Digital Marketing And Social Media PR – The Future Buzz

Our community continues to improve posts here with their intelligent comments. For context to new subscribers, we’ve been sharing thought-provoking comments back to all readers as an ongoing series.

We know you’re busy and may not have time to read the comments on every thread, which is why we highlight thoughts from those with an opinion or something to add.

As a note, our readers have given both public and private feedback that they enjoy this concept, and other blogs like Techdirt have started to do this as well. We’d encourage you to create a similar content format for your own brand of media: it’s a win for the community (their thoughts take center stage) and a win for the publisher (highlights ideas that may have been missed by some, such as RSS subscribers).

Anyway, on to some of the most recent (and interesting) comments to round out 2011:

Josh Braaten on Networking Vs. Leading

Networking, blogging and just about any other digital activity are tactics, and there’s no shortage of people employing these tactics.

But it takes the ability to put all of these together into a strategy that separates the wheat from the chaff in our space. Most people give up when they run out of “easy,” whether they stop blogging after a few posts because no one instantly loved it or they stop at networking because going the step further means creating something new instead of just emulating everyone else. Cheers to leaders, wherever they are.

Jill Levenson on If You Like Links, You’ll Hate What Facebook Is Doing To Them

Don’t forget that those unsuspecting souls who accept The Guardian’s (and other media streams on FB) ToS just to read the article you shared are then doomed to automagically and “frictionlessly” share everything they read on The Guardian. So when they click to read an article about the latest Kardashian Family foibles baited on the “Italian Cat Inherits 10M fortune” page, everyone will know they really DO care about Kim’s divorce even though they’ve been pretending not to.

Rachel on When Your Social Media Marketing Is A Facade

This is definitely one of those “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail” situations. Companies certainly want to look like they are walking the walk, and integrating certain features (like a twitter feed) into a website homepage or touting a blog are great ways to show social media chops, but without an ongoing and unwavering commitment to keeping these assets updated, a company can end up looking worse for having outdated content than they would look if they didn’t try to do it at all. Sometimes less is more. And for the record, I think Adam looks like Ryan Howard too…

Arik Hanson on A College Degree Is Hardly A Guarantee

As usual, love a lot of your points Adam. But, I think you’re missing the biggest benefit to going to college and getting that post-secondary education. The process of “growing up” and maturing. I’ve said for years that school for me was MUCH more about the experience and life lessons and less about the grades and classes. Sure, the classes had value and I learned a bunch from my professors and classmates, but the real learning came well outside the classroom. It came in learning how to live on my own. Learning how to manage my time. How to get multiple jobs to support myself. And learning how to build relationships. Those are skills I use almost every day–not just in my job, but more importantly in life. So, yeah, I think college still have a huge amount of value. But, I hear what you’re saying. In some circles you could take that up a level and say an MBA is now a commodity. How many MBAs are looking for jobs? That’s no longer a differentiator either.

Kristi Lee-John on PR Will Own Content Creation, But Needs To Overcome Challenges

Without a doubt marketing and PR need each other however I have to agree that PR should own content creation. We work with our clients to create and maintain a content calendar or own “editorial calendar” and guide that content by doing what we do best….monitoring the industry for trends, hot topics, etc. While we tend to own much of the social media content creation we do work with our marketing colleagues to provide direction on white papers, bylined articles, etc.

And in response to Samantha’s response, there isn’t a “traditional PR” approach anymore. If anyone is doing traditional PR then Adam is right….they are going to be left behind.

We recently wrote about this on our blog at http://bit.ly/vRYeuw

Andrew McGarry on Dear ReadWriteWeb: WTF? Signed, SEOs Globally

Considering how much the top SEOs have been saying how 2012 is all about great share-worthy content (like 2002 all over again!), it was only a matter of time before someone said that point out of context.

Unfortunately, media sites are only half of the problem. The other half is people & agencies who hire themselves out as SEOs who then fail to deliver what they grossly overpromised. It gives all SEOs a bad name and makes companies even less likely to trust anyone else.

Have ideas you want to share with the community? We select reader comments every few months for this roundup, so be sure and leave your thoughts on posts you find interesting, we read all of them. And remember you can always submit an idea for a guest post as well.

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