Blog as hub, site as spoke

David Berkowitz (@dberkowitz) from the digital marketing agency 360i had a nice article today about building your brand with social media

He used the example of launching the agency's new Social Marketing Playbook earlier this month (which is well worth a look). The launch was a success (10,000 downloads in the first few days), and David stresses the essential back story--the hard work of the last few years building the agency's social presence through blogging, Facebook, Twitter, SlideShare, Scribd, LinkedIn, Flickr, and so on. 

It's a good story, and a great reminder that social media marketing is about ongoing and integrated presence, not individual campaigns or discrete tool-based initiatives.

But a single line--and phrase--stuck with me most: 

There was also a clear architecture for it [our social media efforts], with the blog as a hub, and all of the spokes, including our corporate site, relating coherently to the hub and to each other.

"With the blog as a hub..."

For readers at small companies or consulting on their own, the idea of the blog as hub is nothing special. You want to demonstrate expertise, regularly refresh content to drive better search performance, and minimize site maintenance workload. A blog makes perfect sense.

What about larger companies? The logic certainly remains the same. Larger companies also want to demonstrate expertise, maximize search, and minimize needless site maintenance. But big companies are too complicated to boil it all down to a blog, right? What about all those offerings, success stories, executive bios, and the rest of the content that fills endless pages on large corporate sites?

Well, maybe. But does "needing" a more traditional site to serve as a corporate archive mean it has sit at the center of marketing?

Most of the people you're trying to connect with care a lot more about your latest thinking than they do about your carefully crafted but static product, service, and solution pages. So why not push the corporate site off to the side and put the blog front and center? 

It's a radical notion for a large company, but perhaps it's just the sort of thinking that larger companies need to make a more serious commitment not just to social media, but also to the broader ideas of marketing as education, marketing as service, and marketing as community (three of my current mantras). 

Web sites can certainly support all of these ideas, and companies are livening up their sites with blogs, video feeds, and community portals, I wonder, though, if the more radical step is still necessary to make the transformation real, to fully jettison the old ideas of marketing as broadcast, promotion, and persuasion. 

What do you think?

Photo credit: poppofatticus

Comments

[jer979]

Got here via Twitter (can't remember who, sorry).

I love this and think you are right on. The only challenge with blogging for anyone (companies big or small) is that it requires commitment and actual big thinking. I know David and that's what we get on his blog, so it works for him. If you are just going to promote product or yourself, etc., it won't work.

Well done.

[Rob Leavitt]

Thanks for the comment. I agree that commitment and "big thinking" is essential for blogging effectively, but I guess I would argue that's no different than marketing generally. Certainly in B2B these days, promoting products is not all that effective compared with demonstrating thought leadership and expertise on the issues your clients are facing.