I took this from one of my proposal intros. It’s a pretty straight forward take on how I view my business and our industry.

The purpose of any social media campaign is to buy subscribers and drive awareness of the product through the use of links, traffic, and reader awareness.

To accomplish this, corporate bloggers must first understand the landscape of online communities. Internet users cluster into groups online, just as people cluster together in the real world. We join associations, churches, businesses, and political parties and adopt those labels as a way of identifying with groups whose characteristics define us. It’s human nature to cluster, and to take on the identity of the groups of which we wish to be a part. When you take this dynamic and apply it to the online world, you gain the additional benefit of participating in an environment that can be easily tracked, organized, and explained.

The act of joining communities online is a form of self-labeling that is tremendously helpful to marketers and analysts.

There are several categories of self-labels online. In addition to taking part in communities like Facebook, MySpace, the “blogosphere” and sites like Yahoo and AOL (their online groups and forums), internet users can decorate their online profiles with blogrolls, badges, and other forms of link-sharing to indicate their interests.

And then we track them.

The goal of the social media marketer is to determine which online communities offer the best chance of influencing public opinion and awareness, and then to join those communities by participating in conversations, networking, and events of those communities.

This is not a “soft” description of how to generate awareness, but rather a very clearly defined strategy that involves reaching out to influential community members, gaining their trust through a pattern of reciprocal engagement, and finding ways to benefit the community (injecting value) so that the community can benefit the social media marketer (extracting value). While engaging with the community, the social media marketer has to be aware that while their time is compensated, the time of the rest of the community is not.

These are volunteers working and writing out of passion, curiosity, and a desire to learn and to be appreciated.

Ultimately, internet users go online to gain validation, which is the payment that they seek. The key to success in attracting attention for your cause, is to find people who you can validate because they deserve validation. If you can find the truly talented writers and thinkers online, you can join their community as a corporate blogger, validating them through your experience and the label of your company, while gaining trust, attention and traffic to your applications and website.