I was surprised and very pleased to read the front page of the business section of todays Times Colonist newspaper based out of Victoria British Columbia. The title “Social networking boosts bottom line” brought a smile to my face. The subtitle “Blogs pay off by enhancing websites and communicating with customers” just made me more excited. It’s great to know that old media is recognizing the upside to new media. More and more these days the two are coming together and people are embracing the web and all it has to offer.
Victoria Times Colonist columnist Cara Wilson follows Ling Chan who is running the Vancouver opera’s social networking campaign. Chan recently presented at Social Media Marketing in Action: Using Social Media to Build a Brand and Generate Leads here in Victoria BC. A presentation put on by the Sales and Marketing Executives Victoria organization. Victoria is growing in the web marketing world with several cutting edge companies sproutting up all over the place. This is an exciting time for the technology sector in Victoria as we haven’t been hit as hard by the worlds current economic woes as most places.
Wilson points out the key problem that all of us bloggers and web marketing specialists run in to, time. Julie Szabo explains that blogging two to three times a week is sufficient to make a blog look active. On the flip side, if you’re looking for RSS subscribers, posting more than a couple of times a day may be overkill. Finding the time to write an interesting blog post with original content and ideas can be the hardest part. People such as myself that are marketers first and bloggers second find taking time out of busy days to get all of our ideas down to be tough, many times I will have a great idea for a blog post and then find that I just don’t have the time to write the 500 or so words required to make the post worthwhile. This is the major attraction to Twitter.
More and more traditional companies are beginning to recognize all that web 2.0 and social networking have to offer. A post on the front page of the Victoria Times Colonist business section proves to me that the world is finally coming around. This is great news for all of us in the web marketing community. And also for the traditional companies that will begin to benefit from all that we have been learning over the past few years.
