David Meerman Scott wrote a book called “The New Rules of Marketing and PR.” In it he talks about using online content to market and reach customers directly.

One of his underlying premises is that providing good content widely and freely online is a powerful way to market a product or service. As David says, “It’s about your buyers seeing your company on the web.”

That brings me to the point of my article today:

The new breed of content aggregation sites available on the Web should be viewed as valuable business applications.

These sites can play an integral role in our marketing to reach prospective buyers, if we just learn how to use them.

WHAT ARE CONTENT AGGREGATION SITES?

The designation “content aggregation sites” can refer broadly to anything from a blog to an RSS feedreader to Wikipedia. But I am using it in a narrower context. I am specifically referring to large public sites designed specifically to share knowledge, documents and other content.

Examples of the kinds of sites I mean include:

Work.com
Google’s Knol
Squidoo
HubPages
Scribd
Google Base
YouTube
eZine Articles

There are hundreds more, especially of the article submission sites and places to submit press releases for free. The ones I’ve listed are just some of the bigger, better-known sites.

These are sites that are open to all comers. A basic account costs nothing — they are free. Once you set up an account you simply add your content: upload it (YouTube and Google Base) or compose it (Work.com and Knol) or curate it (Squidoo).

What these sites give you is an outlet or distribution channel for your content — assuming you have quality information to share. You get the potential to reach a wider audience than on your own website, blog, email list or direct mail list — all through being included in the central site or database.

By sharing content publicly you have the potential to interest people enough to find out more about you, your business, your products, your services. These are people who may become buyers.

BUT WE ALREADY USE THESE SITES SOMETIMES

Most businesses are not leveraging these content aggregation sites anywhere near the extent they could.

Most of us tend to look on such sites as places for entertainment, or as places we occasionally visit to research information or get a question answered after they pop up in the search engine results. Or maybe we just view them as Web 2.0 curiosities we’re not quite sure the value of.

Instead, why not look on them as an important channel to distribute valuable information — and in the process help us market?

If we are marketing/sales people and small-businesspeople, we should be incorporating these kinds of sites into our marketing plans.

We should be training our people how to use these sites (and use them responsibly).

We should make mastering such sites a part of the job duties of specific people on our teams — they need to know how to use these sites just like we might require employees to know Excel, PowerPoint, Oracle or Salesforce.com.

IT IS NOT ABOUT SPAMMING

This isn’t about exploiting these content aggregation sites in order to spam or to plaster blatant sales brochures all over the Web. It has to be valuable content you are sharing freely. Assuming you don’t cross the line from useful content to spammy junk or blatant link-dropping sales pitches, your distribution of content can pay off.

Some businesses already have figured this out. For instance, there are search engine optimization (SEO) firms with teams of people who do nothing but create and repurpose content for clients on content aggregation sites.

When taken to extremes, these activities end up spammy and of little value and they give a bad rap to using such sites. But such activities don’t have to be. It’s up to you to use these sites responsibly.

But use them you should. Consider them important business applications. Pick and choose the ones most relevant to the business you are in. Work them into your marketing plans and your everyday operations and systems. Train employees to use them and consider them critical business applications — and not just curiosities.