So you’ve got a corporate website, a PR company on a monthly retainer and a marketing team.

If you’re lucky, you might also have a search agency making sure Google knows how to find you.

You might also have a media buying agency, a PPC agency, an advertising agency and a creative or design agency on the books too.

Surely then social media would be covered by that phalanx of experts?Unfortunately it doesn’t necessarily follow… because social media potentially cuts across all of those disciplines while adding something extra to the mix.

Put the technology considerations aside for the moment, go back to first principles and remind yourself social media is about people and conversations.

Conversations require you to listen, and advertisers are more used to blasting – in a previously effective manner – messages at people.

Conversations demand authenticity, and PRs have given themselves a bad reputation by spinning stories and manipulating the court of public opinion.

Conversations take place in what can be thought of as earned media space, which can’t be bought by your buying agency.

Conversations can be more powerful then SEO… like the following screenshot shows:

Affinion is a faceless corporation that markets “value added services” to finance companies and the like. It ran a scheme called Leisuretime that companies like Barclaycard gave their name to, much to the chagrin on their customers.

But what this example really shows is that you piss off customers enough – or equally please them – then the money you’ve spent on everything else in your marketing mix can be negated.

At digitalmud we are neither PRs, or SEO gods or media buyers – we are chatters and doers who specialise in social media. What that means in reality is that we have first class knowledge of all these inter-related disciplines to help you make a coherent picture out of your marketing jigsaw pieces.

By putting in place a strategic social media plan and building social media capability inside your company you can tie these various pieces together to build your digital footprint and dazzle your customers with your responsiveness.

What steps are you taking to nurture and protect your digital footprint?