I do.

The first time I got this question, I was surprised and took a second to answer.

Of course I write it, I thought. My name is on it.

When I asked people why they asked, they said that they loved the blog, but figured that I had other people writing under my direction. I was a CEO, after all.

The question prompted two thoughts.

First, we all have different styles of thinking and communicating. I write, so when I hit on something that I’m interested or puzzled about, my inclination is to try to get it down on paper and see whether it makes sense. I can go through my old files and find documents that I have written at different key moments in my career that laid out what I was seeing and how it sorted out.

This blog simply offers a platform to share some of those things. I write it because that’s what I do…write.

The second thought stems from that last point: a lot of people have things to say, but they aren’t people who write. There’s nothing wrong with that; we all have our different styles.

Those people who have things to say but aren’t people who write shouldn’t be left out of the power of using content and social media to communicate. And, people don’t expect them to be left out. When people asked me whether I wrote this blog or not, the question wasn’t pejorative. They don’t expect CEO’s to write, but they do expect them to have something to say.

Two years ago, when I began seriously exploring how businesses were using social media tools to market, I was struck by this basic inequity: the benefits of social media accrued to the people who could write, not necessarily the people who were the best at doing the work of their business. People who were facile with content and technology could stamp out daunting digital footprints, taking mindshare and traffic away from other, potentially more expert and more deserving businesses.

This was the problem we decided to try to solve when we launched the DigitalSherpa line of services: Can you make content marketing using social media tools accessible to local businesses? The purpose was to help level the playing field, to give people who had something to say but lacked the skills to say it a toolkit.

We’ve had some success and are learning along the way. I’m constantly struck, though, by people who look at businesses and say, If you don’t do social media yourself, then you’re not doing it the right way. That statement has an elitist and exclusive air. The real question that all of us should be trying to contribute solutions to is how to make the power of social media marketing available to any business, regardless of how good they are at writing and interacting and sharing.

In the 455 posts since I launched ViralHousingFix on January 4, 2009, there hasn’t been a longer gap than the one between Post 454 and this post, number 455:  11 days.

The workbook I use for my professional notes is chock full from the past two weeks, and the program I store interesting snippets in has a long backlog, but there haven’t been any posts.

Being busy with a lot of exciting developments at NCI is part of the explanation.  Getting engaged in a personal writing project is another.  But there are a couple of other reasons for the fallow spell that I think might be interesting to those of you who follow this blog regularly.

The first is that I’ve stepped back for a bit to see how things are going to turn out.  Over the past 16 months, I’ve written and shared a lot of analysis of the economy and the housing market.  The two big questions were exactly what the composition of the recession was and what the beginning of the recovery would look like.

Right now, we’re in the recovery and it’s a choppy and uncertain time.  The macro trends have been positive, as a fairly random selection of charts picked from the blog Carpe Diem shows.  Our business at NCI is hyper-local and consumer-driven, and our experience is showing us that while the recovery has settled people’s nerves, it is neither expansive or extended enough to dramatically shift consumer sentiment to the degree that households are getting reformed and the consumer’s near term outlook is upbeat.

That sense of stasis has diminished my urgency to write about economic trends.  I don’t feel like there’s anyway to really project when consumers are going to have a baseline change in outlook.  It’s going to happen.  When it happens we’ll be happy about it, and a little surprised that we didn’t see it happening at the outset.

In a New York Times column, Jack Stack, CEO of SRC Holdings, Inc., summed up the current zeitgeist:

The funny thing is that despite their recent success, most of these folks seem reluctant to acknowledge that things have gotten better. Why? Well, I have two theories about that: one, people feel so burned by the last few years that they still fear a double dip — and they’re still waiting for another shoe to drop.

I think that’s a pretty good characterization.

A second reason for the dry spell on the blog is that I’ve been digging in on the learnings that we’ve developed around our DigitalSherpa social media marketing service over the past year.  It’s been pretty rich and exciting, and part of an overall organization audit and assessment that we’re doing across the service.

I haven’t written about the things I’ve learned because there’s a lot to synthesize:  the outcomes and experiences of more than 1000 client engagements.  We’ve essentially got thousands and thousands of proof points around the power of content marketing on social platforms, the relative value of different types of engagement, and the impact that a consistent content marketing plan has on search traffic and referrals.

Some of the facts are fun for their sheer scale.  For instance, we’ve generated more than 1 million social interactions for our clients in the multi-family space since launching CommunitySherpa last summer.  Some of the facts are engaging for their business impact:  one client has been able to cut more than $200,000 of search marketing spend because of the impact of the content marketing program that we’ve executed.  (That $200,000+ savings is net of the cost of the program, by the way.)

When you man a blog single-handedly, you’re going to experience ebbs and flows.  What you were writing about isn’t always what you are going to be writing about, and when you get to a juncture where you see a new avenue to explore, sometimes you just need to set back and sift through facts for a while.

The last three weeks have been partly busy and partly sifting time.  Thanks for your patience.  The one thing that has really impressed me is how strong the traffic to the blog has stayed.  That’s because of the way that all of you have used the content — the sharing, the commenting and the reading.  I appreciate it.

What’s the most important and tangible goal for marketers using social media? To drive web traffic, according to an ongoing benchmarking study conducted by the consulting firm MarketingSherpa.

73% of the more than 2300 respondents to the MarketingSherpa survey says they target the goal of increasing web traffic, and measure results against that goal, when they deploy social media marketing programs.

The next three most mentioned goals are equally tangible: increasing sales revenue, improving search engine rankings and increasing lead generation.

Within the general discourse about social media, there is a lot of emphasis placed on the opportunity to open up organizations and create a new level of engagement with prospects and customers.

In our implementation of social media marketing programs, we’ve seen the potential of that activity.

Yet, the most tangible impact comes from the increase in visibility on search engines, and the direct conversion of consumers to website visitors, that accompanies the expansion of a company’s digital footprint.

The brand marketers surveyed by MarketingSherpa recognize the central role their corporate web site plays in their business strategies, and are assessing the impact of social media in terms of how well it helps to improve those strategies.

For those of us providing social media marketing programs, being able to articulate the benefit of a service against these objectives, as well as providing measurable results, will be at the crux of long-term success.

So what happened?

After months and months of a pretty steady production on ViralHousingFix, the publishing schedule got inconsistent. And, I’ve started a few things that I haven’t kept up, like The Good Reads posts.

It’s pretty simple. I’ve been taking some time to think.

Some questions and problems need to sift and filter. Around this time every year, I find myself reviewing the basic things that I’m thinking about and spending time on. Is the time well spent? And is the focus well reasoned?

This process of reflection is a lot of thought-crunching, paring each thing that I spend time on down to its essential and then to build it back up, looking for new opportunities for focus, invention and improvement.

Sometimes new ideas and emphasis come out of it. Sometimes I just try to make what I’m focusing on better.

When I found myself beginning to go through the filtering process recently, I realized that I needed to dial down the amount of content that I was taking in and putting out in order to focus better.

A few new themes are beginning to coalesce. I think you’ll see them bubble up in the content here. I’m finding new questions are popping up and I’m looking forward to trying to sort them out.

An important video to watch if you’re around social media and you start thinking you are super f***ing awesome.

Please though, if you are not comfortable with profanity,  do not click through to the video.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKCdexz5RQ8

Sorry for the two-day absence on the Good Reads. (I just know there are a handful of you who look forward to these short summaries to fill out your day!) I’ve been traveling and working on preparing materials for our quarterly Board meeting next week, so haven’t been filtering things the way I usually do.

Here’s some of the things around the web that have stuck with me over the past couple of days:

The reliable CalculatedRisk takes today’s employment numbers and surrounds them with context and easy-to-digest charts. Click through and enjoy.

Alan Patrick gave a thoughtful presentation this week about the role of Social Media in the Enterprise. He cuts through a lot of the froth and looks at how social media tools can drive value in three areas: revenue creation, cost reduction and capital reduction. (via BroadStuff)

Mortgage bankers have been meeting in Washington this week and the dialogue has been interesting. There’s capital in the market to fund the private mortgage securitizations; the caution relates to external regulatory and policy factors. On balance, good signs for the regular and jumbo mortgage markets next year. (via HousingWire)

Interesting paper about the effect of the recession on “Consumption inequality” and “Income inequality.” Moral: Declining asset values reduce consumption, so the decline in housing values has affected consumption by the higher income quintiles to a higher degree. Of course, this reality is offset by the fact that the jobs shed by the economy have been concentrated in less skilled labor pools. (via Economist’s View)

The FriendFinder IPO just couldn’t happen. (via PaidContent)

Is Consumer social media a bad business? Alan Patrick reflects on the views of Bo Peabody. (via Broadstuff)

Research data from Nielsen that looks at how we consume TV content over the Internet. The current model is using the web as a solitary time-shifter. How will it change? (via NielsenWire)

Take a trip to the Mall of the future. A good exploration of how the technologies we currently have will be integrated in the retail experience. Prompts many thoughts about local, media, marketing and context. (via RetailTrafficMag)

An underlying premise of social networking is the authenticity and credibility of your social graph. When people who you have networked with digitally recommend information, experience or products, you are likely to lend their recommendations more credibility than someone you don’t know. Facebook and Twitter make this kind of socially-curated content sharing incredibly convenient to do.

MINOnline shares recent data from Hitwise that shows just how much impact content sharing has. The chart to the left shows the share of click-thrus to news and media sites from Google News and Facebook. Since May, Facebook has increased its share of upstream click-thrus significantly against Google News.

Some of the phenomenon is driven by scale: Google News has about 63 million visits a month, compared to 2.7 billion for Facebook. But more of the phenomenon is driven by the way people use Facebook; according to the company, more than 3.5 million pieces of content — web links, news stories, blog posts, etc. — are shared by Facebook users each week. People are filtering content, and are looking for content filtered by the members of their social graph.

This trend underscores the opportunities for marketers and media brands.

For a marketer, when a consumer has elected to include your brand in their social graph, they will be receptive to shared content. An effective content-marketing program, which attempts to educate, enlighten and entertain consumers about your brand is an effective way to increase awareness and drive web traffic.

For a media brand, the concept of curating content becomes an important component of your strategy for connecting with an audience. People have a large appetite for content; the increase in the proportion of content that they are accessing through trusted connections suggest that people are looking into their social graph to ensure a good content experience. When a consumer includes a media brand in their social graph, they are inviting that brand to help guide their exploration of good content. It doesn’t all have to be original. It does all have to be useful and relevant to the brand experience.

This shift toward accessing content through curated networks will only increase in the future. Media and marketing brands have an opportunity to increase their brand footprint if they become active and useful participants in the phenomenon.

A basic form of web currency that gets discussed more and more frequently is Google Juice.

Say the words “Google Juice” and people are likely to nod their head knowingly. Getting Google Juice is a dark art, easy to understand and hard to execute. People hear Google Juice and they think, Page 1.

As we’ve driven our business at NCI more and more into a Web 2.0 world, the concept of Google Juice becomes the axis point for many discussions. Too often the dialogue settles into a pattern of defining Google Juice as an outcome of highly-specific tactics designed to influence Google’s behavior.

These conversations are flawed. Google Juice is an ongoing by-product of a consistent content strategy that connects with a specific audience. As my colleague Todd Dubner points out, when you try to game Google, you end up gaming yourself. But when you try to serve a market with consistent content, even with a marketing emphasis, you’ll accrue a natural level of Google Juice that will differentiate you from the market.

Last week I spent a couple of hours with our top management team taking them through a case study in Google Juice.

The subject of the study was this blog.

As regular readers know, the purpose of the blog is to provide an outlet for structured thinking and analysis about business issues that I face in my professional life. The blog is not about the company I work for. It isn’t designed to advance any brand goals. It has no commercial bent — I don’t run ads, I don’t sell consulting. It is primarily a strategy and business information workspace.

As a result, I cover an eclectic number of topics somewhat consistently. I write about that loose focus here. I am not focusing at all on optimizing against specific topics or categories.

But I am consistent in creating content. That makes the way that my blog behaves in search engines a direct by-product of the consistency of the content that I create and its relevance to the audience that has developed around it. Dan McCarthy’s ViralHousingFix is a good study in how powerful Google Juice can be.

More than one-third of the traffic to this blog each month comes from search. Let’s see how that breaks down.

First, some basics about the blog.

It was launched on December 2008. I set it up on Blue Host and built it in WordPress. I use the Thesis theme and a number of different plugins. The five that are most relevant to the blog’s Google performance is the All-in-One SEO plug-in, the Google XML site maps plug-in, Calais’ Tagaroo semantic tag plug-in and plug-ins that integrate WordPress with Twitter and Facebook Connect.

Over the past year, I’ve published 361 posts, about 1 per day. The level of engagement on the site is low: there have been 431 comments.

The site has a digital footprint of about 7000 or so individuals. I get 3000 to 5000 unique visits a month. I have 580 fans to the ViralHousingFix Facebook page, which is used a content distribution point. I have another 650 friends on my Facebook profile; I redistribute about half of the content to my personal profile. My personal Twitter account has 1230 followers; I do 7 to 10 Tweets per day. These are mostly focused on sharing content, either from the blog or from other sources that I find interesting. I’ve got another 1000 connections across various site.

Each time I publish a blog post, I distribute it across my digital footprint. I’m not an active commenter nor am I an active solicitor of links across multiple sites. Generally, I’ve focused on initiating and maintaining my digital links to my Community of Interest, a topic I’ve written a fair amount about in the last couple of months.

This activity generates a lot of link activity: Google identified more than 2300 links coming into ViralHousingFix. A disproportionate percentage of those links come from a couple of blogs, like The Kelsey Group blog and WineZag, that update their content frequently and that list ViralHousingFix in their blog rolls.

The sum of this activity is that ViralHousingFix has a high visibility in some intuitive Google searches that help consistently drive traffic to the site. As Google has indexed the site, it has identified a handful of keywords that help it direct search results. These are show in the chart to the right.

“Media” and “social” are the two primary terms, an accurate reflection of one topic I write about frequently.

The next chart shows the 14 top search queries that drove users to ViralHousingFix in December. (Again, these figures are from Google’s Webmaster tools.)

The table shows the percentage of unique visitors from search to the site that were driven by the term. For instance, 14% of unique users from searches to the site typed in “viral housing fix.” The third column the text of the query and the last column shows where on the search page the ViralHousingFix link showed up.

For instance, 11% of visitors from search in December typed in the words “current state of the economy.” The results that were served up had a ViralHousingFix post in the 6th position on the search page.

This is the essence of Google Juice. When someone searches to learn about State Farm’s social media program, they see ViralHousingFix in the second position. Type in the words “Comscore rental” and you’ll see a post from this blog at number 4. Search for results around “multi-platform marketing” and you’ll see this blog at number 1.

The impact of this becomes more tangible when you look at specific search results. Here are examples of six searches that drove traffic to ViralHousingFix last week.

The first is a query about GDP.

The second is a query about State Farm. My post from last April is the third result on the page.

The third is a query about the current state of the economy. Google served up a post from October.

The fourth is a query about social media case studies in real estate.

The fifth is a query about print advertising leads.

The last is a query about Print or Web advertising in real estate. I find this one interesting. This question is a galvanizing topic in real estate, and one about which we have a very strong point of view at NCI. Search for this on Google and four results come up that are highly relevant to the question: a realtor who advocates cutting back print, a question and answer sequence on Google Answers, and a post from ViralHousingFix speaking to the impact print advertising has on web traffic.

The fact that this post, which is not specific to the real estate industry, shows up so high in the results speaks to the power of the Google Juice that this blog has developed. Google associates a high level of relevance and credibility to the blog around real estate, marketing, advertising, media and marketing. The confluence of these categories of relevance, combined with the incidence of words in my post that are consistent with the search terms, brings the ViralHousingFix post high up in the sequence.

The cumulative impact of this Google Juice is that ViralHousingFix has a degree of brand authority that makes its reach much larger than its actual traffic. The table below shows the Compete traffic results for ViralHousingFix.com over the past year. Contrast that audience of a few thousand with the visibility of ViralHousingFix in relatively general searches online for information about the economy, marketing, social media and advertising.

This is the tangible impact of a social media marketing program. When I speak to groups around the country, I use this example to help them understand how developing a smart content program, and creating a consistent distribution network, will give them increased engagement with their Community of Interest and increased relevance within Google. Over time, they will be rewarded with more visibility on Google.

The difference in a marketing program is that the topics are designed to be more consistent with your business goals. We talked about this during the management workshop. The single most effective way to generate increased visibility and Google Juice is to find out what people are asking about that is relevant to your business goals.

The quickest way to do that is to begin typing a search into Google. I demonstrated this for the management team.

We sell advertising services in The Real Estate Book. We maintain a brand-specific blog at blog.therealestatebook.com. We know that there are some basic topics that we want to cover: The continued value of print advertising integrated with internet advertising to real estate agents who want to have a visible footprint in their market; the importance of advertising even in a down market; and the ways that real estate agents can take advantage of social media to build their business.

If we wanted to improve our ability to intersect with people who are searching for information about real estate advertising, we would begin to share our point of view about the most popular searches. What are great real estate advertising slogans? What are new real estate advertising ideas? What are some key tips to successful real estate advertising?

There is nuance required. If we were to slavishly write about these topics, we would lose the relevance that we’ve established with our current audience, our Community of Interest. But, using Google can help focus what is on the mind of the broader audience and help a brand drive a content strategy that gives it even more Google Juice.

Looking over the search logs made me aware of one thing: I owe the people who are coming to this blog an update on State Farm’s social media strategy. It’s been too long since I’ve looked at it and the post that is served up in search is stale.

I’ve been doing some family research this past year, trying to uncover my mother’s father’s heritage. One of the most powerful tools has been the online editions of the U.S. Census from the late 19th and early 20th Century. Looking at these forms closely, you’re able to piece together the mosaic of a person’s life. The research has been rich and engaging.

In 2083 (when the 2010 Census is scheduled to be released to the public), my great-great-grandchild won’t be able to pull the same richness of information from the Census. This year, the form has been reduced to 10 questions. Here it is.

Search the blogosphere and you’ll find a lot of discussion about the Census, the political process of generating the form and assorted levels of disappointment about how little information there is.

I’m struck by a different angle: We’re seduced by the easy digitization of identity and history. For any of us living a digital life, we’ve got a remarkable chronicle of the current time. But almost none of it is tangible, like the old, wrinkled photos my mother had of her father in Arkansas in the early 1900′s. Those five or six artifacts helped to organize the parameters of a rich dive into the archives.

We’re living a kind of constant state of Jung’s collective unconscious, where we all share awareness through the stream, molding perception, archetype and reality. But we’ve consigned our archives to the stream as well, up in the cloud, or in fragile digital bits. In 100 years, what will be know about today will depend on the ability of institutions and individuals to archive this new storage format. I’m skeptical.

Brian Solis wrote a reflective post today that strayed from his typical forward-looking perspective to reflect on how the term “Social Media” has morphed to encompass all kinds of web activity.

He harkens back to a definition of social media that was developed by a group of leading thinkers a couple of years ago. That definition focused in its short version on the idea of conversation.

The landscape has changed markedly since Solis’ group developed their seminal definition. What is striking is the degree to which the concept of conversation has remained at the core of many people’s definition of social media and infiltrated the idea of how marketing should develop in the space.

When you take the perspective that social media is a set of tools then conversation becomes one part of a broad spectrum of different opportunities. New media companies have created vibrant communities by integrating different parts of the social media toolkit. Facebook, for instance, is a media property that combines different social media tools, such as photo uploading, video uploading, commenting, e-mail, messaging and micro-blogging, into a common interface that is easy for consumers to use.

I often compare AOL and Facebook, because the initial purpose of both services was to aggregate communities and create connections. AOL drove its product development towards a focus on content publishing from media partners; Facebook drove its development towards building easy-to-use content creation and networking tools.

For a business that wants to intersect with consumers online in a dynamic fashion, incorporating social media tools into the marketing process is essential. Each of the tools requires a different set of skills and processes. Starting a conversation with the market is ONE of the things that social media tools make possible. But even without engaging in conversations, businesses can bolster their marketing by changing the way that they create and distribute marketing content, turning the marketing dialogue into an ongoing series of information exchanges rather than one-time marketing events.

Social media tools have moved Content to the forefront of any marketing process. These tools have changed how Media has to think about the process for building content and audience. Solis is on target when he talks about social media become the essence of new media. It’s even bigger than that: Social media tools have the potential to force change in the structure and process of organizations on the scale that the introduction of the personal computer did.