Social Networking 101

I found this post online. It echos what so many small business owners are feeling at this moment in time:

Over the past couple of months I have been muddling my way through setting up a social media marketing “strategy” (both personally and corporately) here at SamePage. Currently, my strategy resembles the equivalent of a bunch of “digital post-it notes”:various bookmarks, URLs, links what-have-you scattered across my desk(top), browser, iPhone, etc. How do you scrape all this together into a coherent, useable, package? RSS, Twitter, tehnorati, ning, FB….a couple of times I have literally deactivated my FB account because I felt a responsibility to maintain it even though I found most of the content completely irrevelant.

IMO, there’s no one answer, or a single course of action that’s guaranteed to bring marketing Nirvana. What seems to apply best to small business marketers is outlined here:

1. Make your blog the centerpiece of your social networking strategy.

A “well connected” blog can feed content to other platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, and do so automatically. Fresh content on your blog has the added advantage of improving ratings on search engines such as Google. Google loves fresh content, that is rich in relevant keywords. From a larger picture/strategic standpoint: the blog is the a natural place to generously share your expertise with the world and create a network of fans.

2. Tie your blog closely to your website and overall web presence.

The best thinking about the new web puts you in the middle of an online community. Websites built to function only as an online brochure likely won’t do much to generate buzz about your products and services.

3. Don’t start until you have something worth talking about.

No amount of clever online strategy will create buzz if your product or service itself is boring, commonplace or irrelevant to the world. As master marketer Seth Godin says, being remarkable is at the center of it all.