The beauty about social media is not about the various ways you let your audience link your site to various social media channels, but more of how you use these social media channels effectively for your benefit.

If you think by putting Facebook, Twitter or Linked-in links on your site is adequate to count for social media presence, you need to think again. Social media is no longer just about the ability to be able to share your site’s content with others.

Social media is about interaction – having a personality behind that social media account and be able to interact with your customers via social media. It means expanding your corporate presence beyond your website. It also means taking your customer’s opinion seriously, and being wiling to take and act on open negative criticism.

So, to integrate social media as part of your web strategy, these are the five things you’ll need:

1)   Set up social media accounts and assign someone to actively interact with your target audience

Your Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and company sponsored blogs have to be regularly updated and maintained. Someone needs to be assigned to build and maintain interactions, updates and build relationships with your target audience.

Use these social media channels to give updates to your audiences, organize competitions or activities as product education or promotion initiatives, or just to respond to reactions to customers’ comments about your company.

2)   Utilize social media analytics to measure progress

In order to determine how effective your strategy is, you need to be able to measure the performance of your social media efforts. Unlike web statistics that can be easily measured, social media require deeper listening and analytics tools to filter out the noise, and decipher what really matters.

Through information gathered, you are then better equipped to address the online buzz going about your company, respond to your customer’s thoughts and comments, or even to turn an unfavourable scenario to a positive one.

3)   Ensure that traffic is directed between your social media accounts and your corporate website

There has to be cross linkages between your website and your social media accounts. Doing this right is also crucial, in order to gain the maximum benefits of cross linking, and to ensure that you are not unnecessarily directing your audience out of your website.

Read Evolution of Social Media Integration and Corporate Websites on the benefits and disadvantages of various ways to link out of your website to your social media pages.

4)   Actively run promotion campaigns via social media – get your target audience involved

To jumpstart your fan base and followers, you first need to attract your audiences. This means, that you build as many incoming links to your social media pages – over email signatures, on your corporate website, getting your staff to be fans, or promoting it through various offline media (if you have the budget), such as radio and press releases.

Rather than just getting people to “like” your page, you could encourage participation and create hype by running a contest over social media. For instance, Canon Cameras ran a EOS photography competition over Facebook and cross promoted this over their corporate website.

With an activity, you then have more reason to create publicity and to spin a story around your social media activities.

5)   If you have the resources, introduce customer service and support via social media

Some companies go the extra mile by extending their customer services support via social media. This is indeed the next level in interacting with the customers, but allows for more transparency in these interactions.

However, adequate tracking and monitoring systems as well as guidelines need to exist to ensure that customer service executives act within their boundaries, and that the management is able to keep track of all such interactions.

When a corporate website is first conceptualized, one of the first things that come to mind is the website structure.

How best can we architecture our web structure so that it’s relevant, up-to-date, functional and easy to navigate, all at the same time?

I also call this as the online customer journey THROUGH your website.

Some small businesses will have no problem creating this. A basic structure would be About Us, Products, Services, Contact Us, etc. However, if you have a more complex business, you’d have products, sub-products, demos, services, offers, more sub categories, and much more.

How do you plan your customer journey so that they see what you WANT them to see, depending on what they are looking for?

First, you’ve got to know who your customers are and what they are looking for. Are they decision makers looking for a solution? Are they looking for reviews of your products? Are they looking at how to use your product to solve their problem?

But then again, each person is looking for something different which you are able to offer. How do you lead them to the right offer?

There are several ways you can consider the structure for your website – 1) By customer need, 2) By product categories, 3) By packaged solution or by 4) By audience type

Customer need

Your top menu is structured according to the problems your product can solve. For example, a IT services company may classify their solutions according to employee collaboration, data management, human resources management, business process management or enterprise resource planning.

Product categories

Using the same example above, product categories could be the various brands of IT software, project management services, hardware and financing services provided by the company in order to meet the customer needs stated above. A consumer retail example would be classifying products according to brands and sub-brands.

Packaged solutions

Suppose the company combines several of their solutions and calls them Cloud Computing Solutions, Information Management Solutions or IT security solutions. These are a bundle of solutions, consisting of several brands, sub-brands and services that are presented to the customer as one holistic package.

Audience type

This would be categorizing your products and solutions according to what you think your customer type. For instance, a CIO would be looking for a different solution as compared to a Purchaser from the same company who is browsing your website. Thus, the presentation approach and the issues addressed for each audience (in which your products and solutions are ready to solve), would be different. The “lingo” used will differ between the audience type you are addressing – technical jargon for IT specialists, developers, etc, and business jargon for CIOs, purchasers, etc

Your landing page

Think about what you want to PROMOTE on your landing page. What is the first impression you want people to make of you? Does your landing page layout, navigation and design resonate with the type of products and solution you are selling?

Navigation

It’s best to make it easy for people to find what they are looking for. Don’t put too many levels or depths in your menu. Make sure they are able to find whatever they are looking for. Don’t cross-categorize your products or place the same products in multiple categories.

Find a structure that best speaks to your audience, and position your products or solutions within the approach that you have chosen.

In Jeremiah Owyang’s post – Reinforcing Customer Service in Social Mediums, he asks for submissions of experiences where social media has proven to be more effective, efficient and helpful in customer service.

Today, I will attempt to explore some considerations when it comes to adopting social media as a viable channel to manage customer service in an organization.

There was a comment posted by Sean Odriscall on how he believes that implementing such a change would require extensive business process reengineering, planning as well as a redefinition in measurement metrics. It’s not merely as simple as creating and engaging with an online community.

I totally agree with Sean in this area, but I also believe that if such a change would give a company an apparent competitive advantage, it should definitely be explored. Perhaps a preliminary study on the extent of how social media is currently being used to engage customers in an organization, and the effectiveness of such relationships would help to provide a perspective towards a full and official adoption of social media in organizations.

Another aspect that needs some attention would probably be a company’s culture and acceptance towards this approach in managing customer relationships. While some companies embrace such moves with open arms, others may regard these changes with wariness, suspicion or even resistance. Not all existing customer service personnel would be adept in using social media on a professional level, and some of them may even require some form of training.

Enlarging their job scope by adding a “social media” responsibility, would mean that less time and focus on existing responsibilities. Resistance or reluctance to change would result in some staff attrition, or reassignment to alternate roles.

Nevertheless, if customer service staff can be made to realize the value that this new responsibility brings to their careers, they would be more open to change. They need to understand that as social media is becoming the norm, rather than the exception, experience in managing customers through this media would be more of a plus point than a disadvantage. With this, a proper communication and education strategy has to be put in place.

While metrics are put in place, bear in mind that there are certain aspects of customer service quality that needs to be considered. How do we measure the effectiveness of our responses to our customers online? What are the rules of our engagement with our customers?

With social media responses being more “permanent”, “accessible” and “distributable” as compared to phone call responses, corporations have to ensure that guidelines are ready to guide the tone, nature and approach utilized in written communications over the web. This would also encroach conventionally less formal channels such as Twitter, in which now supports live search engine results as well.

All in all, social media for customer service is definitely a viable form of engagement in the very near future. But I guess our experiences in deploying such exercises may require further refinement before the ideal implementation process and procedures can be defined.

Social Media is THE hot topic today. There are hundreds and thousands of sites offering tips on social media usage and trends. However, if you are creating a web strategy you probably need more information on trends, ideas, and a great deal of substance.

Here’s a review of 10 of the most social media sites I have found most useful in helping me craft my corporate web strategies:

1)   Jeremiah Owyang

With roots originating from Forrester, Jeremiah Owyang’s blog is a wealth of knowledge from the viewpoint of an analyst. Read his blog, and you’ll find deep insights on the impact of social media on the marketplace or your marketplace. If you are seeking for social media research, you’ll sure to find lots here. With Jeremiah being part of Altimeter now, the current focus of the site right now seems to be on the concept of Social CRM.

2) Social Media Today

This site is probably more of a collection of blog posts contributed by a string of guest authors. Thus, you could probably find lots of social media tips and tricks here, but probably as in depth as you would like. Nevertheless, Social Media Today is a great news site for lighter reading. You’d probably also find some excellent reference documents and webcasts here as well, especially if you are just learning the ropes on social media.

3) Mashable.com

Mashable calls itself the Social Media Blog. Look closer, and you’ll find that it really is a mash up of Tech, Mobile, Social Media and Entertainment news. This could be because such topics do appeal to the typical social media junkie.

Mashable’s social media section consists mostly of the latest social media news, buzz and typically what the tech-savvy would find interesting and amusing. Perhaps what you could really learn here would be to get ideas on how Twitter, Facebook or Twitter can be used creatively for YOUR business.

4) 360 Digital Influence by Ogilvy

If you are seeking for some “agency advice”, 360 Digital Influence would be the place. Get some insights on how one of the top agencies get their digital marketing strategy done, and maybe you can get some free advice in the process.

The only drawback that I see from this site is that some of the posts could have been better if they were backed up with research data, rather than just being an agency’s opinions.

5) Augie Ray’s Blog on Forrester

Augie Ray became a social media researcher on Forrester some months ago, and has recently been named one of Forrester’s top 20 most influential analysts on Twitter (http://technobabble2dot0.wordpress.com/2010/01/19/top-analyst-tweeters-via-tweetlevel-2/) . With his great insights found here – http://blogs.forrester.com/augie_ray – you can go through his blog and find lots of fresh ideas and recent research concepts on how the power of social media may be harness. You may also want to take a peek at his previous blog (http://www.experiencetheblog.com/) , which he had to abandon due to Forrester’s latest policy requiring their analsts to host their blogs solely on the Forrester domain.

6) BrandSavant

While www.brandsavant.com is on social media research and functions also to promote Edison Research, the content here offers some pretty good insights and ideas. It may seem that the content may not lean towards the concept of free research, but posts such as http://brandsavant.com/the-first-step-in-a-social-media-campaign/ or http://brandsavant.com/the-most-painful-social-media-metric/ do help you jumpstart your thinking process towards your social media strategy.

7) Online Marketing Blog

This is not entirely a social media blog. However, I like the posts and coverage this site has on its social media section (http://www.toprankblog.com/category/social-media/page/2/) You’ll learn something from them, and are able to take back some step-by-step tips and tricks on starting up your social media agenda. Don’t expect in depth research from this site though.

8 ) Social Media Examiner

The interesting earth tone motive and cute explorer graphics could make you wonder for a split second if you are on a Social Media site. Yes, you are. Don’t let the ironic theme full you – this site has a lot of tactical how-tos that you can put to good use. There are lots of lists here, things you never knew but were helpful in implementing a web marketing strategy. Have fun exploring!

9) Chris Brogan

Chris Brogan recently launched Trust Agents, a New York Times Bestseller essentially on how to become influencers on the web, and how anyone can build relationships and trust. Over time, these influencers have cultivated a strong following, and thus are able to influence buying decisions, and move market attention in their favor.

If you read Chris Brogan’s blog, you’ll finally realize that his posts are relatively short and sweet. With this, you can get some perspective and tips on some angles in social media marketing, but don’t expect to get the depth like you would from an analyst’s blog.

10) Thirty Day Challenge

Now, this is more of an Internet marketing resource site than a social media strategy site. However, I really like the approach of the Thirty Day Challenge, and the education here will be useful in building your foundation for marketing on the web. It’s practical step-by-step videos (although at times a tad too draggy) will help you understand concepts of generating web traffic, marketing via social media and creating web content tactfully.

I get a lot of people excitedly telling me how Twitter is hot, and that Twitter should be incorporated into web marketing. However, stopping short of using Twitter on a personal basis, most people have hardly any ideas on how to integrate twitter into their web strategy.

Furthermore, in Asia, while there are like 1 million Twitter users in Malaysia alone (I’m not sure how many of these are active), most users are still using Twitter on a personal basis. Nevertheless, with iPhones and Blackberries fast gaining ground here, it won’t be long before Twitter will catch on.

Thus, we need to ready for Twitter when its popularity catches on, and we need to plan for it within our web marketing strategy.

If you are self-employed, then getting started should be quite easy. Start to build a following by connecting with your friends, and then your friend’s friends. Choose a focus area and tweet around the topic of your interest. Share links that you find related to your niche, and share your comments, thoughts and links on topics of interest.

Corporations need to integrate Twitter with their other social media channels. Ensure that the Facebook page has links to Twitter, and use Twitter to reference your Facebook postings too. Ensure that all your corporate blogs, or blogs maintained by key personnel in your company has links to your Twitter feed.

Send the word out to your business partners and employees about your new Twitter account, and hopefully they will follow you. The administrator of your Twitter account should have a rough media plan for Twitter – Does he announce your company’s press releases? Is there are steady stream of new product releases that you announce on a consistent basis? How about offers? To build followers, you need to provide content that are relevant to what your followers are interested in.

Apart from that, running Twitter polls could help to encourage your followers to interact with you. Or you may post a question to your followers on what they think about your latest product or solutions?

At the end of the day, corporations need to view Twitter as an alternate channel to communicate with their customers and potential customers. In fact, many companies, such as Dell and Wal-Mart set up their own social media team to manage multiple Twitter accounts, each dealing with a specific product. Some companies may even take a step further and use Twitter to manage customer support issues .

Finally, with Social CRM seen as one of the upcoming trends relating to the holistic incorporation of social media deployed, used and measured across multiple functions in a company, Twitter is really just one of the tools that needs to be integrated within this ecosystem.

According to the webcast featured in Social Media in Asia, peer networking is the 4^th major influence on buying decisions after Speaker presentations, Research content and virtual events. This means that prospective buyers are consider the opinions of what they listen from their peers within their social networks.

Another interesting aspect is that people in Asia tend to have more friends online, than offline.

Now, how then can companies build on these relationships in their corporate web strategies to help sell more products?

Build a positive perception via social media to influence buying decisions

Other than just personal client relationships, a customer’s perception of a company also plays a role in decision-making. If there is consistently enough good things said about a company, a good reputation would naturally grow.  Just imagine, if 9 out of 10 people said good things about a company’s product, it would most likely skew your decision towards purchasing something from that company.

To achieve this, all online interactions a company makes with external parties will count. This means, everyone who is representing the company in using social media will have a responsibility to make a positive impression.

It is no longer just the client-facing sales person who has to go the extra mile in handling customers. Customer service staff need to display speed, competency and efficiency when dealing with customers online and offline.

Technical teams or brand evangelists utilizing social media to interact with development teams or existing customers need to be knowledgeable and responsive when extending their support.

The marketing department should build a network of integrated online communities to facilitate interactions between the subject matter experts, and prospective customers. Through social media, they are also able to disseminate PR and communications updates, and acquire customer input on new product development.

In the end, with social media becoming increasingly strong and influential in buying decisions, it is imperative that corporations build strong corporate web strategies in order to remain competitive in their markets.

By now, the majority of employees are participating, interacting and sharing on social sites such Facebook, blogging or Tweeting. As of end 2009 there are an estimated 27.3 tweets per day, 60 million Facebook users and 126 million blog (www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6MfnuvH4Rs) .

At a personal level, people enjoy social media. But how many people actually agree to use social media professionally? How can you convince your tech professionals to maintain a blog on their areas of expertise? How can you bring your long-standing staff to utilize social media for sales, marketing, customer service and PR, when they have been so accustomed to traditional channels?

1) Communicate the vision of incorporating social media into business functions

Employees first need to see the reason why they need to use social media professionally. While many may embrace this positively, they need to understand how their contributions will help to improve company performance in a competitive marketplace.  Provide them with examples of how social media have transformed other organizations, and an overview of how social media will be used in selected functions in the organization.

2) Create a Web Strategy which defines the role of social media in various organizational functions

Most people are reluctant to change, and more often than not, prefer to remain in their comfort zone. To facilitate this transition, create a web strategy plan that details how social media is going to be used in each function. For instance, if social media is to be used within a marketing function, explain how employees can help promote company products and solutions via their social networks – blogs or twitter.

Your web strategy may be narrated from a customer interaction or customer journey perspective, and should show how current processes or operations can be enhanced with the presence of social media. Paint a picture of an ideal scenario where social media works hand in hand with conventional marketing to promote a product. If possible, nail down the role of social media in each function and how they relate to one another.

3) Establish education, support and guidelines for social media use in a professional capacity

Not everyone who is on Facebook uses Twitter, and not every one who is an expert in their field have expressed themselves with a blog.

Compile a set of training and reference materials on the functionality of social media tools and encourage staff to go through them. Identify some staff or hire external consultants to train managers and team leaders who are going to lead the change. Appoint an in-house social media expert whom people could contact should they need advise in using social media for work.

4) Commitment from management to use social media as part of corporate strategy

Getting the entire company to embrace social media will not be a success unless there is commitment from the top. The management team needs to set precedence by embracing social media themselves and not just talk about it.

Sometimes, this may mean driving certain major initiatives across the organization to jumpstart the momentum of adoption. For instance, the company may launch a Facebook page, or launch a corporate-wide blog. Additionally, corporations may also appoint several subject matter experts to “own” their blogs or to launch a following of Twitter supporters.

5) Help them think out of the box and define your strategy

At times, it may be difficult for people to transition from conventional relationships to building virtual relationships. In addition, while they may be users of social media, applying those skills in a marketing or business context may require some creative thinking.

By putting together a strategic plan that details how social media will work to drive sales, improve customer relationship management or even to acquire user input for product development, each department will then be able to work towards a common objective and.

Use case studies of social media application by other organizations to jumpstart creativity. It may help by tap on the expertise of consultants to help with ideas and execution. There may be some handholding needed with step-by-step guidance and practical execution. Ensure that your staff learn from these consultants and are able to work on their own later on.

Best practices should be shared amongst peers, and even across organizational functions so that everyone can improve collectively. Invest in collaborative tools to help your employees work more effectively.

6) Set accountability in Roles and Responsibilities

There is no commitment to execution without measurable targets specified within the context of each person’s roles and responsibilities. Therefore, it is essential that everyone know what their new responsibilities are in relation to social media usage, and is accountable to show results for their actions.

If social media is only embraced by some business functions, but shunned by others, the full benefit from adopting a social media marketing strategy may not be fully realized, or even be handicap the overall initiative.

7) Dealing with resistance in using social media professionally

While most people would welcome the changes, others may resist social media in their work. Many cite reasons that social media is not the right tool for the job, and they are better off back in their old ways of working.

To deal with resistance, start off by focusing on the few (or majority) who support social media adoption. Establish quick wins in early initiatives executed and present your successes to those who doubt. Over time, the positive results shown will speak for themselves.

Measuring Social Media success

The goal of transforming the approach and attitude towards social media would not significant if there were no measurements set up. But how do we measure social media? There are numerous ways to do this – measuring buzz around your brand – which means more people are talking about you online, measuring the number of subscribers your blog has, or the number of people following your tweets, or even the number of times your web pages have been bookmarked or forwarded. There are even a full suite of social media management tools available in the market.

One point to note is that social media effectiveness can’t really be measured in terms of the number of leads generated, or the sales volume achieved. In fact, eMarketer has been reported that 84% of corporations don’t measure their social media campaigns (http://www.pamorama.net/2009/12/21/measuring-social-media-roi/). The bottom line is that social media can’t be tied directly to a specific sales campaign or tactic. Thus, we can’t measure social media like how we would measure the effectiveness of a sales event or a sales call.

One things for sure though, with social media use we are able to reach and understand our customers better through an alternate communication channel, and possibly utilize the web as a tool to promote our brand via word of mouth or viral marketing by our customers.

With social media and web marketing, a company has the same objectives to sell their products and services, but the approach, execution, strategy and engagement model is evolved. Finally, getting an entire corporation to change their mindsets and the way they work will take time and patience, but as soon as the benefits are seen and apparent, people will start to see things differently about social media usage.

We’ve all heard all the buzz about social media, and all the stories on how corporations clamber towards social media utilization in their sales and marketing operations.

We hear of the Dell Hell story of how social media cannot be neglected. Suffice to say, corporations and even enterprises have hired talent specifically to manage these online engagements with prospects and customers.  They listen and engage their customers, and identify influential social channels where prospective clients congregate. Simple social media tools such as www.socialmention.com allow companies to measure the level of buzz around their brands.

Along comes Social CRM – a set of tools aimed to help corporations make sense and track the various information and customer relationships that they have built via disparate social media channels. With Social CRM systems adopted, corporations incorporate the social media interactions into multiple customer-facing functions in the company. They are able to have full visibility on past social media relationships the customer have had with them. This allows corporations to react and respond quicker to business engagements than ever before.

How can corporations start integrating Social CRM into their web strategy?

1) Analyze current social media interactions

Does the current social media interactions in the company justify Social CRM? How much is social media used, and how has that impacted revenues?

Depending on the nature of business for corporations, it may be adequate for some to utilize social media mainly for branding, PR and creating buzz.  Businesses who largely depend on the web as a major source of revenue, would have embraced a comprehensive use of social media in their sales processes.

For instance, consumer-centric businesses such as Dell would use Twitter and blogs to engage and solicit customers, while B2B businesses cannot entirely depend on social media to close deals. They can however, use social media as a means to build awareness and to fish for leads.

2) Compare current business model to determine adoption points

If you know where your main points of online interactions with your customers are, and you are aware which of these are most effective in generating leads (or even closing deals), you are then able to see how you can improve on these current processes.

Also, if have a team of people handling social media interactions, or even selling over social media, perhaps then Social CRM may be the answer to track and improve the processes behind these interactions.  For instance, manual tracking is most likely done with individual customers, and the history of conversations with them may be disparate not be systematically tracked.

What if you could track all these conversations, check out their queries and questions, quantify them and improve your customer service quality in the process?

3) Integrating Social CRM into your business processes

Next, look through your existing business (or sales processes), to nail down key areas in which social CRM may be incorporated. A typical sales process would include elements of prospecting, identifying, nurturing and closing a sale.  Now, if you have a social CRM system to manage your prospecting process, would information acquired from social media during the prospecting process be valuable when it’s used for identification and nurturing?

If you refer to the 18 use cases of Social CRM by the Altimeter Group you will find Social Sales Insights, Rapid Social Sales Response and Proactive Social Lead Generation as the 3 main uses in which you can integrate with your sales or business processes.

Reference: Social CRM – The New Rules of Relationship Management

The steps in creating a corporate Web Marketing plan has its similarities to crafting marketing plans within a traditional (non-web) marketing context.

The first element you need to define would be your product’s (or service’s) value proposition.

How is your product or service better than that of your competitor’s?

How do you communicate that value to your target customers? In other words, what is your value proposition? Why should your customers pick your product over others?

I found this article What is your Value Proposition? on Marketing Profs particularly useful in understanding why value propositions are needed, and how value propositions should be crafted.

With the Internet as equally competitive as the offline market place, it is essential that a Value Proposition needs to be:

Differentiating – the ability to be set apart from both direct and indirect competition

Relevant – whatever value that is being offered needs to be relevant to the target audience

Compelling – needs to provide a reason, whether emotional or logical, to purchase your product and service

Enduring – the value created needs to be sustained, and not easily duplicated by competitors

Armed with your value proposition, you then need to identify your target audience. In traditional marketing, we consider demographics, the location or our customers, the industry they are in, their role within an organization (whether they have the ability to make or influence buying decisions) and their propensity to purchase.

Conceptually, the same applies when marketing your product on the web.  With the web being virtual and all, you need to

1) Locate the right target audience for your product on the web and

2) Communicate your Value Proposition that would attract their attention and meet their needs. This would mean – writing compelling copy and taglines, while at the same time paying attention to relevant

Stay tuned for Part 2 of Getting Started with Your Web Marketing Plan, to discover the basics of finding your online target audience.

In the era of Web 2.0, Internet marketing is no longer an “optional” choice within the context of corporate marketing. Web presence has become the norm rather than the exception. For some small enterprises, a simple website or even a free blog page would suffice as a simple virtual representation of the existence of the business.

Thus, the next questions would then be, what can corporations do further to harness the power of the Internet for business expansion or to outperform their competitors? How can organizations incorporate a web marketing strategy as a crucial part of their marketing plan? Is it possible to influence the customer’s purchasing decisions with a solid web marketing strategy?

Surfing through the Internet, I’ve encountered countless of blogs and websites focusing on the “money-making” aspects of Internet Marketing, which would include selling online products, blogging for dollars, selling online Pay Per Click ad space, and to gel it all together, search engine marketing.  On the social media scene, I’m sure you’ve heard all that buzz about Twitter, Facebook and Linked-In.

But how do we put all these concepts to work together for us? We have sites such as www.web-strategist.com that provides analytical insights as well as web and social media trends targeted at Forrester. There are also sites such as www.mashable.com that offers great how-to guides and the latest tech news relevant to social media. Finally, just Google “make money online” and you will probably find a plethora of sites on this topic, in the likes of www.problogger.net, www.johnchow.com or www.courtneytuttle.com.

Ultimately, just by scouring the Internet, business owners should be able to discover piecemeal but valuable social media and web promotion ideas and how-tos. However, in order to stand out from the crowd, corporate marketers and entrepreneurs need to harmonize web tactics with a solid marketing plan and strategy.  Stuff like search engine optimization and social media marketing will only work when there is a master marketing plan in place to drive the direction of web activities.

Only then, would corporations be able to communicate value and drive demand effectively. This comes not just by influencing customers, but also by building relationships and understanding customer needs and requirements, with strategic online conversations.

This has been the pilot post of Corporate Web Marketing, with more insights on corporate web strategy coming soon in future posts. Stay tuned!