Your Children Are Not Special

Everyone believes their company is important. If they didn't, they wouldn't keep working away on it. In that way, it is very much like someone's child: It's important to them. Because it is important to them, they make the fatal mistake of believing that it is therefore important to everyone else. The purpose of a properly executed marketing campaign, of course, is to convince the rest of the society of a company's importance. Just believing it yourself will not change anyone's mind. A lot of companies using social media are finding this out the hard way these days. You won't find any news stories about it, though, because it largely only happens to below-the-radar companies: "We don't know who you are, so we are ignoring you. No matter how much you may believe your business is important, we don't believe you." A Facebook group or a Twitter handle or a blog is just a tactic. A tactic is useless unless you have a larger marketing strategy behind it. You should be able to point to other impartial sources who will also say you are important - associations, universities, published authors, known reviewers within your industry... These are the ways to show everyone that you and your business are worthy of recognition. After all, if you can't prove you are worthy of being "known," why should anyone believe you?

About the Author: Eric Reid

I am the Social Media Services Manager for Off Madison Ave. I've been with the company since 2006, when I was hired to do SEO, and link building in particular. When social networking sites started cropping up, at first I started using them to create backlinks - but they weren't the best for that, given all of the "nofollow" attributes. However, I did see the potential for all of the direct referral traffic they represent. Since then I've been actively pursuing both tactics for clients: Links that can help them for search, and social postings that get them involved in the conversation. It's about the coolest job you could ever get. ;)