This is the next in a series of guest blog posts by IntraLinks’ collaborators, partners, and vendors. David Meerman Scott's book The New Rules of Marketing & PR opened people's eyes to the new realities of marketing and public relations on the Web. Six months on the BusinessWeek bestseller list and published in 26 languages from Bulgarian to Vietnamese, New Rules is now a modern business classic. Scott's popular blog and hundreds of speaking engagements around the world give him a singular perspective on how businesses are implementing new strategies to reach buyers. His new book, Real-Time Marketing & PR: How to Instantly Engage Your Market, Connect with Customers, and Create Products that Grow Your Business Now, will be published on November 1, 2010. Download a free chapter here.

I'm thrilled to contribute this post to the IntraLinks community. Like me, IntraLinks straddles the real-time sales and marketing fields in the financial markets. When I first got out of school, I worked on a Wall Street bond trading desk and then moved into the real-time financial information business. While I spent most of my career in B2B marketing, for four years I was in B2B sales. So I've seen both sides.

All buyers want and need to be educated. One of the best ways to do that is making it easy for them to get the information they need to make decisions. Blogs provide an excellent mechanism to do this, especially when paired with other social media tools.

Earlier this year we decided to make some big changes to our online presence. The decision came about while strategizing how we wanted to represent IntraLinks to our current and future stakeholders. Our business was expanding and our website needed to accommodate.

At the time, the company was involved with very little social media, so this is where we started. We established a presence, and started communicating socially through various sources such as Twitter. Being successful on Twitter meant more than starting an account and posting a press release. So, we used it... really used it as a communications tool. We managed it professionally and didn’t get too cutesy with it.