Colin, as to wwsd? (what would seth do?)

here are some relevant Seth links:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/06/five-easy-piece.html

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/08/creating-storie.html

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/04/ode_how_to_tell.html

At the same time, you can’t build trust until you’ve made the initial connection. Word of mouth is great and we all should strive to offer remarkable products, but you can’t eliminate the need for exposure to begin a business relationship.

In that light, focusing on strategies to increase exposure make sense and are important. At the same time, you’ve got to have a good conversion strategy, and that is where the human element becomes critical.

Make sure your online strategy doesn’t just stop at hello.

@Colin Blogging is social media. If you use the right tools and strategies you can help spread your message without having an outside company or employee spending countless hours online. The only problem with what you are talking about is it cannot be measured. The time spent on social media sites pushing information… there is no ROI.

I think that’s precisely what you’re arguing against. I think that in the end both schools of though will be satisfied from a blogging perspective

What won’t be satisfied by Compendium or any other totally blog-focused strategy is that you absolutely CANNOT ignore social media any more. If you look at modern marketing, the people who use social media are the ‘sneezers’ (as Seth Godin calls them) who will help spread your ideas virally. Am I saying that every company should have someone spending most of the day spreading the message online? Yeah I think I am. It really is that important.

http://blogging.compendiumblog.com/blog/blogging-best-practices/0/0/time-to-rethink-your-corporate-blogging-ideas

We are all on the same page. The ‘social’ in social media refers to people. People trust people..they don’t trust brands and they don’t trust institutions. This is what we mean by Humanizing.

But make no mistake. Business (in fact all organizations) survive and prosper by growing. Every activity from making a quality product or providing a quality service to answering the phone to whatever…is all for the express purpose to further the organization.

When I talk about Humanizing your marketing, I’m using this term because everything is marketing.

Now there is bad marketing like car commercials screaming at me when I’m trying to watch the game or spam or spam blogging.

And there is good marketing; like making a great product, providing real value, answering the phone, training the salespeople to solve problems etc…

With blogging, I focus on search because it’s the most tangible, measurable and scalable benefit for an organization. All the other things you talk about are true too…and if you do this well you get those benefits….but if you also gain the benefits we talk about with Compendium you are able to scale that great, engaging content by factors of 100 to 1700 times.

So one can blog using tool X and get 1x benefit, or blog the exact same way using Compendium and get 100x benefit….which would your organization choose?