Episode 1: Attitude, Approach and Goals

Episode 2: Strategy, Tactics and Execution

The videos above are episodes one and two of a presentation I gave on my company’s journey into the world of Blogging, FaceBook , LinkedIn and Twitter. In “Leveraging Social Media to Build Lasting Customer Relationships”, I discuss how we created an effective website that links both our corporate site (www.dockmaster.com) and our marine-blog site (www.marinemanagementtoday.com) using the power of Wordpress and various other tools. In addition, I will describe the misconceptions I had about marketing, and how master bloggers like Seth Godin, Tim Ferris and Joel Spolsky helped to shape my view of marketing on the web and building a strong brand.

In the above presentations, I have integrated the live video feed with the actual PowerPoint presentation I gave at the International Marine Industry’s Applied Emerging Technologies Conference. I cover the following topics:

- The “Network Effect” and how the web gives anyone new kind of leverage
- Marketing misconceptions
- Permission-based marketing (Seth’s philosophy)
- Why I blog
- The tools I use
- How to be #1 on Google without spending a fortune
- How I use FaceBook, LinkedIn and Twitter to enhance my blog
- Website analytics
- Tips and Tricks
- Lessons learned

Key takeaways:

- Attitude and Approach before Tactics and Execution
- Ideas that spread Win (This is Seth’s philosophy and I am spreading the word!)
- Measure your real ROI and tie those metrics to engagement programs
- Don’t blog for money, blog to build community
- Commitment before Success, not the other way around. This is not an instant success formula

Note: I was asked how much time I spend blogging. My answer was “too long” and I went on to explain that I am a perfectionist and feel that a blog is a permanent legacy of a person. I also tried without success to use a ghost writer on one of my blogs and spent more time editing that one than if I would have written it myself. After reflecting upon this I’ve determined that I spend about 4-hours every other week on my blog and about 5 to 15 minutes per day on Twitter and FaceBook combined.