In this series about how social media and blogging work together, we’ve looked at the world’s most popular social networking sites: LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

For today’s final post in the series, I’ve invited my friend Jeff Korhan to pull it all together for us. Author of Built-in Social, Jeff has a wonderful way of humanizing technical tools and marketing concepts and bringing the discussion back to the basics of good business.

Can you discuss the influences of social media on business activities today compared to how we operated before these digital media were available?

It is my belief that social media is influencing every aspect of the business environment, making it all more personal and transparent. What social media is really doing is democratizing media by giving everyone a voice. This is especially relevant for consumers that now collectively have a powerful voice that can stand up to that of any organization or corporation.

So, the challenge is avoiding the temptation to make social media another layer to add to your current marketing practices. More than just integrating it with your marketing program, its qualities should be built into all of your business growth practices to earn the trust of your community. Therefore, it’s important to thoroughly understand what got you here, and then use the qualities of social media to make them more relevant.

You will often hear it said that because business has significantly changed, what got you here will not take your business to the next level. That’s crazy! Your strengths never change. If you were fast, or strong, or witty, you still are. What’s important today is learning how to adapt or translate traditional business practices to a digital world that is also becoming profoundly social.

So, regardless of whether a business has been sales, marketing, customer service, or production driven, it should stick to what got it here and learn to adapt to the influences of these digital and social media.

This can be an amazingly prosperous time for businesses if they learn to understand the influences of social media on the buying behaviors of their customers, and then redesign their traditional practices to make them relevant for this connected economy.

Many people are so overwhelmed by social media that they don’t even know where to start. What do you recommend as the best way to begin using a social networking site for your business?

Start by observing. Notice what others are doing, and reconcile that with your business and its resources. Social media can get very personal, so it’s important to use it in a way that is congruent with who you really are. In fact, that transparency tends to work well for earning trust on each and every one of the social networks.

After that, take the time to build a strategy. Write it down; implement it; and refine it over time. The only way to make improvements is to create results that can be evaluated. I imagine that is how nearly all of us developed our proficiency – learning from successes and failures alike.

In the early days of social media we made a big deal out of the number of connections. What is clear now is that it’s more important to be better connected than the most connected.

Thus, a smart social media strategy should consider whom to connect with and how; and it should describe specific practices for encouraging engagement, and otherwise nurturing those network relationships over time.

Some people lump blogging into the same category as social media, but I tend to see it as something unique. What do you believe are the key connections that will help everyone use blogging and social media more effectively?

Personally, I like to think of my blog as my farm. It’s a place where I nurture and grow ideas that I then take to the social media marketplace for sharing and consumption.

Especially after Google’s Penguin and Panda updates, and now Google Authorship, it’s clear that we’ve progressed from blogging as a form of journaling, to now building viable digital marketing assets with solid content that will stand the test of time.

It’s important for businesses to now think of themselves as publishers, and even media companies. That mindset alone will change your blogging and social media for the better. Media used to be something that we hired. Now we are the media, and we know better than anyone else what our customers want from us.

Any final thoughts you would like to share?

Sure. Well, you and I have been doing this for the better part of seven years or so, and we have collaborated on a number of projects such as this. I’m convinced that blogging is absolutely essential not only for success with social media, but it’s also where the business world is going in general. Everyone should consider how lucky they are to have this amazing resource, and of course, be consistently learning how to use it to run a better business.

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Jeff Korhan, MBA, is the author of Built-In Social: Essential Social Marketing Practices for Every Small Business (Wiley 2013).

Jeff was a Fortune 50 Sales and Marketing Executive who later founded a landscape services company that was twice named Small Business of the Year during its two decades of operation. Today he helps mainstream small businesses adapt their traditional business growth practices to a digital world.

Jeff is a regular content contributor to leading business publications, with his own New Media and Small Business Marketing site ranking among the Top 100 Small Business Blogs in the world.

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Enjoying this series about social media and blogging? Check out the other posts here. You can also find my post about using Twitter for business at Social Media Today.

In this post we’ll get back to my interview with expert video marketer Anthony Idle from Local Video Marketing. Anthony is a Google Certified Adwords professional with an MBA in strategy and marketing. He is a former general manager of a US national business, but these days he works online helping businesses globally to advertise locally.

For Anthony’s answers to my first three questions about YouTube as a social media site and relationship-building tool, check out YouTube Gives You Face Time With Prospective Customers.

4. What are the best methods and tools on YouTube for businesses to find interesting content (to generate blog post topic ideas and share with their networks)? I call this the “Expand your mind” step.

With YouTube, there are three dominant methods to curate content. The first is to use the search bar to find either individual videos to share immediately via social media or your blog, or to find channels/individuals to subscribe to so you can follow their content over time.

For the best results from the YouTube search bar, I like to recommend something called Google fishing. I put together a video to describe the technique (direct link to Anthony’s video about Google fishing).

The second way to find content and ideas on YouTube is with the related videos that turn up at the end of whatever video you’re watching. Some people turn that functionality off, but 9 times out of 10 you’ll see related videos that have similar tags, title and description as whatever one you’re watching (including your own).

The third tool is one that I particularly like, and it’s the Subscription Manager found inside your own YouTube channel. So if you’re trying to rank for five or six different keywords, you might create a group of subscriptions (these are called collections, and are similar to folders) in each of those categories. For example, I particularly like funny, creative ads, and so I’m always looking for 30-second classic ad clips. So I have a collection for these in my Subscription Manager.

5. What are the best methods and tools for sharing original blog post content on YouTube? What are the benefits of doing this? I call this the “Expand your influence” step.

If you’re the type of person who really doesn’t want to show your face on the camera, there are ways to turn written content into a YouTube video. For example, you can take the key points of your blog post and create a slideshow presentation using Keynote or PowerPoint. From there, you can play the slideshow while you capture your screen using tools like Screenr, Jing, or Camtasia.

Anthony lists all his favourite video marketing tools at http://localvideomarketing.biz/tool-kit/.

Is video worth the effort?

While it does usually take longer to produce a video than it does to write a text-based blog post, Anthony says it’s well worth the effort. He points out that a YouTube video can get you to the first page of Googe’s search results a lot quicker than a text-based blog post. He also stresses the importance of face time in building relationships with prospective customers. That’s why he takes the time to produce high-quality videos, and helps other businesses do the same.

As someone who hasn’t done very much video blogging, I appreciated Anthony’s insights into YouTube and video marketing. The wheels are turning with ideas for videos I might create. What about you?

Enjoying this series about social media and blogging? Check out the other posts here. You can also find my post about using Twitter for business at Social Media Today.

As we near the end of my blog post series about how blogging and social media work together, in this two-part post I’ll be exploring YouTube. For an expert view, I interviewed Anthony Idle from Local Video Marketing. Anthony shows local business owners how to use video in their online marketing even if they hate to be on camera and have zero budget.

I met Anthony on LinkedIn via Des Walsh’s 30 Day Linking Blitz, a program designed to help people increase their effectiveness on LinkedIn.

1. How would you describe YouTube overall as a social networking site?

I believe that YouTube is a sleeping giant of a social media site. Currently, it’s flying under the radar and when people are on YouTube they don’t realize that they’re part of a social media site. They’re not aware of the power of YouTube to attract more clients and visitors, and grow their audience in their particular niche.

Let’s look at the facts: Facebook gets, daily, something like 620 million visitors. YouTube gets 500 million visits a day. It’s nearly as big as Facebook, it just doesn’t have the perception of being a social media site. I really think that the giant’s waking up. Recent moves to retire the video comments inside of YouTube signal that Google is making fresh attempts to socialize YouTube. I predict a Google+ comment system coming to YouTube.

2. What are YouTube’s unique characteristics for business and lead generation?

Like Facebook and most other social media sites, there are two approaches for lead generation – organic and paid. With the organic approach, it’s similar to blogging, in that you need to complete the meta data inside your video post.

Action: The keyword that you’re trying to rank for should be prominent in three places: It should be the first word in your video description, at the start of your title, and it should also be one of your tags. Tip: For best results, use 15 or so tags in your videos, not two or three as people typically use.

The second approach is paid lead generation and that includes two strategies. First, you can promote your video to specific audiences, much like a promoted post inside Facebook. But the other way that is really unique to YouTube is TrueView advertising.

What’s so powerful about TrueView advertising is that you only pay for a view if someone actually watches the ad (they’ll have the opportunity to skip the ad in the first five seconds). You end up with a confirmed list of people who are interested in what you offer.

3. What are the best methods and tools for businesses to deepen their existing relationships and find new connections? I call this the “Expand your network” step.

Now this is a big question and a large reason why I am on YouTube. I believe that the further up the funnel that you want to go, towards the top of your funnel where you’re educating and motivating your audience, the more important it is to get your face on camera.

Video accelerates the relationship-building process, because people do business with people they know, like, and trust. Trust is a function of credibility plus reliability plus intimacy, divided by self-interest. With video not only can you establish your credibility – how you look and how you present yourself – but the intimacy part is really, really important as people can see your face, hear your voice, understand the tone of your language, see your eyes and see your smile.

You’re leveraging your ability to create a relationship by putting your face on camera. So many people hate to put their face on camera, and so it’s a differentiator. When you do it, people pay attention, and they feel as though they know you. You can’t get that from text. It’s face time.

When I was running a sales team in the States the big salaries went to the sales reps who got face time. It’s the same thing with online marketing. The big results come from building face-to-face relationships, and that’s why I choose video over text.

Just like with blogging, building an audience on YouTube requires regular posting, e.g., weekly on Fridays at 5:00. All the big YouTube stars know exactly what time of the day they’ll release their next video, and so do their fans, who watch for and comment on the videos as soon as they’re posted.

Action: Try to respond to all comments. This is what makes YouTube social, and is extremely important for relationship building. A lot of people have their comments linked to Twitter so if they comment on a video, it automatically tweets and then you want to keep that conversation going on Twitter to amplify that as well.

Creating a YouTube channel is another tool for building relationships. Not only can you put up to four links up in your channel homepage art, every time that you publish a video you have the ability to share its link to your broader social media audiences.

Anthony raised some excellent points about how YouTube gives us a face-to-face connection with our audience as a way of increasing trust and deepening our relationships. In the next post, he’ll talk about how to use YouTube to curate and share relevant content for your niche, both on your blog and on social media.

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Enjoying this series about social media and blogging? Check out the other posts here. You can also find my post about using Twitter for business at Social Media Today.

Continuing this series about how social networking and blogging work together, today’s post delves into the world’s largest social network, Facebook.

For expert insights, I went to Rebekah Radice. Rebekah is a social media strategist, content developer, trainer and community manager for Better Homes and Gardens^® Real Estate, serving as “the voice” behind the brand.

1. How would you describe Facebook overall as a social networking site?

Marketing a business online continues to evolve as more and more consumers turn to the web and social media for information. Facebook is an excellent conversation facilitator. It’s also excellent for eavesdropping. Listening to the needs of our consumers and then meeting them in real-time is one huge benefit I see to Facebook for any business owner.

It also allows you to focus on building relationships as opposed to simply pushing out information. On a daily basis, we can create engaging conversations around an existing business or brand.

2. What are Facebook’s unique characteristics for business and lead generation?

Social media has undoubtedly changed the way we interact with consumers and Facebook has been leading the way since its inception. Not only does it offer business professionals the opportunity to transition an established offline brand to the online world, but a way to create a vibrant and memorable online presence.

Consider this: According to recent Facebook statistics, 510 comments are posted, 293,000 status updates are posted and 136,000 photos are uploaded every 60 seconds. What an enormous opportunity for any business to connect and engage customers in a comfortable and relaxed environment where they are already actively spending their time.

3. What are the best methods and tools for businesses to find interesting content (to generate blog post topic ideas and share with their networks)? I call this the “Expand your mind” step.

The beauty of the web is that interesting content is everywhere and can come from a myriad of resources.

My favorite content curation tools are Feedly, a news aggregator that allows you to keep up with your favorite bloggers and websites all in one easy location. You can organize, follow and share your favorite content in the cloud-based platform or from the mobile app.

I am also a huge fan of Alltop, Google+ communities and Facebook lists. Each provides tailored content dependent on niche and the ability to make unique connections with other business professionals sharing similar content.

UPDATED AUGUST 29, 2013: I asked Rebekah to expand on her Facebook-specific suggestions for idea generation, and she shared these gems:

Facebook lists are a wonderful way to categorize friends and find relevant content that speaks to a select group of people. Lists also allow you to quickly view what that group is posting and talking about at any moment. You can step into the conversation or simply scan the feed to find topics that become instant fodder for blog posts.

Another great way to generate ideas on Facebook is through groups. Join groups that share common interests. For example, if you own a bakery, look for Facebook groups that talk about a love of desserts, baking, or any group catering to a niche such as wedding planners.

(Note from Linda: Here is a another helpful article by Cindy Ratzlaff about how to use Facebook lists to grow your business page.)

4. What are the best methods and tools for businesses to deepen their existing relationships and find new connections? I call this the “Expand your network” step.

Facebook is a very visual community. There are many ways businesses can capture the attention of their existing fan base using images. Adding an eye-catching image to posts will make the post more attention grabbing in the newsfeed.

Another method I find very effective is creating a post that will spark conversation. Is there something happening within your industry that others will be eager to discuss or maybe a question you’re dying to ask?

Allow fans to offer feedback and insight. It can be extremely valuable as a crowdsourcing tool and as you test out new products or services.

5. What are the best methods and tools for sharing original blog post content on Facebook? What are the benefits of doing this? I call this the “Expand your influence” step.

Cross promoting your blog post content is an extremely effective way to build thought leadership and expand your network. Use tools like Hootsuite, Sprout Social and Buffer to schedule your blog posts throughout the week.

Many business professionals tweet or post their blog only once on the day they hit publish. Make certain you are making the most of your blog content by pulling quotes and useful tips out of it and repurposing them into simple graphics, a quick video or even the incredibly popular infographic.

Thank you so much for your contribution, Rebekah! I’ve enjoyed learning from you.

Adding more visual interest to your blog posts also came up in last week’s Google+ post from Paul Biedermann, and Denise Wakeman suggests that images are a cornerstone of online visibility. The lesson seems to be that no matter how well you write and how relevant your topics, to get attention on crowded social media sites like Facebook you need to stand out and be noticed.

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Enjoying this series about social media and blogging? Check out the other posts here. You can also find my post about using Twitter for business at Social Media Today.