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What's your New Year's Resolution? Why not add Social Media?

By: Tammy Stankey | 01/03/2008

Over the past year or so, clients and colleagues alike have been talking about, experimenting with and putting to good practice the many opportunities that social media affords to businesses, organizations and communicators. Why? It works. This just in: According to an article in Bulldog Reporter which references The Hitwise US News and Media Report, search engines are driving news content for more News and Media category website traffic than ever before. The article goes on to state: "The New York Times found that more than half of their traffic was coming from search and as a result dropped paid content and reverted to the traditional model of free content supported by ads."

What is helping to drive traffic to sites? In part, viewers fascination with short video clips that tie to content. That's why having a Universal or Blended site is important - it allows for greater visibililty in the online world.

According to Standing colleague and social media guru and blogger Marijean Jaggers, "Universal or Blended search refers to the next generation of search engine capability. In the past, Google searches were divided into catagories – so you searched Web pages or news or blogs or images, etc. Now, there are no walls of separation. As you search, you may get results from the highest ranked pages among all content to produce results. What's important about that is how we leverage our clients' websites and overall content to play the search engine game. So, if a client wants significant online presence, it behooves them to have content in all categories."

If improving your organization's image and presence is important, then consider this one of your 2008 New Year resolutions: "I will work to expand my organization's presence by adding new or expanding existing social media tools." Not sure where to start? The nine questions offered up in Bulldog Reporter's article can help.

Posted in Social Media, Digital Communications