Two for one post today! In my last post, who’s in charge here, I talked about the disruptor nature of digital media including many beneficial aspects. And because websites are a sub-set of digital media this means SEO is important to your website’s web success in the new media order of things.
Another sub-set of digital media is social media including things like blogs and portals like Facebook. These tools can be used to engage with customers and enhance SEO results. But many managers ignore social media as irrelevant or they are reluctant to change with the times. Well, you can try to ignore social media, but you can’t hide from it.
Business manager’s reactions to social media range from extreme enthusiasm to total denial. However you feel about social media, know this: even if you consider social media tools inane and a waste of time, a large number of your customers do not. That means you should at least monitor the conversation in social media channels for possible signs of trouble. But if you won’t go to social media channels, a new channel will be coming to your website if it has not already arrived.
There are now tools available that will drag everyone into social media. These tools include things like Google Sidewiki (http://www.google.com/sidewiki/intl/en/index.html). This is a new, free, easy add-on for Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers. Once installed, it can be used to open a side panel where visitors to your website pages are able to enter comments about any page of your website – any page. Future visitors who have Sidewiki installed can then read the posts and add their own comments. And Sidewiki has an easy linkage system to other social media portals like Facebook.
Every web page now can be commented about at will by anyone if they install Sidewiki. Your customers, new prospects, your competitors, friends, relatives, and enemies can now comment on your company and its products and services – good and bad. If you avoided adding to your website things like a forum, message board, or blog or have a blog but turned off comments, now your website visitors have access to a public blog appearing alongside your web pages.
As I said in the last post on this blog, with digital media you can no longer control the conversation and that now includes within the broad boundaries of your own website. The best strategy is to join the conversation for the benefits of engaging with visitors or if for no other reason, out of self-defense. Because with the Sidewiki tool, every site is a social-media site so you can run, but you can not hide.
Tags: Digital Marketing, Digital Media, Internet Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Search Marketing, SEO, Social Media
