Are You Thriving in the Digital Ecosystem?
Posted on Wed, Aug 04, 2010
The digital ecosystem is complex. And it grows more complex every day. It is time consuming just keeping up with the developments, let alone taking the time to integrate and manage them.
How then do decision makers make sense of this ever expanding digital ecosystem and grow their business at the same time?
It requires looking at your digital foundation in three parts:
- Website
- Content
- Social Media Engagement
In the spirit of the term ecosystem, let's look at each component through the lens of the plant life ecosystem.
Website
A company's website is its digital home base and front lawn. It is the place where existing and prospective clients gather. Yet in order for people to find your website, it needs to be searchable in the midst of the internet jungle. Keyword selection and optimization in titles, headings, images, and anchor text are critical to ensuring this. In order to keep people on your website, you need to think like a gardener and create an engaging landscape.
Content
Like a good gardener, you need to make sure that your website is being nurtured and cultivated. Plants rely on sun, water, and nutrients to sustain themselves. Websites depend on content to sustain their search rankings, searchability and relevance to existing and prospective clients. Updating content - blogs, videos, images, and other forms of text - on a regular basis ensures sustenance. Plus careful use of language and keywords can help in building and securing links that can enable your website and monetization opportunities to grow even further.
Social Media
Engaging in social media is akin to pollination. With pollination, plants and gardens grow as the birds and bees engage with them and then carry seeds and pollen across the ecosystem. Social media tools like Twitter and Facebook enable existing and prospective customers to spread new content and insights about your company throughout the digital ecosystem. Social media pollination can lead to new customers and leads as well as securing loyalty with exisiting customers.
So how is your digital foundation? What are you doing to strengthen it? Are you generating more traffic and monetization opportunities in the process? If not, perhaps you should spend a little more time in your own garden for ideas for thriving in the digial ecosytem.