I recently spoke at Indiana Construction Roundtable and SMPS – Society for Marketing Professionals first joint seminar on “Social Media are Internet tools used for sharing and discussing information. Sites such as Facebook and Twitter help connect like-minded people, companies, and associations.”  They did a fairly quick interview with me that I would like to share with you.

I used a lot of my recent ISBDC conference information and you can check all those facts over here – stuff like Facebook being up 700% and how communication has risen 18% in overall time online.  Those are big numbers. more

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I get lots of questions about how I personally use social networks to market MediaSauce and myself.

And to tell you the truth, sometimes I think I know the answer to this question and sometimes I feel like I don’t.

Has any of my contacts through Linkedin, Facebook or Twitter generated business for MediaSauce.  Well, sort of.  But maybe it’s not the kind of direct correlation that advertising and marketing delivers.  Or that we think advertising and marketing deliver.

You see, you can’t argue with the facts.  Lots and lots of people are using these platforms.  The increase in usage is tremendous.

Facebook is up 700% in time spent and has over 200 million users – over 100 million unique visitors last month.

Linkedin is up 69% in time spent and has over 41 million users – over 12 million unique visitors last month.

And finally, Twitter, the marketing buzz word for the first six months of this year, is up a whooping 3700% increase in time spent and has over 32 million users – over 19 million unique visitors last month.  This is all from Nielsen, if you think I’m making it up.

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Listen, these technologies are just tools.  Just like your fax machine (if you still have one of those) or your email.

It’s a tool for communication with other people.  When email came out (does anyone remember life without email?), some people embraced it.  But others, you know, struggled, they fought it, but then they finally had to give in.  And, of course, there were those that got confused and accidentally spammed the entire company.  That still happens.  But it doesn’t happen so much anymore.  And what companies do actual training on how to use email?  It’s just a part of life in the office environment and you should know how to use email.

Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter can all be the same thing – even if it isn’t called by these specific brand names in a few years.  Think companies won’t have an internal Facebook for communicating.  Think a Linkedin type tool won’t hold all your business and personal information.  What we are seeing is just the first shots at these tools.  Email has come a long way in a short time.  Don’t think that these tools won’t evolve as well. more

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A business blog can do lots of things so it really depends on the company. I can tell you that we are not a digital company that immediately says you need a blog.

We are a company that will find out what you want to do, find out what your audience really wants from you and then if a blog fits our strategy – well then, we’ll suggest you start a blog.

But that being said, I am a big believer in blogs. Right now, blogs are very good at doing lots of great things on the web.

What is Princeton Premier

Driving traffic (#2 from the guys at SEOmoz.org)
Spurring conversations – Check out Naked Conversations by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel
Giving business a real voice and personality (Chris Brogan and Bob Rhubart’s Comments
Search engines love them
But they can also suck. Here’s a good list for knowing if your business blog sucks.

We measure our business blog by the traffic it generates and the conversations it spurs. Our chief evangelist, ScottyHendo, is very, very good at getting conversations going. Some of his more intriguing ones are:

I Gave $10 to David Armano to Help Daniela and Now I Regret It
Why Chris Brogan’s Kmart Moment Matters: Personal Reputation vs. Corporate Brand

But he is amazed at how much traffic my little post about Princeton Premier has driven for our blog.

I wrote it merely as an example of how I used searching and social media to find out about a company and then make a common sense evaluation of whether I wanted to do business with them.

But the blog post itself remains one of our top posts and continues to drive traffic to the site. It’s on the first page of the Princeton Premier SERP (Search Engine Results Page) for Google and it continues to get comments.

I never really intended for it to do anything but be part of our voice to help businesses understand that if you aren’t out there in social media spaces and being a part of the conversation, others will do it for you. And it may not be the message you want.

For Princeton Premier, I think it is bad. Their site is number one but almost all the other links are blogs calling them out for being a scam.

The lesson here is make sure you are constantly making sure that you know what is being said about you on the web. I use SM2 and Google Alerts for both my company and myself.

And then if you find something bad, knowing what to do about it. MediaSauce has several solutions for this that range from contacting the person directly to establishing a siteless web presence with social media.

If you would like to learn more, just give us a call at 317.218.0500 or email.

But back to my original purpose of this post, business blogs do work if you give them time and you write about things that your audience wants and you tie it into your business. Don’t give them just fluff. Don’t give them that old school marketing spin.

If you don’t believe in business blogs, I would like to understand why. Give me your feedback and experience.

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