This was the 2008 IBM’s vision of Social Media, it is amazing how times change and the beauty of it all is how a great company can evolve and adapt to times.

We have seen the new push from IBM to get their Business partners to use Social Media, but is Social Media the panacea that will fix all the marketing problems? If it is not part of an integrated Internet Marketing strategy, I doubt it.

When I said that I doubt that Social media per se will fix your marketing problems is because for starters, it s just one piece of the New Marketing puzzle, you still need to identify who your buyer personas are, you need to figure out where they hang out on the internet and how you are going to attract them to your site and   you need to have in place procedures to create fresh content to keep the attention of the visitors generated by social media. Further more, you need to share internal knowledge and no one better than you and your employees to do that.

You need to get better results from your website as a part of a comprehensive Internet Marketing strategy, it is without a doubt the 24 by 7 connection between your company and the world, are you taking advantage of that?

On the other hand you and your team need to think about Search Engine Optimization SEO, you have to make certain that all the pages on your website are properly structured so that the Google’s and the Bing’s crawlers can pickup and index correctly your content.

Basically you need to start following an Inbound Marketing methodology for your Internet Marketing efforts and educate your employees on this new 2-way marketing schema, is no longer you pushing your message out and everybody has to listen, but instead establishing conversations with real people who expect to talk to real people.

In today’s information age of Marketing and web 2.0, a company’s website is the key to their entire business.

Marcus Sheridan-AUTHOR OF THE SALES LION BLOG MARKETING SPEAKER

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