You can’t read any marketing material without hearing about social media – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIN, Google Buzz, tec. — but blogging is also a social platform. Twitter is defined as a micro-blogging service. Instead of a whole paragraph or a whole page, it is a 140 character blog post to the Twitter service. Who says you can’t blog?

Why blog?

A bunch of reasons including to demonstrate your subject matter expertise; for publicity (PR); to become a Trusted Advisor; for reputation; or to just be heard.

In general, you blog for marketing.

A side effect of blogging (and other social networking) is SEO (search engine optimization) – or at the very least, search engine results. If you create enough organic, genuine content around your subject or topic (or keyword), the search engines will ikely find it (eventually). The more content and the more frequent you create content, the better your search results. So blog often.

Jay Conrad Levinson wrote the Guerrilla Marketing Handbook with Seth Godin in 1994. Things have changed a lot since then. Hyper-competition for one thing. The ubiquity of the Internet for another. Entrepreneur magazine says that it takes 5 minutes to create a top-notch marketing plan. I disagree because it takes about 45 minutes to clarify your Positioning statement (your USP, your differentiation). I did a presentation on this a couple of years ago. Here it is:

In the same issue of Entrepreneur, 198 items for your guerrilla marketing arsenal [here].

Next week, Jack Brandt of Register.com and I are back at ISPCON to do another session on Marketing. For those that read this blog, here’s a thank you gift – the presentation early.

As many of you know, I don’t use PowerPoint during my sessions, but these are the ideas I will be trying to convey about Marketing, Messaging, and Guerrilla tactics.