Last week, we were excited and honored to be part of a group of presenters at a Greater Baltimore Technology Council event, Digital Media in Action: Engaging, Implementing & Creating Tangible Outcomes.

For our portion of the program, Mike and I discussed Why Blogging Should be the Hub of your Social Media Efforts.  While I’ve included our presentation below for those of you that want to dig in slide by slide, from a big picture perspective our focus was on the benefits of blogging as a component of your overall B2B marketing strategy.  And though many of the same approaches — and the results - do carry over in a B2C world, our presentation was primarily for the B2B audience.

The goal was to provide insights on how to use a blog for branding, communications and prospecting purposes.  Specifically, we covered:

• Building a blog strategy
• Options for creating a blog
• Benefits of corporate blogging
• Common blogging objections and appropriate responses
• Marketing a blog
• Writing blog posts to maximize readership
• How to get started on a post when you seem “stuck”
• How a blog drives the rest of your social media efforts
• Tracking the ROI of blogging
• Using your blog, and social media presence, to “Skip the First Meeting”

In particular, for B2B marketers it is nearly impossible to be involved in the vast amount of social media properties out there.  By using your blog as the hub, you are able to then use that content as the anchor for your social media efforts.  Mike made a great point during the presentation on why people read our blog: they know what we do, they want to know how we think (thanks to Will Burns for reminding me of this via Twitter).

Without great content - and the blog can serve as that content source of how you think - your social media presence is likely to be just a bunch of 140 character headlines with no story behind them.   It’s tough to really make an impact that way.

We thoroughly enjoyed our chance to speak at the event, to meet and do Q&A with so many people, and the feedback we received via Twitter.  We’re looking forward to the opportunity to do so again soon.

About the Author: Will Davis is Managing Partner of Right Source Marketing.  Don’t hesitate to drop Will a comment on this post.  If you liked this post, follow @willdavis on Twitter for more commentary like this.

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