Blogging: The Missing Link of Social Marketing

By Social Editors • on August 15, 2009

ClickZ – If you’re tweeting, stumbling, friending, or participating in other social venues for your online business without a blog, why is this?

A blog makes a perfect home-away-from-homepage anchor for all your social marketing initiatives. You can tweet more than 140 characters at a time in a blog. You can get stumbled upon by others with a blog. And you will find many friends and would-be friends by way of a blog.

Again, I have to ask, why isn’t your online business blogging if you’re out there in the socialsphere? So I did.

Surprisingly, a few of those responding said, “I don’t know how to blog” or “I don’t know what a blog is.” For the dwindling minority of business people who live in a Web -1.0 cave, I usually take them to a blog search engine and pop in a rival’s names just to get their attention and show them what a blog is.

I also offer take them to Blogger and get them up and blogging in about 10 minutes. After pointing out that it’s much better to blog for your organization rather than for another, we start to talk about their real business barriers to blogging.

The most frequently mentioned barriers to blogging are content creation, time, and money. Many organizations seem to believe that creating good, interesting content takes too much time, and if it takes too much time, it takes too much money.

Let’s put time and money aside for a moment and talk about content creation first by answering the following questions:

* Do you publish an e-mail newsletter?

* Do you do direct mail marketing?

* Do you offer coupons, specials, or discounts?

* Do you publish a catalog?

* Do you print flyers?

* Do you belong to any industry associations?

* Do you sell stuff?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, then you have something to blog about…