Video blogging is another of the social media tools we get questions about.  “Does it really work?” clients ask.  “Can it make a difference to our corporate bottom line?” And so on.

As I am fond of saying, one good example is worth a thousand blog posts. Before reading on, open up a second browser and point it to www.winelibrary.tv.  Once there, be prepared for what Jeff Jarvis (author of What Would Google Do?) calls “a jet engine in your face”. “This blast of personality is Gary Vaynerchuk. He is a 32 year-old merchant who has made more than 800 daily wine-tasting shows online – just him, his glass and a spit bucket,” says Jarvis. These are all simply made, easily uploaded, video blog posts.

In doing so, Gary took his New Jersey-based family liquor business from $4 million in revenues just a few years ago to over $60 million a year today.  I guess that answers the question I started the post with. These regular video blogs that cost next to nothing to create enjoy a daily audience of 80,000.  As Jeff Jarvis points out, this has not only created explosive growth but is also “transforming retail and making it social”.  Gary calls himself the “the social media sommelier”. Social business, he says, is the future of our society.

 How can you make your business social? How can you leverage all these amazing tools we have at our fingertips to engage your customers and prospects?  Please share your comments, thoughts or questions right here.

A good number of our clients have been rolling out social media initiatives over the last year or are in the process of doing so.  These initiatives include blogs, podcasts and social networking.

We also hear regularly from clients who are considering initiatives but are still unsure about the effectiveness and staying power of this particular marketing channel.  One of the most frequent questions we hear:  Is this social media thing for real and should be deploying our resources to leverage it?  To answer this question I will direct you to some stats that were sent to us by a friend of ours, who herself is a savvy marketer. Check it out here: http://socialnomics.net/2009/08/11/statistics-show-social-media-is-bigger-than-you-think/

“Blog fade” is an expression used to describe the fading enthusiasm for a blog; posts become less and less frequent until the blog is finally left sitting idle collecting pixel dust.

It’s happened to the best of us. We start out of the gate with a plan to blog twice a week, weekly, bi-weekly or even monthly. The blog was so easy to set up, we launch right in.

And it’s precisely because blogging is so immediate and accessible that we sometimes push it back in favour of more pressing tasks like, oh, I don’t know, taking care of clients! We figure we can always jump in there and put up a blog post; we’ll get to it later.

As part of a broader marketing communications strategy, well-written blog posts will improve your search engine rankings, attract traffic to your website, and reinforce your credibility as an expert. You may also use them to get a conversation going with your clients, prospects, team, employees, vendors, suppliers or other stakeholders.

When you don’t post regularly, you’re losing out on all of those benefits. But not only that – you’re also sending a subtle message that you’re not around anymore. People surfing the Web are hungry for information. They want more and they want it now. As brilliant as it was, the post you wrote last month is ancient history.

Have you ever heard the expression, “How you do anything is how you do everything?” When people look through your blog and don’t see any recent updates, they may start to wonder if you’ll “fade away” in other areas of your business as well.