Chapter 10 of Secrets of Social Media Marketing explains the fundamental importance of content when building social media or using it in a business campaign. Naturally, one of the first things a social media author must do is to make sure that his or her content is presented in an interesting way that won't bore the person viewing it. There are plenty of ways to get creative with social media content - the important thing is that you get creative. After all, as Gillin points out, even bland content can be made original if approached in an original way. Aside from making content interesting to the user, another primary decision should be if an online social network is the right medium for a given business objective. Gillin provides an extensive list of various objectives for using social media, but the fastest way to narrow it down is to decide what the objectives are for each buyer and each stage of the process. In order to keep an online business campaign manageable, Gillin explains, it must be modularized.
To Gillin and other social media authors, the "single greatest distributive effect of the new internet" is the new ability for anyone to be both the author and publisher of their own content, and in order to succeed in social media you have to think of yourself as such. In fact, the medium I'm using right now to write this post demonstrates that very fact - this blog entry is my own intellectual property, and I'll be publishing it under my own name. In order to effectively use this ability as a part of a business strategy, social media authors must also think like publishers.
