Mark talked about marketing blitzes and drip marketing in the last posting, and how if you want to keep growing your company you can never stop marketing and monitoring your lead-generation results (and of course you need to sell stuff, too).
As it should be, but when it comes to marketing in Web 2.0 – social networking, blogging, podcasting and the like – we should all be careful about getting obsessed with our audience metrics (great article about this in the San Jose Mercury News Perspective section last Sunday). These are definitely becoming vital viral marketing activities for the HR marketplace, but like all visibility and lead-generating activities, make sure to invest more of your time where the greatest return is without compromising the greater good of your business plan.
Five years ago I freelanced in marketing, writing and editing (before I came on board at HRmarketer.com). I was (still am) an aspiring writer who belonged to some online fiction writing workshops at Zoetrope.com. The process in the workshop was that for every five story reviews you gave to other writers, you could post one of your own stories to be reviewed. I always tried to be thoughtful and take my time with my reviews, but like all the other aspiring writers, we couldn’t wait to read the reviews of our own work. I can remember checking the writing site constantly and spending hours and hours each day reviewing and posting, at the expense of my contracting work unfortunately, just to read the reviews of my work.
Self-absorbed and obsessed, craving kudos, didn’t help me grow my freelance work (and didn’t really help my fiction writing either).
Fast forward to HRmarketer and I don’t even comment very much on other blogs, which I know I should now because that’s proper blogosphere etiquette if you want other relevant industry bloggers to comment and cross-link to you. My point is to balance how you spend your time in these new online marketing activities and make sure they’re benefiting your brand and bottom line and not just your ego.
Fortunately we have a pretty good balance to our blogging and tracking site traffic, and it’s paid off too, because we made a recent top 25 list of blogs according to RecruitingBlogs.com.
Time to check those comments and Sitemeter stats!
Posted by Kevin Grossman
Labels: blogging, PR, sales, viral marketing, web 2.0