More and more companies are adding new media marketing strategies to change the way they interact with customers online. Extending your marketing message through blogs, Facebook, Youtube, Digg and more, can help build your brand, network with customers, and give an effective boost to organic search engine optimization. With so many social media sites, and so many ways to leverage blogging, I’m going to share some thoughts on how these new forms of media can be implemented within your marketing strategy to build your brand.

Brand Blogging

Blogging provides you an opportunity to give a personality to your corporate brand. The corporate blog is connected directly to your main domain, which connects your blogging efforts directly to the main brand. It’s a quick way to float out marketing concepts, and generate instant feedback. This is makes blogging a good brand tool - giving you more flexibility than your normal website.

Your blog’s best asset is being tied to your main domain, which makes it “official” - but this is also the thing that limits blogging more than social media.

Social Media Branding

Social media has less boundaries than your corporate blog because it’s not directly tied to your domain. It’s an extension of your brand and online marketing strategy, and it’s generally less formal in nature. This gives you the flexibility to move beyond corporate messaging. For example, you probably need to think twice before referencing someone else’s content - even on your blog - but on Facebook, Twitter or Digg it’s commonplace. This is one of social media’s best aspects as a branding tool - branding by association. The brand by association concept really works on social media, allowing you the freedom to leverage other content but also because of your network. Being able to network directly with prospects, and directly network your brand with people (and other companies) can help position your brand in ways that your website cannot. It’s extremely organic, and unlike your position on Google - it’s completely controlled by you.

There are hundreds of ways that social media and blogging can be used as branding tools. Look for part two where I provide more thoughts on the subject.

What are your thoughts?

Tags: Blog Marketing, brand-marketing, Branding, Social Media Marketing

This entry was posted on Monday, July 14th, 2008 at 6:24 am and is filed under Blog Marketing, Social Media Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.