Contel Bradford of DMB recently caught up with Nick Stamoulis, Brick Marketing founder, to get his thoughts on marketing in the era of the social web.

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In your opinion, how could a business benefit by implementing a three-pronged marketing strategy that involves email, search, and social media marketing? And what are the challenges of such an approach?
Search engine optimization, opt-in email marketing and social media marketing are all long term internet marketing channels.  They all help build trust and a solid reputation over time.  I think the biggest challenge of building a newsletter list or your organic visitors from the search engines is that these approaches take time and an extreme amount of commitment and patience.  This is an area that I see many clients’ struggle with, but overcome as well!  Personally, I think these approaches together are truly a triple punch that works well for most businesses.  But to clarify, SEO is something that works well for EVERY type of business, it’s not a matter of should I optimize my website it’s a matter of when!

How is Brick Marketing helping organizations capitalize on the social media frenzy?
At Brick Marketing, we offer 3 different types of service:  Full Service, Custom Training and Custom Consulting.  For social media marketing, over the past several years we have provided companies with these customized solutions based on their specific business and needs.  There are a few mistakes that I always see companies making with their social media marketing campaigns.  The first challenge is they don’t personalize their social media outlets.  Social media marketing is about people and communication. The second area of improvement for many companies is they tend to waste too much time on certain social media activities.  Social media marketing is the type of medium that you get out what you put in, but it is very easy to waste time on non-performing areas and/or not give it enough time to work.

What are the challenges of measuring social media marketing ROI?
Measuring the ROI of social media marketing is always very challenging because of the long term and sometime intangible nature.  I think social media marketing (like all other forms of internet marketing) has its place within each organization and is not the end all be all.  Many people are under the impression that social media will solve all of their sales problems.  This is generally not the case.  When you measure your social media, in my eyes it is simple, are you looking to increase your brand awareness in your industry?  Or are you looking to communicate to your customers and potential client?  Or are you looking to increase visitors over time?  The point here is measuring social media marketing is very different for every type of business but it should be tested accordingly.

With the social web continually changing the marketing landscape, what improvements do you think can be made to better measure campaign performance?
That is a loaded question and honestly I am not sure.  I think social media will certainly continue to change and the reporting metrics will change with it.  The bottom line in my mind and the best advice that I can give companies looking to building the social media or search engine presence is NEVER put all of your web marketing eggs in one basket, diversify your marketing portfolio!