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Lest we forget that the Internet is not powered entirely by tweets and friending, Small Business Trends has a nice explanation out today regarding the value of the more “traditional” blog. The conclusion:

Though it can be attractive as a SMB owner to let social sites like Facebook or Twitter become your dominant Web presence, it comes with a high cost. The less time you spend building content and authority for your site, the more you make yourself dependent on tools that may one day fall away. And if Facebook or Twitter went away tomorrow – would you have enough seeds planted to attract your audience?

The article makes some great points against putting all your eggs in a basket owned by someone else, and some equally salient points in favor of building your own authoritative web presence that does not rely on the whims of the rapidly evolving social media space.

At RepEquity, we tend to take this a step further. It’s crucial to develop a multifaceted approach to online reputation management – one that includes full immersion in the social media world, but also stakes out more permanent territory. As Small Business Trends points out, you want to be able to exercise full control over some of your online properties; the advantages include strategic link-structures, credibility as a thought leader, and the ability to create great content that supports your brand.

However, simply launching a single blog shouldn’t be the final step. We advise our clients to build out a handful of additional “microsites” designed to augment a primary corporate or product site. Our team can generate unique and meaningful content for each of these secondary destinations, which then become a valuable part of the overall ORM program. One blog can help build credibility and improve your visibility… but two or three additional microsites can cement that credibility and dominate the search engine landscape.

It’s all about diversifying.

FairWinds Partners, a leading Internet strategy firm, released a new white paper this week detailing the importance of social media for businesses and brands. Specifically, they focus on building the right kind of online foundation by grabbing the domains and profiles most valuable to your identity, which is at the heart of the RepEquity social media strategy:

With these kinds of numbers, failing to at least secure usernames in social media sites simply is not an option—the question is, how does a company work to develop a clear social media strategy? For FairWinds, the connection between domain names and usernames is clear—they are both critical digital assets that protect and promote a company’s initiatives online.

What follows is an in-depth case study looking at some of the most powerful brands in America, and how they’re using social media to fully engage their consumer bases. It’s a good read, and worth the download.