The Steve Rubel Stream

"Social media is a great way to keep the conversation going with your customers outside of your store. A way to listen. A way to learn.

Social media is our gold rush. With the zillions of tweets, Diggs, blog posts, and Facebook updates all panning for attention I’ve only heard of a few who have ’struck it rich’ as a result.

With $10,000 to spend. I’m going to put it into a well designed ad, in a print medium, my target audience reads".

If we're talking ads to ads I can see where he's coming from. Although, $10,000 in Google ads could be a better initial investment than both combined.

However, then fact remains that advertising is untrusted and it's thought leadership and expertise that rises to the top in today's world. People want to know what you stand for before they develop an ongoing relationship. #

Marco Arment captures how John Gruber and Merlin Mann consistently create compelling online content...

Gruber says that when he’s writing Daring Fireball, he’s picturing his ideal reader — a copy of himself — and conceptually writing just for him. With everything he writes, he’s writing to and for that one ideal reader, not trying to boost his SEO for target phrases or appeal to an ever broadening demographic.

Simple formula, but it's rare people follow their interests so obsessively that they want to create content around it. Be that guy or gal before someone else is. Walk in the footsteps of giants. Give a listen to the full podcast that Marco links to as well. It's worth the hour spent. #

1. Define the keywords that people use to find your business
2. Find out how many people are actually using the keywords you have selected
3. Define your competition and make sure the keywords you have chosen are relevant
4. Finding the best keywords
5. Breaking keywords into pages

Great advice. But swap out the word website and substitute any content that ends up online - blog posts, videos, press releases, journalism. Everyone who aims to be creating findable stuff needs to sweat the data.

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"Social media is going to rule the Web until at least 2012 - according to a post by Justin Kistner, a Social Evangelist at web analytics company Webtrends. Kistner also claims that Facebook has become the king of social media."

This all begs the question: when do we abandon the terms and just consider this all part of the norm. When is the social media cake baked?

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