A blog or website news section which automatically publishes to an email list and a company Facebook page? For many marketing managers, the very idea still seems like black magic (I know, I talk to them all the time). But if this is you, don’t be embarrassed. There’s no reason why any marketing manager should be expected to have the IT skills to set up this sort of thing. However, knowing how straightforward it is …that’s a different matter. Getting a company blog created from scratch, and setting up social media services, should cost you less than a page advert in a magazine which hardly anyone will see. You can even farm out the writing for a few hundred pounds a month. Then you get to do all the fun bits, like setting up Hootsuite to monitor what’s going on in the worlds of LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Too many companies who I speak to are still “scared” of all this stuff …and there are a lot of outdated media outlets around who are quite pleased about that. Your customers might not be so impressed.