Mediaboss Marketing

Powerful forces at work within digital marketing are transforming the social media communication landscape. My recent visit to B2 Interactive offered insights into what the next 12 months will bring to media and public relations.

B2 Interactive has honed a business model in the last two years working as a growing digital agency in suburban Omaha, Nebraska. The steady stream of end-of-year business suggests that there is profit from three basic functions: Search Engine Optimization (SEO), content creation and management, and coding.

While social media strategists might be tempted to proclaim a slow death of search, in fact, SEO principles now dominate successful social media projects. Keyword research, website audits and optimization offer a path to learning audience motivation and needs. Satisfy those, and the social media data will trend upward. From information to entertainment, real-time data analyses generate strategies for earned organic versus owned, paid and promoted campaigns.

Just as SEO continues to be important in driving website traffic and advertising revenue, sites often remain the end game of social media return on investment (ROI) strategies. By replacing business jargon with natural consumer language found within social media, we can target blogs, video and other rich media. While digital marketing works well, it is also worth emphasizing the need to be restrained by ethics. As we go forward, an SEO mindset must never ignore basic ethical principles.

Social Marketing and Ethics The recent Sony email hack and subsequent news reporting of private message content, for example, crossed an obvious line. Most religious faiths emphasize that we should not do to others what we wouldn't want done to us. Hacked email does not pass the smell test because you would not want your private emails published on a news or entertainment website.

Still, what happened to The Interview film this week is instructive of an emerging distribution model that leverages social media buzz and publicity:

Online pre-release of content social & media amplification release

While 2014 was about using social media tools in PR and marketing, 2015 must move our conversation toward ethics and improving measurement methods.

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Digital Marketing Will Define Social Media in 2015 ...