Got your blog up and running?  Swell.  Now, who’s gonna read it?  Who’s going to leave a comment?  Who is going to retweet those carefully-crafted posts?

This is where it gets fun.  Harken back — as I often do in this blog — to Forrester’s POST method.  People, Objectives, Strategies, Tactics.

Surely you know WHO you want to reach.  Now it’s simply a matter of finding out where they’re hanging out.  Are they on Twitter?  Facebook?  LinkedIn?  Yelp?  YouTube?  Are they lurking on more industry-specific Message Boards?  What publications do they read?  What blogs do they follow?

These are questions you need the answers to, because if you only do *four things in Social Media, the 4^th is: ENGAGE.

I won’t bore you with the umptillion reasons you ought to engage with your prospects (and the people those prospects are influenced by).  If you need a refresher course, try my e-book or “Jedi Academy” posts, or read David Meerman Scott’s stuff, or check out Chris Brogan’s blog, or Brian Solis’s book, or Jason Falls’s blog or absolutely anything written by Tamar Weinberg.

The larger point is emphasize that thou shalt reap what ye sow.  This is a Biblical lesson too often forgotten by marketers in general and CEOs in particular.

Marketing is a tramp through the mud, while attempting to keep your face scrubbed clean; it’s hard work made to look easy.  That hard work entails interacting every single day with the customers, prospects and influencers who converse online, with and around your brand (and, with and around your competitors, too, who are also waking up to this opportunity).

If you are conversing every single day with relevant online audiences, in the right places — and, if every single day you attempt to say or share something relevant to these folks — you are going to drive traffic to your blog and/or other content.  If you further impress these audiences when they view your stuff, they will share it, applaud it, critique it, and generally make Y-O-U the topic of conversation.

Engagement will help your brand’s equity grow, from organic cultivation (cost: sweat equity) vs. advertising campaigns (cost: $$$).

Notice how “engagement” — the essence of Social Media — came FOURTH in this series?  Before you think about “organic cultivation,” you have to do your spadework.

Let’s see if my own spadework has done me any good?  Help me spread the word about this blog, using any of the links below?

Comments