I think this visual summary from Nick Burcher of the convergence of SEO, social media and brand-building activity is a great summary on which companies can discuss a strategy to succeed in this world. As with all new approaches, it is often easier for smaller organisations to have the balls to do this – corporate governance and brand protection in larger brands will often prevent this.

So good to see this short video from Toyota Europe on their social media strategy (for Twitter and blogs) for a case study of one global brand where marketing appears to have won the argument. I’m an admirer of the Toyota UK blog which shows an integrated approach.

Back to SEO and something I have noticed on a personal level is that the bar is much higher to get backlinks thanks to Twitter – the majority of us will Tweet no problem, but preparing a blog post or even a comprehensive reply like yours requires commitment that few have today. Fortunately the search engineers realise this and I’m convinced they are looking at new signals like social bookmarking and Twitter.

These are a fantastic set of articles you have written here. Link building seems to be one of those things that seems so daunting that so many clients just forget about it. I always think that it is about Signal to noise ratio. If enough information of note is offered then a reciprocal amount will be returned and that’s the point where backlinks happen. I was at Ad Tech last week and there were a lot of people there who seemed to be upbeat (not a bad thing in the current climate) but singing the same tune as before.

My belief is that this is a pivotal moment for digital media in general and could be the point where it comes of age. SEO and SEM have both been lauded as complete solutions for a while now in various quarters but my point (and my company’s strategy) is that these are still tactics, and not over arching solutions. Both of these (you can include social media as well) are about gaining the attention of an audience. They don’t do anything more than that though, and time and time again a tactical approach gets attention and fails to do anything with it. Its only when you take a strategic approach with an end to end solution that you truly deliver the benefit to clients in the form of orders and cash. I believe that its time Digital moved away from the boutiques with their specialised disciplined (whether it be search, web design, email, social media etc and started to look at the overall process from first contact to final order and then beyond that to repeat order and referral. I won’t Spam you by leaving my own back links on your blog but if you have a look at my site you will see the strategy I mean.

I would be interested to hear your thoughts back if you do look at it.

All the best

Aaron