MindLink Marketing is officially open for business this week and I couldn’t be more excited about working with technology companies to address their strategic marketing needs. As I have been reaching out to companies, inevitably the conversation circles around to social media and what their strategy should be to utilize this increasingly important medium. Universally, companies recognize that social networking sites are changing the way that they should be interacting with prospects.

Unfortunately, for many companies they have not been able to get past the very tactical step of establishing a company presence. They put up a LinkedIn corporate site, a facebook site, establish a corporate blog (which typically has a flurry of posts and then tapers off to inactivity), maybe even set up a YouTube account and post a few videos. Then they hit a roadblock. What next?

It is important to understand that social media is simply a new and highly effective medium for distributing a company’s original content. Good social media strategy always should begin with a web content and messaging strategy. I just engaged with a client and our discussion focused on the following important items:

• Thought leadership – how will their content strategy support thought leadership in their industry
• Competitive positioning – how will their content build a case for prospects prioritizing capabilities that emphasize their strengths and highlight competitors weaknesses
• Customer needs – what key needs are they addressing for prospects
• Search marketing – what key words need to be consistently used in the content they create
• Messaging strategy – what are the top messages that they want to weave into all of their posts and documents
• Key markets and market drivers - what markets are most important to them and what motivates their purchasing decisions, i.e. regulatory requirements

Only after walking through their strategy for web content and messaging did we begin to approach how that would be distributed through coordinated blog posting, tweeting, blog responses, pay per click campaigns, LinkedIn group postings, etc. If your company is exploring a social media strategy, think first about how you will be able to create fresh, consistent and relevant content to get the best results. Once you know what content you will create and who will create it then think about how you will distribute that content through a variety of social avenues.