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The Business Value Of Engagement Marketing

George Dearing and I had a twitter discussion yesterday about whether business people understand the value of building relationships. I made the point that many business people don't understand the value of building relationships within the realm of social media. I come to that conclusion from spending seven years in blogging communities and explaining to colleagues and clients exactly how social relationships work in influencer networks.

Success in social media is not just a matter of creating great content, though certainly important. Rather, my point to George was about understanding the importance of dialogue and engagement. The value of building a relationship in social media comes from a reciprocal relationship, you read other people's content and share their content with your community, and as a result of conversation and support you build trust and a relationship with people in your social network. You may not even comment on posts that are directly related to your products or company's services. The reason why you do that is because you are building a relationship with colleagues in the industry. The ROI to a company is that you've built a network of friends and colleagues who are willing to evangelize for you because you have good content and you are committed to supporting them.

George suggests that most business people understand the value of measuring influence; I think that makes sense, though we then get into a wider discussion on what's important in terms of influence, lots of followers, or a small group of contacts of the right people!

I've seen a direct business value from building social media relationships, both from the many corporate blogs I've run over the years, consulted on, or watched in the industry. Take a look at a great case study with Jim Deitzel of Rubbermaid, Jim's leadership in his twitter and blogging community put him at the center of the professional organizers community because he spent time on supporting the community.

Content is important, and companies like Junta42 and HubSpot are taking business people to the next level, but what’s after inbound marketing and content marketing once you’ve developed the infrastructure for content development? The next level has to be engagement marketing. Engagement includes content, measurement, and lead management, and engagement marketing goes beyond content marketing in that it includes outreach and dialogue with the view to managing and building community management. What’s ironic about engagement marketing is that dialogue and conversation is where much of the thinking about social media started with books like the Cluetrain Manifesto, or the PR Blogging Week 2004, or dare I say my book on Strategies and Tools for Corporate Blogging.

Good content has always been important, that’s why traditional media was so successful for so long, but today, if you can use social media, its not just about good content, you also have to have the social networks to take that content to a wider audience spread through word of mouth through your extended social networks. And building social networks is all about engagement marketing not content marketing.

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