Integrating a social media strategy inline with a company’s current web and internet marketing strategies will leverage these existing plans by providing raw feedback from stakeholders. From such feedback and interaction the social media strategy will increase understanding of your brand equity, build trust with stakeholders, providing viable feedback to help shape your existing online marketing strategies, drive lead generating content, and build a stockpile of unique content to help drive your SEO & SEM efforts.  

However before you invest time and money into social media and especially blogs, be ready for what you are going to find out. Perceiving social media as a pie in the sky endeavor can be the down fall of a social media campaign for an organization. Before you launch a social media campaign for your organization everyone needs to know that you will more than likely receive “brutally honest” or in other terms negative feedback. If this continues depends on what your responses are and how you act on what you say.

“The direct unfiltered brutally honest nature of much online discussion is black gold…Texas tea to companies that want to spot trends or find out what customers really think”  (The Economist, March 11,2006)

The initial launch of your social media campaign should not be directly focused on increasing SEO and lead generation. The first step in your social media campaign should be concentrated on utilizing social use social anthropology techniques. Social anthropology is very important to understand in social media because the communities that we enter define the medium not us.

After reading this if you have questions, comments or any type of feedback comment below and I will reply within 24hrs. If you have questions on barriers that you are currently facing or how to start up your own social media campaign I am all ears.