and stay in business. When you’re in a situation where there’s “not enough room to carry everything for everybody,” i.e. digital services, such as what you’re providing, you end up with “hit-driven economics”, people trying to attract big, broad audiences to justify cost.

Applying this to search, think about those three or four keywords that are going to attract the most traffic to your site. They are usually very broad terms with wide appeal (think of how many sites turn up for the word “dogs,” for example). And think about your chances of getting to the top of that heap. Make shorter heaps, where you float to the top, and you will eventually get found in the larger ones …

The Blog – SEO Equation

It goes without saying that search engine optimization is just as important for blogs as it is for websites. However, fortunately, blogs integrate software that pings search engines to inform them of new content, and consequently, blogs are usually crawled a lot more often than a static site.

In this section, we’ll discuss some of the important considerations you must make when choosing a blog platform for SEO and tools that will make SEO much easier. You’ll also learn a little more about how to create content that is SEO friendly, especially with regards to keyword research.

When you are considering SEO for blogs, you’ll need to think of employing numerous on-site techniques so that search engines can discover your content. The critical piece is keyword-rich content. Beyond that, make some considerations for:

Usability and ease of navigation: Make it easy for your readers to access the various parts of your page without difficulty. Be sure to add important information in visible areas. One mistake often seen with blogs and blog designs is the lack of a “Previous Posts” or “Next Posts” link on the bottom of the page. It makes sense to flesh out all these details as soon as possible.

Regular content updates: Search engines crawl websites more often if they are frequently updated. Content updates are user-friendly as well – readers have a reason to keep returning to the site.

Creation of XML sitemaps for search engines (and HTML sitemaps for user navigation): An XML sitemap is a file that contains a list of URLs that informs search engines when new content becomes available. You can also put numeric values to indicate weight/priority on specific content. When content gets updated, your XML file is updated. As long as you register your sitemap with the various search engines, the search engine spiders will discover new content by looking at your sitemap file. Adding an XML sitemap is usually easy with numerous plugins available for blog platforms.

Duplicate content: Your category pages may have the same exact content as your monthly archives. If this is the case, be sure to employ rules (such as in robots.txt) to filter out the duplicate content. For example, in the case of WordPress, you may want to add rules to disallow crawling of category page. This ensures that search engines find the proper page (typically the main page) and crawls that (and indexes it) instead.

Linking (both internally and externally): Link to your important pages internally, and use appropriate anchor text to direct your readers (and search engines) to content that you feel is important. Link externally to diversify your content and link to other recommended sources for information. For example, if you are talking about search engine optimization and have a page dedicated to SEO on your site, you may want to link to your SEO page (internal linking). But if you want to talk about social media marketing and don’t have a relevant page on your site, you might want to point your readers to a better authority source on another website (external linking). Also, when employing linking techniques, use appropriate and descriptive anchor text, not “click here” to pass the best link value to these pages.

Choosing a name that is easy to remember: Like any website or brand name, your blog should not be difficult to remember - Keep it simple.

SEO Plugin Options for Bloggers

Since WordPress is by far the most prolific blog platform with plugin support, this section will discuss a number of WordPress plugins available for making SEO easy.

All in One SEO Pack: If you have to choose one plugin for WordPress to use, this is the one you need. The All in One SEO Pack gives publishers the ability to customize the title tag (and make it different from the actual post title) and to add meta tags to individual posts and the blog’s homepage itself.

Google XML Sitemap: This plugin gives you the ability to create a sitemap that is search-engine friendly. When a blog post is published, it also automatically notifies search engines of changes via pinging. As soon as you publish a new post, the XML sitemap gets updated.

Dagon Design Sitemap Generator: You already have a sitemap for search engines, but what about for visitors? Dagon Design’s sitemap generator is a fully customizable sitemap generator that you can add on a single page for ease of navigation for those human readers. It also allows you to view the number of comments your blog posts have received at a glance.

Objection Redirection: Making a big page structure overhaul? Use this plugin to redirect pages without having to edit your .htaccess file.

WP Super Cache: If your server is stressed under an intensive load of concurrent database connections, WP Super Cache kicks in to serve static HTML files without processing the heavy PHP scripts. While this is may suffice as a viable solution and will keep your website up during a traffic spike, your hosting environment may still have problems with this setup, so stress testing is absolutely imperative.

Disqus: If you don’t want to manage comments yourself, the Disqus comments plugin is a social community that also serves as a WordPress plugin.

WordPress has thousands of plugins available, and many of them support additional features, including analytics, social integration, and more. The official WordPress plugin directory can be found at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/.

Note: Upon starting a new WordPress blog, be sure to set up the permalink structure appropriately. By default, your URL may be something to the effect of www.mydomain.com/?p=302. Change this as soon as you get started to reflect a keyword-rich URL structure and to employ slugs rather than post IDs within the URL.

Have fun out there, and as always, we’re here when you need help!
Best, The Savy Agency

As of December 09 online social activity of consumers around the world was at an 82% increase in time spent on social networking from the year prior. On average, users spent more than five and a half hours a day on networks such as Facebook and Twitter. So what does that mean for businesses today? What does it mean when customers continue to adopt social technologies at a blinding speed – yet organizations big and small aren’t able to keep up.

Since rapid adoption of social networking enables users to connect with individuals and communities who share mutual interests, organizations are increasingly being left out of the conversation. Simply hiring more people to keep up with social marketing, sales, and support will not be sufficient, as customers and their new channels outnumber employees. As a result, organizations need an organized approach to connect their business to the social web giving them the opportunity to respond in near-real time and in a coordinated fashion.

The relationship between organizations and customers has traditionally been optimized around organizations, not customers. However, the rapid adoption of social networks and online activity has shifted the balance of power to the customer. Companies and organizations have fallen behind in connecting with customers, and realize that they must find a way to at least participate in the conversation. Some still yearn to regain control of the customer relationship.

The reality – this is no longer possible as a few key trends have emerged:

 Customers connect with each other – happily leaving organizations behind.

Customer behavior has changed. Businesses and organizations no longer control the conversations with their customers. In fact, customers and prospects have chosen to engage with organizations on their own terms, for instance in Yahoo! Answers, online communities, and on Twitter because they trust companies less and less. As a growing number of customers choose to connect and collaborate with each other, for instance, in Get Satisfaction, Yelp, and the blogosphere, they’ve discovered that they can enjoy a more accurate, timely, and relevant customer experience without the organizations, disrupting the flow of influence.

 Companies know the problem will get worse before it gets better. Organizations realize they are no longer in charge. They often lack a credible strategy that empowers their employees to catch up with their customers. Although Comcast Cares has over 10 employees responding in social channels, they know they can’t scale in a 1:1 manner. Furthermore, a proliferation of new social networks and mobile tools are appearing at an increased pace – organizations will fall further behind. The result – tremendous amounts of waste in piecemeal data, customer records, APIs, and experiences – leaving companies unable to efficiently reach customers, prospects, and partners.

 Outdated frameworks and pet theories relegate discussions to incremental fixes.

Organizations seek a unified framework from which to build use cases. What’s lacking is a holistic approach to integrating social into CRM and enterprise apps. With technology providers espousing their point of views based on heritage (e.g. support, sales, marketing, and customer experience), and over 15,740 social media self proclaimed experts on Twitter1, confusion abounds in the application of social CRM.

The market seeks actionable frameworks to provide vision, build use cases, create entry points, address change managements, and consider technology requirements. And what’s more, the market seeks relationships. And that’s exactly what they’re getting.

Source: Brian Solis

10 Steps for Optimizing Your Brand for Social Search

1. Modernize and socialize your site to complement the experience visitors expect in 2010

2. Optimize the site and all social objects for traditional, social, and real-time search

3. Create meaningful and personable social profiles where consumers are active today (pay attention to where they will be tomorrow as well)

4. Establish an editorial calendar to produce and distribute relevant content for every network with cadence

5. Add social connectivity to the home site to facilitate maximum engagement (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Google, Yahoo) – eradicate proprietary login systems

6. Integrate social sharing functionality at the source of engagement – keep them on the page

7. Enable the social syndication of that content within one step

8. Manually introduce content and social objects to stakeholders and social beacons

9. Create paths that define and engender the experience you desire with destinations and calls to action integrated to close the loop

10. Monitor the activity and find ways to improve the experience and also sharing

Bonus: Give them a voice to make sharing more personal and contextual

The Future of Business People-Powered

 
Better said, the future of information discovery and dissemination is people powered – by the very people who were once fed information as dictated by mainstream media and brands.

The rapid evolution of search fuses traditional search algorithms and destinations with new formulas and services defining social graphs, social networks, semantic and real-time. As social becomes the axis for which all search is predicated, advanced SEO/SMO and a maturing human algorithm reinforced by the stature of one’s social capital will ultimately contribute to the hierarchy, placement, and findability of the content and social objects we share online.

Google and Bing are already implementing sweeping changes in their algorithms and reported results to include activity from the social and real-time Web. It’s also the reason why Google rushed Google Buzz into the spotlight. Information and activity are now influenced by the greater collective of social contacts with whom we forge relationships and relations in each and every network where we engage.

 Guest Post by Ivana Taylor, Third Force

How do you feel about new software applications or new ways of doing business? Are you eager to try something new or do you prefer the tried and true? Sometimes I feel like I’m the only person in the world who hasn’t complained about Vista or the new user interface of Office 2007. I love to see how art and engineering come together to make computing fun and easy.

This is why I’ve decided to examine 5 up-and-coming applications – and how to turn them into a daily tool.

1. Augmented Reality and Reality Browsers. You may not be familiar with this phrase, but you’ve already seen this in action on TV and the movies. When you see actors interacting with a virtual computer screen that’s actually an overlay on the space around them; moving files with the swipe of their hand, opening documents in mid air – that’s augmented reality. Augmented reality applications can already be found on mobile phones. The new Android has an application called Layar. Layar is a “reality browser. Users will simply use their phone’s camera feature to point at scenes or objects and the technology will overlay additional information or data on the screen about those objects. For example, say you’re in a new city or town and are looking for a Chinese restaurant, you would point your phone at the street or neighborhood where you are and Layar will tell you what businesses are around you. Think of this application as on-demand Yellow Pages.

You’ll want to make sure that your business appears accurately on Google Maps. Bryce Sady, a Boston-based healthcare marketer recommended the following: “Enter in the address (not the business name) on maps.google.com and see if it shows up. You can advertise your business for free on Google Maps .When adding the category of business you are in, think about search terms that someone would enter in on their phone or GPS to find a business like yours. Also, be sure and upload an updated photo of the storefront. Prices, hours, credit cards taken are all helpful information for users. If you are listed, you will want to verify the listing, so that it shows up as “owner-verified” in results.”

2. Location-Based Applications: With the widespread incorporation of GPS devices and applications, it’s easier than ever to get real-time information on where your friends are and what’s around you. This trend is related to augmented reality applications because it’s “location-based” technology that is one of the first consumer-accessible ways that we use it. Twitter was a pre-curser to this trend when people were using it to tell their friends where they were and connect in real time. BrightKite was another location-based application that was a little before its time in giving you updates as to where your friends are. The latest in the mix is Foursquare: A location-based service based on your Twitter network with an added layer of social gameplay. Currently Foursquare is gaining traction in big cities.

How to take advantage:  You have to be visible, listed and tagged in all the right places, Google Maps and Yelp. Another important way to take advantage of these applications and trends is to build an active community that sincerely promotes your product and talks about it online. If you’re a small business, you must start a customer community program this year. Make it a point to build an accurate customer list that includes e-mails. Create a Facebook Fan page, Twitter, Foursquare, BrightKite and any other location-based application account and offer specials and promotions through those channels to your customers. Also check out: Google Latitude to Loopt and FireEagle,

3. Interactivity and Crowd Sourcing –Wikipedia is a great example of crowd sourcing. But as the trend has become more commonplace, people have come up with increasingly more creative ways to use it. Take Dahlia Lithwick, for example. By day, unassuming Supreme Court reporter, but for her special project, she decided to write her novel (Saving Face) using input from her Facebook Fans. From the other end of the spectrum, budding inventors can use the power of crowds to think up, develop, manufacture and market new products on Quirky. Say that you have a great idea, but don’t have the engineering skill to design it. Submit it to Quirky and engineers will help. The community serves as the market test site and the proceeds from products that actually sell are divided among the community according to their level of input.

How to take advantage:  Make it a point to add “interactivity” to your products and services. If you’re thinking about writing a book, involve your audience in the process. If you’re planning on a new product, create a space where customers and users can put their two cents in. Put a crowd sourcing button on your web site from IdeaScale and let your customers tell you what new features to add. Create a Facebook Fan Page or a blog-style web site dedicated to your next new venture and engage your readers in the conversation. Use social media tools like Search.Twitter.com to search on your company name or industry terms to see what people are saying about it in real time in their own words.

4. Real time collaboration –Google Wave is an innovative new way for people to communicate and collaborate. Wave is already being used for projects and collaboration among many small groups and organizations around the world, in large part because of its strength in combining familiar communication platforms. But it’s really no fun or no good if everyone you work with isn’t on the system. Maybe that’s why it’s been so slow to build steam. Because I run so many virtual teams, I think that Google Wave is an amazing way to stay connected, work collaboratively and efficiently with people from all over the world as if they were right next to you.

How to take advantage:  Get yourself on Google Wave and get everyone you work with to sign up too. Connect with associates and customers and collaborate on projects in real time.

5. Digital Branding/Real Time Branding:The internet revolution has made it hip to be small. Small businesses can increase their brand equity by becoming ubiquitous participants on social media sites. But there are more opportunities for small businesses who want to build their brand in a more subtle, more cost effective way. Ex-Yahoo Real Estate executive, Arjun Dev Arora used his expertise in real estate to create ReTargeter, a brilliant way to get past visitors BACK to your site. The technology places a little “burr” of code onto your web site – much like the little burrs you might collect on your pants while your hiking. Then once visitors that have been to your site, they collect these digital “burrs” as they wander off to bigger sites like CNN.com, for example. As they wander the web they see a subtle ad for your site on the sites they are visiting (such as CNN.com, that have ad spaces) thereby increasing the perception of your brand and enticing them to return to you.

How to take advantage:  Look at digital advertising opportunities. Do your customers have a favorite site in your industry? Offer to sponsor a page or become a regular contributor.

Guest post by: By Chris Garrett

Social media has many uses—from making contacts to performing customer service—but driving quality traffic to your site is Twitter’s secret weapon. The big question is this: How can we get more of that lovely attention we crave?

As my recent poll shows, generating incoming traffic is the number-one need that people have right now, and for good reason. Traffic translates into:

■Attention, engagement, conversation and recognition
■Spreading your message far and wide
■Prospects and subscriber opt-ins
■Customers, increased sales and leads
■Media and interviews, which lead to more attention
… and last but not least, an ego boost.

In a previous article here I mentioned the many benefits of Twitter for your business. Now here are seven key points you need to know if you want to get more targeted traffic from Twitter:

#1: Know your audience
Growing your traffic always starts with your audience if you want to do it right. Untargeted, uninterested “hits” are a waste of time and resources at worst, and at best just pure vanity.

■What does your audience want and need?
■How do they like it delivered?
■Which topics are on their minds right now?
■Are there trends that are growing in popularity?
■How do these folks speak? What words and phrases do they use?
This means that driving traffic starts with listening and observing. Get to know your target so you can most efficiently engage them.

Twitter has a tool for this. Use search.twitter.com to find what people in your niche are talking about and follow some of their conversations.

Once you get an idea of what people are interested in, join in those conversations and talk to people.

#2: Get the “right” followers
So much rubbish is thrown around about how to grow your follower count that it makes it seem that the number is all that matters. Wrong!

You need people to want to hear what you have to say. This means you do NOT want people who auto-follow because they are either:

1.Robots and not real human beings (e.g., spam software, people trying to inflate their follower count, scrapers)
2.Not actually reading your tweets and just following to allow you to DM them
The followers you most want are those who follow you because they are interested and think they will get value from your tweets. These people are most likely to find you via:

■People retweeting your stuff, either within Twitter or using a TweetMeme button
■Referrals from other Twitter users
■Your blog; for example, your articles that say “Follow me on Twitter at @chrisgarrett and tell me what you think,” or your sidebar Follow Me button
■Other people’s blogs, when you guest post or comment
■Clicking your forum signature when you participate in discussions, or your email signature
Unfortunately Twitter closed off a really nice way that people used to get targeted Twitter followers. It used to be that we could “listen in” to conversations that people we followed were having, but now you have to be following both parties. This means we can’t discover new people that way. If someone puts something before they mention your @name it can still work, and I still occasionally get followers through that.

Essentially the advice is, put your Twitter name where it will be seen and encourage people to share it!

#3: Build engagement. Talk to people.

Engage your followers. Don’t just see them as a passive list of eyeballs! Treat folks as human beings and you will do much better at this stuff. It is called social media for a reason.

■Ask questions
■Hold conversations
■Dip into others’ conversations
■Encourage feedback

#4: Get clicks
So now your followers are seeing you as an interesting person and not a robotic “feed,” which means they are more likely to take notice when you tweet out a link.

Tweet Valuable Links

Whatever you do, don’t just tweet your own stuff. That is both selfish and boring!

Get into the habit of sharing anything cool, regardless of who created it. Retweet good stuff and other people are going to be more willing to retweet yours. Tweet out fun and useful links your friends send you in email or from the news. Be known as a person who tweets good stuff.

Timing

Not everyone is online at the same time. There is a whole world outside of your timezone, plus people have a different schedule than you. You know the feeling of confusion when you land in a foreign country. Not only have you got to adjust to local time, but also people seem to have their meals at a different time of day, shops open and close at strange hours, and business meetings seem to be held randomly. Twitter is like that, you can’t just look at a time zone converter and think people will be at their desk at a certain time.

1.Tweet the same thing a few times, a few hours apart, to give your message several chances to be seen.
2.Vary the times of day you tweet and monitor response.
3.Watch for the peaks and troughs of activity in YOUR stream (not just what works for others).
I tend to aim to catch the peak times for Aussies, the EU/Brits, East Coast USA, and West Coast USA, but it is far from an exact science!

Headlines

There are two main driving factors that affect your chances of getting a click:

1.Your reputation
2.The headline
Hopefully at this point #1 is taken care of, but #2 takes some work.

First of all, use my free download 102 Proven Headline Formulas as a starting point. There are 102 fill-in-the-blank templates which ought to give you a head start on writing a compelling caption.

If you use an interesting title and it matches your audience’s wants and needs, then you are going to get clicks.

Split test

You might not get it right the first time, so try another variation:

■Phrase it as a question
■Make it into a “How To” headline
■Use curiosity versus just the facts
A lot of this is about learning what your audience reacts to best.

#5: Measure performance
When you use a link-shortener with a built-in click-tracker such as bit.ly, you can see how well any of your links perform. This is useful for improving over time and to see which links get picked up virally. As they say, what you measure you get more of!

With Twitter it’s not just the link clicks that YOU get, but the retweets and shares that really drive the real traffic. TweetMeme and bit.ly can give you vital reporting about how well you do, as well as your Google Analytics.

#6: Do more of what works, but test, test, test
When you find what works for you, do more of that. Keep in mind though that if you only do the same things you will either get the same results and not improve, or you will wear out that technique. Experiment, learn and mix it up.

Trends change, techniques improve, fads go out of fashion. Do not get stuck on rails, move and flow with your audience.

#7: Encourage sharing
Once you have your initial click, your job is not done!

Make sure your article has a TweetMeme button so that anyone who likes what you shared can easily share it too.

If you want to get really fancy, give people an incentive to share, such as a random prize drawing for anyone who tweets your message. Of course, the message will contain a link back to you …

Once in a while it doesn’t hurt to actually ask for retweets. Just don’t overdo it, as you will only annoy your followers. This will make them less responsive, rather than more.

Posted by Shannon Sweetser

So, what kind of leverage does Inbound Marketing get you in comparison with Outbound Marketing? Well, let’s go back to those simple machines we were learning about in Physics.

Let’s say you had to raise a heavy box 3 feet. To do this, you have two choices. You can lift the box straight up in the air 3 feet. Or you could push it up an inclined plane 5 feet.  Though it would seem that inclined plane makes you do more work because it increases distance, really it’s using mechanical advantage to multiply force. Though you arrive at the same height, the extra work combined with mechanical advantage gives you leverage. It’s much easier to push a box on a solid surface than to just lift it.

Think about Inbound Marketing. Though you may get a whole lot of traffic to your site from buying enormous ppc advertising, it can’t last forever. Just like your body will get tired doing all that back breaking labor without an inclined plane, your marketing budget will eventually tire out, too.

Inbound Marketing Multiplies the Force of Your Marketing Efforts.

When you use simple inbound marketing tactics in combination, it builds a powerful Inbound Marketing machine.  If you write one fantastic blog article, it simplifies your marketing efforts. People link to that blog article, increasing your search rankings. That article then spreads to the social mediasphere, which connects you to more people who will link to and share your article.  If the article has a lot of links, it will start getting found more easily in Google for keywords that are important to your prospect.

Though you may have spent more time creating your blog, coming up with a concept for your article, and writing it, you actually created more force using your Inbound Marketing machine to complete your goal and you did it without breaking your budgets back.

Guest post from Todd @SHIFT Communications

While the RFP process for PR agencies was relatively straightforward for the past 50 years, in the next 3 – 5 years agencies like will need to suss out their proper role on a client-by-client basis:

Some clients will want a traditional Media Relations firm … Some will want a Social Media specialty shop … Some will want Content Creation (video, microsites, iPhone and Facebook apps) … And smart clients will desire a hybrid model that incorporates all of the above – yet which could also potentially be sourced to an advertising agency.

Meanwhile, mainstream media relations will continue to be important, but ultimately no more or less important than Blogger Relations, Facebook Group Administrator Relations, etc. That’s the power of Social Media: when everyone has a printing press, everyone is important.

“Advertising is shifting from being the foundation of a corporate marketing strategy to a catalyst that feeds owned media and creates earned media.” – Sean Corcoran, Forrester Research

Advertising now comes after the corporation has created an ecosystem for its owned media channels (e.g., a blog, a Twitter handle, a Facebook Fan Page).

Advertising now comes after the corporation has an established rapport with its fan base, bloggers, and traditional media contacts.

Advertising now comes after relationships.

Tellingly, the “Challenges” that Sean Corcoran points out regarding paid media — “clutter, declining response rates and poor credibility” are ameliorated if the brand takes the awareness scale approach in which: social media feeds PR and advertising, both of which serve to catalyze fresh brand conversations amongst people who are predisposed to do so.

With consumer and media relationships in place, advertisements then are not rebuffed but are embraced and carried forward by online enthusiasts. Sayonara, “clutter.”  So long, “declining response rates.” Bon voyage, “poor credibility.”

So, there’s no question that Social Media has complicated things in the marketing world.  The problem with complexity is that it too often leads to analysis paralysis. Sometimes you need to see concepts broken down to their simplest terms to come to grips with them.