Digital Marketing And Social Media PR – The Future Buzz

Peter Kim recently wrote on the plague of plagiarism. I don’t really see it as a plague, having your work copied is merely a byproduct of producing digital content. Many fight it. I’ve put it to work for my music and I do the same for the words I write.

Steal this blog post. I’m not joking. Copy-paste this post onto your own blog or site. You can credit me if you want to (this blog is registered under a creative commons license meaning you’re encouraged to do this) but if you don’t want to, that’s just fine.

The embrace of content marketing by businesses and marketing agencies has exploded. Already most professionals and companies that seek to be found have blogs, the ultimate content marketing tool.

Yet most get content marketing or pull marketing (in its purist form) dead wrong and are destined for perpetual obscurity.

Q-Burns Abstract Message AKA Michael Donaldson has been an artist producing music and playing gigs by embracing the Internet for marketing art long before the social web has evolved into what it is today.

I discovered him initially through the web, as thousands of others have, and he’s someone with an innate understanding of embracing technology to concurrently make connections with fans and network with venues, other artists and labels. I recently asked his perspective on music, file sharing and marketing to share with you and was pleased to get a response.

I rather like having discussions with Mitch Joel, he gives me good food-for-thought. That’s because we grew up in different times – I have only known a digital society, he has seen both a digital and analog. Due to this we tend to look at things through a different lens.

Previously when he argued print is not dead, I made the point that it may not be dead, but it’s on life support and that digital is now the master copy.

Mitch wrote something else that struck me recently. He made several different points so I’m going to respond to a few parts bit by bit:

Today I decided to draft a case study that should be especially interesting to members of this community. What makes it interesting? It’s a case study of a company who used a marketing idea from a post on this blog and is having great success from it.

Face facts: social media isn’t new anymore. Actually, it hasn’t been new for a long time.

We’ve been socializing on the web for well over a decade – long before Twitter, Facebook and the glorification of monolithic walled gardens, which are nothing more than modern versions of AOL and prodigy with bells and whistles.

If you think the social web is new, you’re already far late to the party. And if you are late, the worst thing you can do for your brand or yourself is to flat out ignore or brush off a form of communication that an entire generation already sees as “invisible.”