Digital Marketing And Social Media PR – The Future Buzz

Social media comments are the new trackbacks.

Enabled by a slew of tools, there is an increasing trend of bloggers aggregating comments about their content from around the web right on their blog. In theory, this is a nice idea – bringing together bits of conversations in one spot – under the original content.

You probably already know marketer and communications pro Valeria Maltoni. She keeps the very popular Conversation Agent blog, a must-read for marketing professionals, where she discusses marketing, social media, PR and quite frequently the intersections of those topics.

As Valeria and I frequently have conversations both publicly and via email, I thought it would be interesting to directly ask her some questions for readers here as we cover much of the same topics. She was kind enough to agree to participate in a brief Q&A on the topics we’re both passionate about:

Smart digital marketing is setup in a way to provide steadily increasing returns bit by bit over time. These gains are difficult to see over shorter periods, but over longer stretches they should become apparent.

Take great care that your digital marketing strategy is one which encourages increasing returns. When you’re doing things right, your blog, network, content, search traffic and interactions will incrementally add value to your brand and feed into your success.

The Future Buzz is a place where I help more than just communications professionals and businesses with their internet marketing. I also try to create content and conduct experiments that photographers, musicians and creatives who produce digital media of any sort can learn from.

I write frequently that social media and artists are a natural fit. I’m not just pontificating, as an artist who personally embraces creative commons as a promotional tool, I have firsthand experienced the positive effects the web has had helping my music spread. In fact, without the web I would have a total of zero listeners.

The social web and search results support each other and are inexorably linked. It goes beyond a mere passive connection, the two create an active, virtuous cycle growing more powerful daily. I mocked up a quick version of what I view the cycle as:

As you’ve been reading, I spent last week at the 2009 SES San Jose conference. I attended the event as a member of the press and covered panel sessions for the Online Marketing Blog (and shared some with you here).