With all the fuss over social media these days, a lot of people are ignoring the content that makes it work.

It’s the insights and ideas of your practitioners that define your advantage in the marketplace. A successful social media strategy will draw on that intellectual capital to start a conversation and build your brand.

Until recently, you could easily leverage your thought leadership through a content-driven website strategy: putting your commentary, white papers, blogs and other thought leadership front-and-center on your corporate dot-com (as in this diagram of user flows on asset management websites).

But that dot.com-centric approach is no longer enough. In today’s content-centric world, not everyone comes to your content through your corporate site. Users now bypass your home page and access content directly from a constantly changing landscape of search engines, email links, blogs, Twitter feeds, Facebook pages and the like.

In some cases, your content is even being removed from your site and delivered to users in other applications such as RSS readers, mobile apps and content aggregators. Your content is going viral as financial advisors and other intermediaries pass it on it to their own clients. And you might be providing your own multiple points of access through microsites, campaign landing pages, targeted channel-specific sites and other specialized destinations that ultimately draw on much of the same content.

All this requires a new way of thinking about your online presence: It’s all about creating and distributing content. So the first step to a successful social media strategy is creating an engine of timely, relevant, differentiated content.