The Missing Link in Marketing with Social Media

Posted on December 1, 2009 by Lisa Isbell

linkSocial Media is all the rage these days and Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and a multitude of other sites are growing like wildfire.

When it comes to using these platforms for marketing, many are just left scratching their heads in seeing exactly how to use it for this purpose.  Over the last two years I’ve been studying a number of online marketing techniques, some I see a lot of discussion about and some I don’t see mentioned anywhere.  What leaped out at me right away is the potential for orchestrating a larger strategy using a multitude of online resources as tools and a means to an end.  It seems many others are discovering this too but aren’t quite sure how to put it into concrete terms and establish a formula for execution.

The term now in use for the overlying strategy for using Web 2.0 in conjunction with other online resources (and sometimes even a little smidgen of traditional marketing tossed into the mix) is Inbound Marketing.

Just going by feedback I’m getting in talking to people and watching discussions on a variety of forums I believe the overall principle of Inbound Marketing is the missing link for most who are struggling to make the pieces fit toward using online resources to market projects and ideas.

Social Media is drawing people in droves at the prospect of a less expensive (lets face it most people think it’s all free) means of advertising only to arrive and find it isn’t going to be quite as easy as it sounded.

Later this week I’ll explore this topic much more deeply.  Laying out an overview of what an inbound marketing strategy looks like, how it fits into the big picture that may already be in place and how to incorporate these methods into your marketing model.  Okay, so it might not be just one post, this is a lot to cover so I may be dropping it out here in smaller pieces.  Either way, my goal is to provide a solid overview to get you started.

You can do this yourself if you’re an army of one (as am I) and I’ll speak to that and I’ll also explain where the opportunities for outsourcing exist.

Stay tuned…

~Lisa


  • I'm looking forward to hearing more about inbound marketing. I've been working on social media marketing for my web design business now that it's a full time effort. It is time consuming to weed through all the chaffe looking for the relationships that count.
  • I'll be laying it all out step by step here on the blog over the next several months...the details in how to build an inbound marketing strategy and I'll talk about how and when to outsource different aspects as your business grows. I invite you to subscribe to the monthly email updates - each month I send out a summary of the blog posts plus some exclusive content just for subscribers. Thanks for stopping by and for your comments here. Lisa
  • Hi Kris,
    Thanks for your insight. I agree, the difficulty with all Social Media platforms, including LinkedIn, is the task of sifting through the spam and it causes a lot of people to just leave. I think we're always going to find those who want to take the low road, but more often I think the problem stems from the lack of understanding how to use these tools together toward a larger goal. So we see distribution of what most of us regard as spam. Many just haven't realized a more intricate plan for using each tool is needed and even when they do realize this, are struggling with where to start or just how to go about the task of tying everything together. Discovering Inbound Marketing is like the sun coming out on a cloudy day, a clear path becomes visible and the pieces become one. More to come...
  • Interesting concept. I look forward to hearing more....
  • Sounds like a great topic Lisa. One of the concerns that I have within the social media world is my perception of the apparent dillusion of the effectiveness of LinkedIn.

    I'm not sure if all groups within LinkedIn have this problem or maybe it's just isolated to some of the marketing groups. But I've noticed that rather than living up to their intended purpose of being havens for idea sharing and thought leadership, group "discussions" have become little more than glorified dumping grounds for high-class spammers. Frankly some of these groups have become little better than Craigs List.
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