In the days when a company website was the only aspect of a business' online presence, controlling brand consistency was pretty simple. With everything all in one place, you only had one shot at getting your audience's attention, but once you had it, there was only one set of branding you had to manage.
In the traditional, offline marketing models, often things were compartmentalized and kept completely separate. Your newspaper ads probably had little to do with your mailing list, except that the overall goal was to bring more business in. These days, the online marketing model is a little bit different, with every aspect contributing to the overall goal of gathering an audience so that everyone can join in on the conversation, in the expectation that some of those audience members will become and remain customers.
In a report released this week, global consumer insight giant Experian Marketing Services revealed statistics on how consumers in various markets spend their online time. The report shows that in 2012, the average American spent more than a quarter of every online hour on social networking sites. By contrast, only five minutes was spent shopping, and nine minutes was spent on entertainment sites.
You may be thinking that you don't have any need for blogging, or that the time it takes to write a post would outweigh any potential reward. Although there are certainly many ways to blog, a little can go a long way, and if you play your cards right, you'll see that even a small amount of blogging effort can yield some great search engine results.