How Blog Marketing Works in Social Networks

It's unclear to many executives why blogs should be part of their business communication strategy. Ceding control of the company message to the general public goes against centuries of increased centralization. The very purpose of a corporation is centralized control based on pooled resources, so how can giving away that control be healthy for the company?

Maybe the problem is understanding how a blog can bring in sales, instead of how it affects public relations.

ROI is difficult to measure in PR and Marketing. Even with complex statistical models, the easy answer to increased sales is to claim the sales staff is responsible for the gain, not the marketing.

Online sales and leads solve that problem, because they form a trackable database that points directly to where the lead came from. As the internet, and search in particular, grows in importance, the ability of companies to connect to niche communities online will depend in large part on how interactive their website is in comparison to competitors.

Don't take my word for it - ask the SEO Blog what they think of Social Networks. .

As a search marketing application, the basic concept of social networking is simple. There are multiple points of connections between almost anyone on Earth. Working from that basic truism, virtually anything imaginable is possible to find, share, enjoy, and track, providing a cross-reference can be found. With social network applications, user choices and preferences are saved, stored, shared and used to build rapidly growing chains of endorsements.

As those cross-references are established, the profile of a person, company or service provider, along with its traditional website increases in recognition and reputation. Think about how links affect rankings at Google but on a different, more chaotic sort of scale. As search marketers however, our job is to get our clients' sites recognized and to build traffic across their domains using whatever legitimate means is available and relevant to their business.

Social Networks are groups of people who form an identity online. The only way to sell to these online communities is to become a part of these communities, and blogs are the simplest way of doing so.

Rather than spending ten thousand dollars a month on newspaper advertising to solicit 30 leads, businesses could be spending five thousand dollars a month connecting with a group of 500 people that represent 30 leads, and another 100 referrals. When in Rome...

Now, to be honest, these communities are not fully formed in every industry vertical, but they are getting there. What company is taking the time to join these groups early? What would be the advantage of an online database of prospects informed about your company prior to the time they are ready to buy?