In addition to these sites, start volunteering for local/nearby charities. You'll find that it's a good way to build up your network (why do you think so many execs are on nonprofit boards?) and your credibility within the nonprofit space.

We blog for a number of reasons. Since we run a B2B business, we'll write about topics of interest (i.e. issues in the B2B or software space), our community/users and the company, as appropriate.

Check it out: http://about.g2crowd.com/blog Our site is also at http://g2crowd.com. (Might give you a better sense of what we're about.)

What happens then? Are they just there to take down your opinion?

Give it a try; report back.

Go to Google. Search for your favorite companies. See if they have Google Places pages, Facebook pages or websites. Chances are some of the smaller ones won't have the latter.

We have a few contributors for the G2 Crowd blog (http://about.g2crowd.com/blog), but it's a great place not only for sharing company news, POVs, media coverage and more, but to publish highlights from your user/customer base as well.

What fraction of traffic does your blog do compared to your main site?

Apologies. Nothing came up when I searched for it!

Yeah, that was a hard one. We just remembered it from yesterday.

This is critical. As a marketer, I've seen - far too often, mind you - a severe disconnect between the perception of one's customers, and the reality.

Not saying that you need to have full personas, in which you include ALL motivations, demographics, customer journeys - the works - but it helps to have something on paper that you can refer to.

The beauty of it is you can always change them!

Agreed!

Very robust answer. Thanks for taking the time to respond!

Thanks--I guess I had a lot of this pent up and this was the perfect thread to post it in.