Atomizing your content: your B2B social life

Web marketing used to be all about driving traffic to your website.  Now, it’s also about driving your content out into the wider web to see who trips over it, links to it, re-tweets it, rates it, comments on it, shares it and (of course) follows the backlinks back to your site.  This social media is becoming increasingly important in digital marketing.

At Velocity, we have content all over the place, including:

Flickr – fun but probably the least useful of our social sharing exercises.  Photos on their own don’t tell much of a B2B story — though we’d love to hear how any other B2B marketer might be using flickr.

YouTube – a Velocity channel for video case stories (check out the one for BT Global Services) and for videos we’ve done for clients (the VNL film, shot in rural India, is a favourite).

Twitter – we use Doug’s Twitter feed for micro-content and links to other Velocity content… (this is all getting terribly self-referential).

Scribd – Like YouTube but for documents.  We put a few up there to see who might stumble over our threshold…

Biznik – This is a business-driven social networking site that seems to have a more active community than LinkedIn.  We’ve published articles on there and attracted readers and comments.

YouBundle –Like Squidoo (below), a quick way to create a page on any topic and sprinkle it with goodies, including links back to your site, content, blog, etc.This is our B2B Marketing Bundle…

Squidoo – another way to make quick web pages (they call them Lenses) that hold content, links, images, video…  Ours is a bit promotional but you get the idea.

Slideshare – publish your powerpoint presentations and tag them for all to discover.  Our first one, on Twitter for B2B, got put on the Slideshare home page for a while and some nice comments.

LinkedIn Groups –  we push a lot of content into the relevant LinkedIn groups, via the News or Discussion areas.  This generates a significant amount of traffic back to our site but it also gets comments and discussion going in LinkedIn.

Pitch Engine – and other press release distribution services.  This kind of thing may not get many human readers but it does wonders for your Google PageRank and your SEO.  Here’s a spoof press release we did to test this kind of thing.

Social Bookmarking – Don’t just post content, Digg it, Stumble it, put it on delicious,  Technorati and any other social bookmarking sites you have the time to use.

Needless to say, we’re also using tools like this for our client work — promoting content, generating traffic, seeding backlinks and creating dialogues.

Your own website will still be the heart of your digital marketing and all roads should ideally lead back to it.  But it’s naive to think your prospects will always come to your website (most don’t even know who you are).  Instead, loosen the apron strings and let your content run free — as long as your URL and some keyphrases are pinned to its jumper.