When speaking with companies about marketing, the topic of “should I integrate social media into my marketing plan this year” comes up. My advice is always the same: watch, listen and learn. Take small steps. Understand the accepted behaviors in this culture of social media. Then engage. By learning what is accepted before you dive in, you can avoid offending someone or embarrassing yourself in the process. 

In Matt Dickman’s Five Keys to Successful Blogger Outreach, he and the folks commenting provide valuable insight into how to engage bloggers to provide exposure to your products and services. I might add that taking it slow in building the relationship is my philosophy. Before you jump in and comment, send “news” out or do something that could land you on a blogger’s blacklist, understand what the writer is interested in and add value.

Keep following the thread from Matt’s post to Valeria Maltoni’s Revealing Yourself to Others as she highlights what works well and what does not when she is the target of the PR pitch. These rules apply to all forms of marketing using social media in my view.

The following interview of Matt Dickman and David Armano by Andy Sernovitz  offers good advice on getting started with social media for B2B marketing.

Armano’s advice: LinkedIn is a good place to get acquainted with social media.

Dickman’s advice: Listen to what your customers are saying about you in the various social media communities. Learn from it then take the next step.

Like any social setting, watch and listen to those around you for guidance on how to behave. When you feel ready, then dive in.

I took my cues from David and searched for an easy to use widget to load my blog entries into my web site home page. I came across Kent Brewster’s Badger application that creates Web badges out of any RSS feed. With a little tweaking of the css provided, I was able to integrate the information into the site pretty seamlessly. Being able to put my new posts headlines on my home page makes my web site more interesting to new visitors, encouraging them to visit my blog for more information.

I also updated the web site design to more closely match my blog design. I like the clean look of the blog and wanted to make the same look work for the Web site. With a bit of rearranging and rewriting some of the content, the site looks as good as new. There’s still work to be done, but the site has received the necessary facelift and is ready to go back to work.

Your web site is still very much an important part of your marketing effort and needs to remain equal to your blog if it has served you well. With a little bit of love, your web site can continue to work for your business in conjunction with your blog. It takes a little planning and strategy, but it can be done.

Along came the Internet which has given marketers an additional medium in which to communicate their messages to their target audience. And although it took a while for companies to incorporate Internet marketing within their corporate marketing functions, the Internet is now an integrated part of their overall marketing plan.

So if you have Internet marketing activities in your marketing plan, does that mean you are implementing social media marketing?

Many corporate marketers would like to think so, but there is a fundamental difference between Internet marketing, using the Internet as a means to communicate your message to your target audience, and social media marketing.

Social media makes marketing a multidimensional exercise. It is no longer about pushing your message out to your audience. Social media marketing takes the same Internet technologies and adds interaction with your audience. It’s having your constituents spread your messages for you rather than you talk deafly to some cloud of people who may or may not care about what you have to offer. In some ways it really isn’t much different from word of mouth marketing where your happy clients, colleagues and partners say good things about you and provide you referral business. The difference is the speed with which your message is carried via the social network.

And it’s because of that speed that many corporate marketers are frightened of it. The key is to embrace it and use it because your company is being talked about in social networks and there is nothing you can do to stop it. By participating in the social networking world, letting your customers speak directly to you, and listening to what they have to say, you are more likely to win the hearts and minds of the masses than you will if you hide behind the corporate veneer.

How do you turn your Internet marketing activities into social media marketing?

I am an extremely strong proponent for Internet marketing. It has worked for my business and my clients’ businesses and now we are extending that Internet presence by adding on social media marketing. Every business, small or large, needs to open the communications channels with their audience. Look for opportunities to get feedback on your company, good or bad, and respond. For small businesses, start a blog. It doesn’t matter whether you market B2B or B2C, a blog provides benefits you normally will not get from Internet marketing alone.

In 7 reasons why small businesses should blog, Ben McConnell & Jackie Huba, authors of Citizen Marketers, provide reasons and advice on why you should blog.

Adding social media marketing to your marketing mix is not a difficult project. It does need to be planned so that your social media marketing activities stay on brand with all of your marketing activities. And depending on your company, you may need to evaluate the effect social media marketing has on the culture of your business. But there are ways of evolving your company to take advantage of this new and exciting marketing area. It’s really not that scary afterall.

Part of the reason for this is that I dove into creating my blog one weekend. I had been planning on launching a blog for my business, and like most other things I do, all of a sudden I get the urge to just dive right in. Since my hosting company had the blog software available as part of our hosting plan, I thought I’d take a look and see what it would take to build a blog. The diving was fun, I learned a lot about WordPress, diddled with the template to make it look like my web site, and wrote a few posts. I added the WordPress software to my web site as a subdirectory. Little did I know that my experiment would catch a few folks attention right away before I even launched the blog.

Next fun part was that my hosting company advised me to deinstall WordPress to determine if issues that arose were due to the installation of WordPress or some other issue with PHP. Well, bye bye posts, comment and my patience.

After reconstructing the site and re-entering my posts, I got the blog back online and added a couple more posts. Another comment appears. All is well until I decide to check and see if the domain name vistaviewpoint.com is available just for grins. Not only was it available, I also found vista-viewpoint.com available. With all the activity around Microsoft Vista, I figured I’d better grab those domain names now or they will be gone forever. So now I have the even more interesting exercise of creating the blog at the new domain name. I figure I best do it now before I get more comments, more visibility and subscribers.

I have just finished recreating the blog at the new domain name. You have to admit that being able to point people to www.vistaviewpoint.com rather than www.vista-consulting.com/vistablog/ is much neater.

If you are actually reading this post, then you found the new blog location. Wonderful! Welcome back. Better I do this on my blog than a client’s. Hopefully I have saved a few of you from this exercise. Planning all these details ahead of time certainly makes life easier.