In many ways, the standard thinking about your marketing no longer applies when it comes to what’s happening online. Two of the largest components, search and social, are in a constant state of flux. For better or for worse, the big players like Google and Facebook do what they can to keep marketers and the businesses using them on their toes.

Chalk it up to constant improvement if you’d like. Say that they’re out to get us and that they don’t want us to succeed because then they won’t be making as much money. Whatever theory works best to make you understand that stagnant strategies are ineffective, so be it. That’s not to say that there aren’t components of search engine optimization and social media marketing that haven’t worked for a long time and will likely continue to work into the future, but the overall status of SEO and SMM are always on the move. What worked yesterday may not work today but may work again tomorrow.

This stems from a conversation I had with a potential client who was convinced that the Google Penguin and Panda updates had reached their final form. There were no more changes to monitor, no more adjustments to make. His site was ranking well and there was no need to push any further. There are two problems with this philosophy. First, Panda was updated just last month for the umpteenth time since it rolled out in February, 2011. At almost two-years old, it’s still being adjusted. Penguin is far from hitting its final variation – Google has all but said that. Then, there’s the dreaded Zebra update that may or may not be a mythical unicorn more than a real obstacle, but whether it’s real or not doesn’t really matter. The point is that Google is always improving, which means that search marketers must always be improving as well.

The second fallacy with his argument is that their rankings were thought to be as good as they were going to get. We have a client who has been getting optimized since 2003. Every month we’re fighting to keep the progress that we’ve accumulated over the years while pushing them further in other keywords. While there is definitely a plateau that can be reached where the gains from improved SEO start to level off, the idea that SEO can be in a pinnacle phase with no need for further improvements in the future is preposterous.

Social media is worse. In social, it isn’t just the changes that the websites themselves make that make strategy adjustments important. It’s the trends and flow of the communities themselves that make a difference. Case in point – I was working with a client not too long ago who was feeding multiple RSS feeds onto their Facebook page and into their Twitter stream. There was a time (short as it may have been) when this strategy of “more is better” worked. That was 2010. Today, any business who is auto-feeding a dozen posts onto their Facebook page per day is reaching nobody. Once I showed them how to look at their statistics, they realized that out of 17K fans, their posts were reaching an average of 16 people. Everyone had either shut down their stream from their news feed or had seen so many without liking any that Facebook shut it down for them.

Their Twitter account was a mess. With 4k Twitter followers, nobody had engaged with the account in weeks. Their posts were all doubled up – they were posting from the same feeds onto Twitter and Facebook, then feeding their Facebook onto Twitter.

This isn’t intended to single out a couple of juicy examples. Most businesses are not taking such a careless approach to their online marketing. However, it does seem that there is a rise in complacency. When success is found, it’s time to move on – at least that seems to be a prevailing attitude.

The reality is this: success is relative and there are very few who have reached a level that cannot be dramatically improved upon with better understanding of the current trends. Instagram was a huge portion of many business’s Facebook and Twitter strategies just a few weeks ago and now is being abandoned altogether by many. Pinterest is hot today but is facing spamming threats that could plummet the site into strategic unworthiness. Google+ is effective today for search rankings and may become more effective in the coming months, but it could also fall off the radar completely if Google decides that it’s just too easy to manipulate.

Nobody knows what’s happening behind closed doors at the companies that drive our industry. We can speculate. We can guess. We can keep our eyes open, read the various blogs, talk to insiders we have in out back pockets, but at the end of the day we’re all dealing with too many unknown variables to rest on what works today.

I’m not trying to scare anyone. I just want it to be understood that your online marketing efforts should be tweaked, adjusted, monitored, and tested on a regular basis. To sit back and let the changes happen without you, to be passive in an extremely aggressive atmosphere, would be the biggest mistake you can make, particularly if you’re already doing well. I’ve said in the past, “Being thankful for what you have doesn’t mean you have to be satisfied with it.”

Perhaps a more appropriate “person” to quote would be Ricky Bobby: “If you ain’t first, you’re last.”

The vast majority of business websites out there tend to stay laser-focused on their goals. Whether they’re intended to sell a product or generate leads, it seems that all of the content placed on their websites works towards this end. While there’s something that can be said about the strategy, changes at Google, Bing, and social media sites makes it beneficial to post content that does nothing more than educate, entertain, or act as a resource for people without attempting to sell or generate a lead.

If you want to truly get ahead of your competitors this year, you should be willing to devote a little bit of time (or money if you choose to buy it) every month on content. This isn’t the type of content designed to get ranked in the search engines, but it can help your important pages get ranked. It’s not the kind of content that will generate leads through social media, though you have opportunities every time someone lands on your site. It’s the type of content that is truly giving – you’re motives should be business-oriented but the content should be able to stand alone.

First, let’s take a quick look at why this helps. We’ve covered it before but here’s a refresher:

Valuable Content Helps the Rest of Your Site

Google, Bing, and the social media sites love quality content. They can tell the difference between quality content that is beneficial to visitors and content that is designed specifically to generate leads and/or sales. They can tell by the content itself in many cases (particularly in the case of Google) but they can also tell through inbound links that are earned and social signals that are given.

When you have content that people are willing to share, whether by linking to it from their websites and blogs or by sharing it on social media, the search engines and social media sites (Facebook and Google+ in particular) give additional trust to the domain. This is the primary reason that we strongly encourage having a blog on the primary domain itself. That’s not to say that there are no benefits from having an offsite domain, but for this exercise the benefits yielded come from the domain’s interactions.

A post that is valuable to visitors can link to other pages within the domain, helping both the domain in general and specific pages rank better in Google. For Facebook and Google+, sharable content ads the trust factor. Most domains do not appear as well on social sites regardless of the content because they do not have an established history of trust. By posting content that people share, the social sites start to get “acquainted” with the domain. You can tell if your domain needs a trust boost by having someone post content from the site and then clicking it on Facebook. If a warning comes up that “you are about to leave Facebook and go to blah blah blah”, then your domain is not trusted yet. You can fix this. You just need more people sharing the content on your domain. This can be achieved by posting quality content that people are naturally willing to share.

This type of useful content helps both in search and social. Now, let’s look at the content types.

Content Worth Sharing

There are several different kinds of content that can play well for the search engines when it comes to building two of the primary SEO signals: inbound links and social shares. The general way of looking at it is to take your industry, your area, or both and apply your knowledge into the creation of content worth sharing. Here are three examples:

• Entertain – Let’s say you have a Ford dealership. You can post a gallery of images of classic Mustangs, title it something like, “7 Epic Mustangs from the 60s and 70s”, and write up a 3-5 paragraph blurb about the storied history of the car. Many people love classic cars (and Mustangs in particular) and will be willing to share the page and the images on their social profiles as well as their blog or websites.
• Educate – With what you know about your industry and location, you should be able to teach people things they didn’t know. Even if you don’t know for sure, the internet is there to help. For example, you could post something like, “The Storied History of the Seattle Space Needle in Pictures”. Gather up some images of the Space Needle from when it was built and during times of note, write up a quick paragraph or even a sentence describing each scene (make sure it’s unique – don’t copy and paste!), and post something that will be educational on your site today and into the future. This has excellent sharing potential from locals.
• Resource – You’re the expert. Show it. There may not be a direct business reason to post a story titled, “How to SYNC Any Device in a Ford Fusion“, but the information can be helpful to those who run into challenges. They may share it. They may link to it. If they visit the page, they will likely stay on it for a while as they apply the advice. This component of the search algorithm isn’t discussed often but when a page is sticky, the domain gains trust in search.

These are very basic overviews of the ideas, but the key is to stay consistent. Some have asked me in the past why I keep it limited to two pieces of content. I don’t. If you can post every day, go for it! Twice a month is something that’s sustainable. In the business world, we often find ourselves starting a new project and abandoning it if it becomes too hard. Twice a month is enough to build up a nice library of content that can benefit your marketing immediately as well as over time.

The key is to stick to it. Schedule it. Make it happen. You’ll soon find you’re looking at your competitors in your rear-view mirror.

A recent study by AdAge, which has been tracking such things since 2009, shows that there are over 180,000 people on Twitter who claim to be social media mavens, experts, consultants, ninjas, pros, warriors, or some other noun that’s intended to fill you with confidence about their ability to save you from the evil world of Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. This is up from 16k when they first checked.

It’s challenging for businesses to keep up. The world of social media offers so much potential, so many options, and has so many people using it every day that the allure to get involved is high, but there are risks. Bad strategies, an inability to keep up with changes, and the potential to blow a lot of time and/or effort are all high. Businesses often look to experts who reside in this world on a constant basis to guide them through the mess.

The bad part is that the industry can be an extremely lucrative one, so many people are jumping in without having a true understanding of how to make it work for business. The good part is that there are things you can do to identify the good ones from the bad, the real ones from the posers. Here are some telling signs:

Check their personal accounts

The most important component here is that follower counts mean nothing. For under $100 a Twitter user can buy thousands of “followers”. Given enough time and a willingness to accept any friend requests, a Facebook account can hit the 5,000 “friend” limit in a couple of months.

You’ll be looking at two things when checking the accounts. Links – what kind are they posting? Are they posting links to notoriously spammy sites like Hubpages and Squidoo? Do the links lead to teeth whitening, Forex, or “how to make money from home” ebooks? Everyone has to start somewhere, but those who are worth their title should have gone beyond the spamming and moved into the realm of quality content posting, particularly with their personal social media accounts.

The second thing you’ll look for is interaction. Are people retweeting them? Talking to them? Engaging with them? Commenting, liking, and sharing their content on Facebook? Giving their posts +1s on Google+? If so, is it organic? Just as with the account size factor, it’s not hard to buy likes and retweets. Are the people engaging with them real people or fake?

Look at their advice, strategies, and tips

Most gurus have a blog. They may have a YouTube channel. They should be on Pinterest. Check out the content that they’re posting and the advice that they’re giving. While not every guru is a writer, it’s safe to say that they should be able to put together a list of tips at the very least.

Are they putting out advice videos? These don’t have to be regular – a video with the right content can be useful for months – but there should be something of interest, some rants or recommendations that work on video. Are they pinning quality infographics on Pinterest?

Content is a tool of the trade. If they aren’t putting out content on their own sites or social profiles, do they really know what they’re doing or are they regurgitating strategies they read on Mashable and Social Media Today?

Look at their clients

As with any agency or individual that you hire, it’s important to look at the results of their efforts. Check to see if the pages they run, the accounts that they manage, and the content that they’re posting is effective.

Again, size doesn’t matter here. It would be easy for me to say, “don’t work with people who only have a couple of clients” since my company is loaded with clients, but it’s simply not true. Some of the brightest minds and most effective social media experts that I know only keep a handful of clients. Size is not important. If anything, being too large means that your needs won’t get the personal touch that you might require.

The most important component here is to call or email the clients. Be very skeptical about experts who use the “client confidentiality” ploy. It’s true, there are times when businesses do not want it known that they use a social media agency, but that really only applies to being out in public. I’ve had clients that do not want us to post that we work with them on our website, but none of them in the last 5 years have ever said they were unwilling to be a reference to a potential client. If they’re unwilling to let you contact their clients, they might not have any.

Social media isn’t hard. It’s time-consuming. It requires a constant attachment to the changes that are happening. That’s the main reason to hire gurus, experts, and agencies – if you’re running a business, do you have the time and energy to devote a couple of hours a day keeping up with it all? Finding the right person or agency isn’t hard, either. Yes, it requires an investment of time to find and check out candidates, but that is time well spent. It’s better to have no strategy or presence than a bad strategy driving a poor presence.

First and foremost, it’s important to understand that Facebook (and social media in general) is a communication tool. It’s a way for businesses to connect with customers and a safe venue through which customers and potential customers can interact with your business.

With that said, let’s look at the other two primary functions of Facebook: marketing and branding. Both are similar. Both are categories that can mean different things to different people and businesses. While it’s definitely possible to do both well on Facebook at the same time, the safer and less time-intensive strategy would be to pick one or the other as the primary goal (outside of communication, of course).

Here are the two basic options. There will be those who will say that it’s being oversimplified, but this isn’t a tutorial. It’s a way to distinguish between the two so that a business can make an intelligent decision about which mindset to take in their efforts. Once the mindset is established, the strategies can form.

Facebook for Branding

This is becoming the more common practice among businesses because it is more open in form and more singular in goal. More importantly, using Facebook as a marketing tool is considered by many to be harder (depending on your business type, of course). Many, particularly those who are engaged with individual customers on a daily basis such as car dealers and realtors will opt for this approach because it gives them the freedom to simply be entertaining or informative without having to put the time into crafting an appropriate marketing strategy.

It’s the easy road, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s any less rewarding.

Using Facebook for branding is all about getting your name, logo, and general message out there. The general message is often abstract – it’s not talking about a sale or a particular product but rather trying to convey a company attitude with the message.

This strategy can use popular images, interesting (and sharable) facts, or funny concepts to will encourage liking and sharing. While some take the road of using ideas that are completely off topic, I’m a firm believer that it’s possible to stay focused on either the local area, the industry, or both with every post. In other words, a car dealer shouldn’t be posting pictures of cats. They should be posting pictures of cars, videos of cars, and images or discussions about the local area.

The branding message is easier to spread because it doesn’t involve marketing. There’s no goal of direct conversions or clicks to the website. It’s all about getting the brand out there as much as possible.

The downside, of course, is in proving ROI. Without direct marketing applied to the messages, it’s a leap of faith that by getting interaction and engagement around content that does not lead directly to a lead or a sale but that keeps the name and logo of the business in mind, that there are intangible benefits that are happening.

Facebook for Marketing

Unlike using Facebook for branding, the marketing strategy is trickier. It’s easier to mess up. There’s a risk of actually doing damage to the Facebook account by being too “spammy” with the posts. Those who are not ready to take a little heat on their path to get more conversions should not even go down this road.

However, if your goal is to achieve demonstrable ROI and take what you can today in a concrete manner, this is the right approach. It will rely on Facebook ads. There’s no way around it – unless you’re marketing something that resonates while also being productive such as a funny T-Shirt company, you’re very unlikely to get away with a hardcore marketing message without the use of ads.

Thankfully, Facebook ads are cheap.

Using a marketing strategy on Facebook does not mean that it’s all business. While some I have spoken to on the subject (including a VP at Facebook) have said that businesses can find success by only posting once or twice a week and promoting those marketing posts, I’ve found that a mix of interesting or entertaining content with the marketing messages can be beneficial.

People aren’t going to Facebook to see marketing messages, so yours has to be truly valuable. It’s not about putting up a picture of a car and calling that marketing. It’s about generating messages that they can only get through Facebook. For example, having Facebook-only sales events can be effective with next to zero risk. If people come to the store as a result, awesome! If they do not, then the expenditure was minimal. If they aren’t successful, you shouldn’t give up. You simply need to tweak the message, adjust the advertising, or go through a series of “fun” posts to set up the marketing posts properly.

Don’t Forget Communicating

Regardless of which path you choose, remember the number one rule: Facebook (and social media in general) is about communication. It’s about talking to your customers and having them talk to you. It’s about giving them a venue through which you can be completely open about your business and hold public conversations with unsatisfied customers as well as the happy ones.

Which way fits best with your business? That’s the only real question you need to ask to get started down the right path.

Semantics. That's what many will say. They'll tell about how trying to define the difference between being a marketing platform and being a marketing tool is pointless.

Others will say it's much more of a platform for marketing than it is a tool. They'll say that it's the community and the venue that offer the benefit and trying to corner Facebook into a toolbox is unwise.

Both, in my humble opinion, would be terribly wrong.

When looking at Facebook as a platform, we see certain elements that stand out. It's huge - a billion users can't be wrong, right? It allows businesses to create pages and market their wares on these pages and within the news feeds of their fans. It allows apps which can be used to do nearly every business operation directly from the platform. With all of this evidence, it's clearly a marketing platform, right?

This is the biggest mistake that many businesses make on Facebook. In many ways, it's a trap, and the majority of businesses who look to Facebook fall into that trap.

Facebook wants to be a business interaction platform. It wants to be a marketing platform. It wants businesses to look to it and (in some cases) pay them money to get their merchandise and services exposed. The only thing stopping them (other than poor decisions regarding business since 2009) is that the power of Facebook, namely the people, want nothing to do with it.

This is the key point that businesses must understand. It's the point that steers Facebook away from their unstated goal of being a marketing platform and towards the unfortunate reality that they are a tool in an overall content marketing strategy. Through Facebook, a business is better served promoting the things that are not necessarily "business focused" in order to gain favor with the Facebook algorithm. They can (and should) do this through ads, but the reality is that a business must be willing to interact with people and engage with the community before they can have any chance of getting marketing benefit from the site.

Once this is done through any of a dozen groups of techniques, it now becomes possible use the tool for marketing that Facebook truly is. It's a tool in a toolbox that includes LinkedIn, YouTube, and, of course, the four majors of today (which can change at any time).

Businesses must understand this distinction. They must learn that what happens on their Facebook page is minuscule compared to what happens off their page, that what they say is meaningless compared to what others are saying about them, and that to make their message work, they have to get involved rather than put themselves into a box.

Platforms are boxes. Tools lead to the freedom to explore.

Google has stuck with its story that the various components of Google+ and the +1 button don’t have an effect on search rankings. They have to. Once they admit that it does (as countless studies and tests have indicated), the flood of spam and blackhat SEO techniques will grow larger than it already has. This is important to understand for anyone doing research on the topic. Google isn’t trying to deceive people for the sake of being deceptive. They’re trying to protect the sanctity of what will become their greatest advantage in the ongoing search engine wars. They will not sit back and do what Yahoo did a decade ago, relying on mass adoption to carry them through. Just because Google is on top today doesn’t mean that they have no fears for the future.

Thus, Google+.

With that out of the way, let’s take a look at the three primary components of Google+ and the various +1 buttons (they look the same but they have different uses) that have an effect on your search rankings.

The Google+ Business Page

There’s a good chance that if you’ve been following the advice of internet marketing experts out there for the past couple of years, that you have a Google+ business profile. If you don’t, get one now.

The page serves two purposes from a search perspective. If you’re posting content from your website onto your page, it counts as a +1 for that particular piece of content. +1s are weighted differently and the ones from your page have more weight than spammers but less weight than most users, but it’s still a good thing to have. It doesn’t hurt, so why not?

The other component is a relative scale. Your page itself has +1s, demonstrated in the image above in the bottom right by “+346″. There have been a couple of studies that have looked at this and shown that it’s the most important aspect of overall search rankings that Google+ affects. I disagree based upon my own research, but it definitely has an affect. By being a “relative scale”, it isn’t a matter of gathering hundreds, even thousands of these. It’s a matter of having higher quality ones relative to your competitors for search rankings. As with everything in this article (and pretty much in search and social altogether), quality trumps quantity. You only see the number. Google sees the quality of the accounts within the number.

Domain Content +1s

The rise of content marketing from a search perspective has been most positively affected by the +1 buttons on your site. Inbound links are still extremely important, but they have remained at a steady value ever since the Penguin update. The +1s accumulated on content within a domain have risen in overall power.

This is why true content marketing on your website is so important from a search perspective. We can no longer rely on strong HTML content and organic links to rank higher than competitors. Sure, they work, but the real differentiator that so few are willing to explore is the fact that social signals to a piece of content affect the overall rankings of a domain. If a piece of content is strong enough to get some viral love on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook, the rankings of many keywords are affected.

Individual Content +1s

This is a two-headed beast. Google has not seen the +1 abundance of data that they had hoped when they first started putting the +1 button everywhere. They’ve gone through many changes over the last year, including changing the way that the search results interact depending on browser and device. Now, you can “share” pages from results into Google+, but it’s unlikely that this is being done very often.

What Google IS seeing is an increase in the number of shares directly from content. It isn’t just a rise from the clicks on the page itself, but also an increase in the +1s happening on the Google+ network within users’ feeds. This is translating into very strong improvements in overall search rankings and traffic for those who are able to get activity on Google+ with their content. The catch-22 is that many businesses are finding it much easier to get +1s to “fun” content. This helps with the second component above, but if we’re not able to get +1s to the “money” content, we’re missing a large part of the strategy.

To achieve this, websites have to start being built with “fun” and “money” on the same pages. It’s a challenge – the entertainment or educational value of content often makes it hard to use as a conversion piece, but that’s the golden ticket at the end of the day. If you can turn your fun content into something that also has the ability to generate leads and sales, you’re definitely a mile ahead of your competitors.

One of the biggest problems faced when businesses try to use social media as a marketing tool is that there are simply too many social media sites. A day doesn’t go by when I’m not asked about this new site or that old site and whether or not they can be used is marketing. Most can. However, most simply do not have the reach to make them worthwhile. For the majority of businesses, if they stay focused on four current social sites, they’ll have the vast majority of their marketing covered.

Some big sites were excluded. It’s not that Tumblr doesn’t have its place or that Foursquare is useless. It’s that the time and energy necessary to make them stronger is not worth the return on investment. Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest are the big dogs right now. They don’t take a ton of time to master and the results are strong compared to the effort put into them.

• Facebook – This is the only no-brainer out there. If you only use one social media site for your marketing, this is it. From both a social interaction perspective as well as a public relations perspective, Facebook can cover as much as 70% of your social media marketing efforts.
• Twitter – This is often the hardest for businesses to understand. They look at it, give it a try, and believe that the results aren’t worth the effort. The problem with that argument is that Twitter is still extremely popular and more importantly the time necessary to have a rock-solid Twitter presence is minutes a day at most. Don’t abandon the low-hanging fruit just because the results aren’t apparent. If you use it right, the results will come.
• Google+ – Even if you don’t believe that Google+ will emerge as a true social media force (it will, but I won’t argue that here), the search engine marketing benefits of building up and maintaining a strong presence on the platform cannot be argued. Few would say they couldn’t use better search results or more traffic from Google. Their social network is one of the ways to improve those results.
• Pinterest – Just like Twitter, Pinterest falls into the category of low-investment, higher-returns. One of the things that differentiates Pinterest from other social sites is that they’ve embraced business usage more readily than other platforms. Posting and maintaining a quality Pinterest presence can be literally less than a minute a day and many of those who use the platform swear by it.

There’s a common theme here. Effort versus reward. If you measure your returns relative to the amount of effort put into the maintenance, you’ll find that these are the sites that generate the highest level. Used properly, just about any business can benefit from a strong presence on these four social media sites.

In business, we often look to social media as another venue through which to achieve our business goals. It's a marketing goldmine - at least that's what the experts are telling us. Sites like Facebook and Twitter are the websites and apps that the people, our potential customers, are visiting, so putting out our marketing messages on these venues makes absolute sense.

The problem with that premise is that people aren't going to those sites to receive marketing. One can argue that the same is true for television and they would be right. Television is an extremely effective advertising platform for many despite the fact that most people don't like seeing advertisements. The real difference is choice. On television, radio, and other venues, we have the choice to change the channel but normally we sit through and watch the marketing in between our shows because we don't want to miss it when it comes back on. On social media, the messages are chosen. Those who are posting content that doesn't appeal can be easily unfollowed. In the case of Facebook, they can be blocked, removed from the news feed, unfollowed, and even reported as spam.

It's a paradox. How does a business achieve their goals on social media while maintaining a connection with the audience that prevents them from blocking us? There are several answers to this question and many different strategies that can work, but one of the easiest and most underutilized is simply posting the things that we and our audience enjoy.

In the example above, the city in which a car dealership resided had their local team playing for their playoff lives. Sunday was the day that would determine whether it was time to pack it up for the season or continue on into the playoffs. The post itself, a simple message, was put on Facebook the day before the game and promoted through Facebook ads. The results were very strong. It had over 100 likes, a handful of comments, and dozens of shares, the majority of which were done by locals to the area since the Facebook ads were extremely geo-targeted.

How will this help them sell more cars? First, it expresses the dealership's personality. They love their local team. It's not a marketing ploy - the owners and most of the employees are strong supporters of their football team. Second, it's a shared love - many of their customers and potential customers are fans. These two things are great from a PR and branding perspective but they don't answer the question of how this directly helps them sell more.

That answer is the algorithmic response. When a piece of content resonates and is widely liked and shared by the target audience, it dramatically improves the ability for the marketing messages that follow to be seen by the same people and their friends. Facebook's and Google+'s algorithms are designed to reward businesses and individuals who post popular content with more visibility. By working in the truly likable things within a business' market area into the overall social media mix, the marketing messages will see more exposure. One strategically placed and properly promoted "fun" or "inspiring" message followed by one or two marketing messages will have a dramatically higher reach than a flurry of marketing messages that are not set up by the fun pieces.

The easiest way to find the right content is to look inwards. What do you know? What do you like? What do you enjoy that your audience will enjoy as well? For local businesses, it's best to stay laser focused; don't jump on a movie's buzz bandwagon, for example, but stay in the realm of your business' expertise and/or the local area's interest.

As with so many pieces of advice that I've been giving lately, the moral of the story is that if you "keep it real" and deliver authentic messages that resonate within you, there's a good chance they'll resonate with your audience as well.

I knew it would happen sometime in 2013. I’m glad it happened sooner rather than later.

For a while, many of the smaller bloggers such as myself have been preaching about how search, social, and content marketing are all actually a singular activity that can be broken down into a proper repeatable process. There have been skeptics and naysayers, the majority of whom work in one of the three industries and would not profit by the consolidation of things. In other words, someone who is trained in SEO who only opens up Facebook to see pictures of little Timmy sliding into 3rd base would not benefit by the emergence of social signals into search rankings, so they choose to pretend like it doesn’t help (or in some cases, saying that it can actually hurt your rankings).

When an article by Jeff Bullas, a respected internet marketing expert, came across my feed this morning with the title, “6 Social Media Trends You Should Not Ignore in 2013“, I was hopeful that he would mention the convergence of the three disciplines and was extremely pleased when it was the top trend mentioned…

“Expect to see more content marketing tools, tactics and strategies that accept the fact that social, search and content are increasingly integrated and intertwined.”

Tools – perhaps. It’s challenging to put together a tool set that doesn’t spoil the mix. The reason for this is the need to focus on quality and value above all else. With tools, they have a tendency to automate processes that end up hurting in the long run. By mentioning tactics and strategies, I couldn’t agree more. As someone who wakes up at 2:30 every morning to read my feeds and stay on top of the ever-changing worlds of search and social, I am always hopeful to find more strategies that will enhance my current playbook.

As we plunge further into the year, there will be more and more articles written about the convergence. Some will be spot on. Others will be misleading as the natural tendency to convert everything into a template will send many down the wrong path. You need skill, creativity, and resources at your disposal, not tricks or schemes. Google, Facebook, and Bing are getting smarter every day. They’re learning how to recognize the difference between content that truly brings education, entertainment, or resource value to the table and the content that is churned or spun. If you read about a strategy that operates without expertise or the human factor of discernment, run away as fast as you can.

Think quality. It’s the point at which search engine optimization, social media promotions, and content marketing converge.