Are Blogging and Social Marketing a key compenent to an overall back linking strategy or has something new come onto the horizon that is a better option? Dan
A combination of link building strategies is always good but my personal experience has shown me that article marketing works the best.
Each blogpost you post to your blog, you submit it to social bookmarking sites without the nofollow. Google will be index them quickly.
Article marketing, web directory listing and yes blogging can help a lot. Also press release submission is an aid too.
Many have tried and many succeed and failed its just a matter of quality content where bots would love to crawl for the benefit of the users.
You can try as many as possible ways to generate backlinks. I recommend article submission and forum posting.
You may also work on article submissions, promotion in hubpages and squidooo lenses, forum postings, yahoo answering
If we talk about over all back linking strategy then blogging and social marketing may be affective for SE's accepting Google for a only reason and that is NO-Follow back links,most of the blogs and social sites gives links back but they are No-Follow in property so that means visible for visitors and other SE bots but restricting Google Bot to crawl.