A year ago, Cheryl Burgess and I published the first #Nifty 50 award winners, starting with the #Nifty50 Women of Twitter on this blog in May 2011 and followed by the #Nifty50 Men of Twitter published on Cheryl’s Blue Focus Marketing blog in June.

The posts were a huge hit on Twitter, with the #Nifty50 hashtag reaching nearly 70,000 people through more than 140,000 tweets and retweets, according to TweetReach.

The goals of #Nifty50 are:

1) Acknowledge 50 men and women who share valuable content and actively engage on Twitter, and

2) Help foster connections between those who are recognized and others who would mutually benefit from being followed on Twitter.

But as the #Nifty50 moves forward, our goal—our passion—is to add a third component to the #Nifty50 brand, an objective for social good.  We are working with a potential corporate sponsor to provide Apple iPads to 50 low-income children—the #Nifty50 Kids—somewhere in the U.S.  Over time, our goal is to give technology devices (who knows what the future may hold—Google Glasses next year perhaps?) to 50 disadvantaged kids in all 50 states.  Check out Google’s Project Glass Video .

As marketing and social media professionals (which most of you reading this post likely are), we get to spend our days in interesting and intellectually challenging work, in (generally) comfortable surroundings, interacting with bright, innovative people through the latest technology platforms.

But for many kids, that world is as foreign as a faraway planet.  The #Nifty50 Kids program is a way to bring creativity-unleashing technology to these kids, who otherwise would have no way to afford it.

Want to be part of this?  Nominate your favorite technology twitterer using this form.  For 2012, the #Nifty50 will honor 50 men and women who work for technology companies (B2B or B2C) and are, of course, active and engaging on Twitter.  See the form for complete qualifications.

Nominations close on June 22, 2012 and the #Nifty50 women and men for 2012 will be announced in posts on the Webbiquity and Blue Focus Marketing blogs this summer.  So nominate yourself, a co-worker, and/or someone you admire. And feel free to share this post!

Guest post by University Alliance.

Mobile access to the web has surpassed browser usage. Consumers are growing fonder of their smartphones and tablets, using them to access content and make online purchases in staggering numbers. In fact, by 2015 more U.S. Internet users will access the web through smartphones than through PCs, according to technology site Mashable.com.

Still not convinced? Consider these 2012 statistics:

• • Twitter estimates 55% of users access the site through a mobile device.
• • 34% of marketers have generated leads using Twitter.
• • Click-through rates on search result ads are higher on mobile, according to a Marin Software study. In the fourth quarter 2011, smartphone click-throughs were 1.25%, tablets were 1.31%, and desktop/laptops were .95%.
• • 57% of Facebook users “like” a business because they want to receive special offers and promotions, according to Mashable.com.
• • Consumers are engaging with their favorite companies on Facebook, says Mashable.com. 77% said they interact by reading posts and updates, while 17% share experiences and news stories, and 13% post updates about brands they like.
• • 56% of consumers are more likely to recommend a brand to a friend after becoming a Facebook fan, according to Mashable.com.

But what do these trends mean for today’s businesses? And what do marketers and business owners need to know—and more importantly, do—to keep ahead of consumer demands? First, they should recognize the benefits of creating a mobile strategy that their best customers will respond to.

What Can A Mobile Strategy Do For Me?

Once upon a time (like a year ago), having a mobile strategy was an option, and revamping your company website for mobile was very progressive. Now, having a mobile strategy is a must—no matter what size your business is.

Consumers use mobile devices for entertainment, with books, movies, games and videos; to interact with friends and business on social networks, like Facebook and Twitter; and increasingly, to find information and make immediate buying decisions. What does mobile mean to your company?

Mobile is a direct channel to your target audience. It can have a significant impact on your marketing efforts by increasing awareness of your brand, events and special offers. Mobile marketing can drive traffic to certain locations, and provide a mechanism for instant feedback and engagement. Plus, it can create a whole new generation of opt-in prospects, and give you the means to convert them to customers and evangelists.

Mobile can help you acquire new customers, increase your engagement with them, and drive sales; and you’ll be more successful at all three when your brand message is delivered across all mobile platforms.

Cross-Platform Is a Must

It’s important to note that all mobile platforms are worthy of attention. Focusing on just the iPhone ignores huge sections of your market. Apps, games and videos must be developed for Androids and iPads, as well. And don’t forget about the Amazon Kindle, Windows Phone and BlackBerry. Fortunately, cross-platform mobile frameworks make it easier for developers to generate new versions of an app, so it functions properly across platforms.

When done well a smart mobile marketing strategy can be hugely successful, as demonstrated by the Oklahoma Lottery.

How One Organization Successfully Embraced Mobile

The Oklahoma Lottery recognized mobile marketing’s power to reach new markets. They launched a 30-day promotion, creating an exclusive Mobile VIP club. Participants had the chance to win $100 per day by texting in to join the club. Updates and winners were posted on the company Facebook page and mobile website.

At the end of the month-long contest, the Oklahoma Lottery had over 13,000 new, highly engaged fans. The very next day, they launched an iPhone app, and invited the Mobile VIP club members to download it. The result? 667 click-throughs from the text to the app on Day 1. By targeting their audience through their mobile devices, they amassed an entire community they can tap into to promote special events, drive sales and introduce new products.

With the enormous growth of mobile devices, mobile marketing strategies are a must for every business. As the Oklahoma Lottery’s effort shows, knowing how to create and execute a mobile marketing campaign can open up tremendous opportunities for your business.

Developing a Mobile Marketing Strategy is Essential

Mobile media marketing puts your brand right into the hands of your target audience. No one knows what the next mobile craze will be, but it’s clear that mobile devices are increasingly the consumer’s choice for staying in touch, finding information and making buying decisions. Savvy marketers will continue to stay on top of mobile marketing trends and deliver informative, usable content that their customers want—no matter where they are.

This guest post was provided by University Alliance and submitted on behalf of University of San Francisco.  USF offers online marketing courses including SEO training, search engine marketing, social media training, advanced mobile marketing training and more.  To learn more about University of San Francisco’s certificate programs visit www.usanfranonline.com.

References:

Mobile stats:

http://mashable.com/2012/02/16/mobile-commerce/

Social Media Stats:

http://www.digitalbuzzblog.com/social-media-statistics-stats-2012-infographic/

Let’s face it; lots of people consider spending one’s days with online games, tinkering in PhotoShop, “working” in Facebook, and using words like “viral” and “targeting” in decidedly non-lethal ways a funny way to make a living. Why not laugh with `em?

Find sh*t marketing people say, cross-dressing Linux developers, the stages of Twitter addiction, still more priceless demotivational posters, an online tool for generating business jargon phrases, Russian unicorns, things puppets hate about Facebook, the funniest tweets of last year and more in this collection of amusing, creative and offbeat market and social media stuff.

Sh*t People Say (Various Sources)

Starting early last year, a raft of sh*t various sorts of people say videos hit YouTube, some going viral, some less so. The flood continues, though the more recent additions to the genre are becoming progressively more arcane (e.g., Sh*t No Adult with ADHD Says). Here are a few of the best technology / marketing related creations. Funny even if you’re not seeing them for the first time.

Sh*t Web Designers Say

Sh*t Graphic Designers Say

Sh*t Silicon Valley Says

David Pogue: Be There, or Be Cher! | CrossOver Impersonator launching at MacWorld! by CodeWeavers

How do you get the world’s attention if you’re a scrappy little Linux-realm software company with a bit of creativity (and some really smart coders) but no cash? Well, you could try producing an outrageous cross-dressing-themed video, but that’s risky–it could definitely go wrong. Or, it could go spectacularly right, as this effort did from CodeWeavers founders Jeremy White and Jon Parshall.

10 Incredible Interactive YouTube Videos by Mashable Business

“Like a 21st century version of the choose-your-own-adventure books, interactive YouTube videos can up the engagement factor by letting the viewer decide the course of the action, or just play around with the content,” writes Amy-Mae Elliott , who then shares “10 top interactive YouTube experiences, from both businesses and individuals, that incorporate gameplay, quizzes and just plain old fashioned entertainment.”

Social Media Saves Valentine’s Day by Socialnomics

A cute little video from the brilliant Erik Qualman about a guy who uses social media perhaps too well on Valentine’s Day.

The 46 stages of Twitter Usage by Chris Voss Show

Funny and true progression of common Twitter reaction beginning with ridicule and ending in addiction.

De-Motivational Posters for Freelancers by FreelanceSwitch

For those days when you wonder, “Was I crazy to leave to leave the corporate world?,” this priceless collection of demotivational posters will remind you that yes, you were. And are.

Video Case Study Parody by Jack: A Blog About Experience Brands

The pink pony birthday party video case study parody. Parents will get this.

Twitter Gets the Ken Burns Treatment From Funny or Die (Video) by All Things D

Funny or Die goes Ken Burns on the history of Twitter. Hilarious, mostly safe for work (a few cuss words), and it’s endorsed by Perez Hilton.

Clever QR Code Example: The World Park by Firebelly Social Media Marketing Blog

Not funny, but very creative video showing “a clever use of QR codes. The World Park campaign turned New York City’s Central Park into an interactive board game.” As blogger Chad Richard advises, “You have to see it for yourself.”

Business Jargon Generator by Growth Science

Anyone can write clearly. The challenge is to be able to appear profound even when you have no clue. This handly tool will help. For example, “If you’re not sure what to call your next PowerPoint slide deck you might use ‘Experiential Paradigm Convergence.’  Nobody will know what it means – and that’s the point!…Want your boss to think you’re forward-looking? Ask why nobody’s been prioritizing ‘Proactive Competence Alignment.’  If your boss asks what that means, say it’s to ensure ‘Global Impact Integration.’” Try it yourself!

The Lighter Side of SEO: People Search for the Darndest Things by Inkling Media

Ken Mueller shares some of the odder search phrases that visitors have used to find his website, based on Google analytics data. Among the unexpected phrases that have driven search traffic for Ken: “random things Mennonites can’t do,” “shiny comphy shoes” and “wooden pegs for marketing.” Hmm.

Not Google+: The First Antisocial Network [PARODY VIDEO] by Mashable

Do you have too many social networks to manage already? Does the world really need another one? The guys from College Humor provide their answer here.

“Russian Unicorn” — a bad lip reading of Michael Bublé by BadLipReading

Okay, it’s not marketing-related, but this video take-off on “Just Haven’t Met You Yet” is extraordinarily well done. And funny. Not to be missed.

The Best Of “Google+ VS Facebook” Videos by @NewCommBiz

Benjamin Beck pulls together four of the best videos about the battle between Google+ and Facebook. It may be a deadly serious fight for Google and Facebook, but no reason the rest of us can’t laugh about it.

10 Things Puppets Hate About Facebook by Burgers By Phone

People sharing pictures of what they just ate, cartoon cows as gifts, getting tagged in pictures where you look terrible, and seven other reasons that puppets (and many non-puppets) hate Facebook.

The 50 funniest tweets of 2011 by HappyPlace

A fantastic (for the most part, other than the questionable political tweets) collection of some of funniest tweets of the past year, among them, from @Starlett17: “I hate when old people poke me at weddings, point and whisper ‘You’re next!’ So I’ve started doing the same thing to them at funerals.”

The 10 Best Commercials of 2011 by AdWeek

Tim Nudd presents ten of the best, if not the best, TV ads from last season. Fortunately the list was compiled before the Clint Eastwood ad from this year’s Super Bowl, which while interestingly crafted, seemed like it should have been either promoting Ford (Gran Torino) or the Republican party.

Honest Logos by Viktor Hertz

An interesting collection of “honest logos, revealing the actual content of the company, what they really should be called. Some are cheap, some might be a bit funny, some will maybe be brilliant.”

9 campaigns that won with humor by iMedia Connection

Jim Nichols like the use of humor in these campaigns. The quality is uneven, but the collection includes a few clear hits, like the Tom Hanks video in which “Reality TV’s biggest train wreck was beautifully spoofed.”

Recent research from MarketingProfs shows that 84% of B2B companies use social media marketing in some form, and the figure is likely higher for B2C firms. But that’s a bit like saying that most Americans exercise regularly; it’s probably true, but there is a big difference between walking the dog around the block a couple of times per week and training for a triathlon.

Image credit: The Far Side

And just as there are significant differences in the results one will obtain from an intense training regimen vs. the occasional stroll, the MarketingProfs study points out that the “best in class” B2B social media performers are producing more than three times the number of leads from this channel than are “laggard” firms. In fact, another recent study from HubSpot reveals that 63% of B2B companies aren’t generating leads from social media at all.

In social media, as in physical training, it takes time to see substantial results. And so, just as it’s easy to slip off a training schedule, it can be tempting for busy marketers who aren’t seeing an immediate payback from social media efforts to neglect those efforts. This is apparent from the large number of abandoned blogs, orphaned Facebook pages, silent Twitter feeds and the like littering the social media landscape.

I recently did some “spring cleaning” on my Twitter account using Twit Cleaner and was stunned—though perhaps I shouldn’t have been—to discover that hundreds of those “following” me hadn’t tweeted a thing in the past 30 days, 90 days, 180 days, even a year or more.

Billy Mitchell recently commented on this phenomenon as well, writing that “Although social media marketing continues to be a hot topic among B2B marketing professionals, a surprising number of B2B companies are (either) not planning to start, late to get started, only going through the motions with little or no results (or) have already given up.”

The good news is that, just like there’s never a bad time to start exercising (unless you’re in a body cast perhaps), there’s never a wrong time to step back, reassess, and re-launch social media marketing efforts. The first step is to take a look at your social media program and determine if you’ve got a results problem that’s really an activity problem. And understand that if that’s the case, you’re not alone.

I recently conducted a competitive analysis on behalf of a client looking at 10 companies in the IT management software market. Note that these weren’t hair salons or auto body shops or some other type of business whose core isn’t the online world; these are companies whose buyers were trading messages using now-obscure online communication protocols since before the Internet had a name, and long before the term “social media” was introduced. This is a group of companies that, although primarily SMBs, should be fluent in online and social communications.

So while certainly not a scientifically valid sample, the findings about social media use among these 10 companies are nevertheless telling:

• • Two of the vendors’ websites have no social media buttons/icons/links at all, and three have only a limited social presence on their sites (e.g. social account links only on their Home and Contact pages).
• • Only four of the 10 have blogs, and of those, three have had a total of four or fewer new posts in the last 60 days.
• • Three of the companies aren’t on Twitter. Of the seven who are, three have fewer than 100 followers. Six of the seven companies tweet, on average, less than once every four days.
• • Though nine of the 10 companies are on LinkedIn, though only three have complete, optimized company profiles and product listings. Eight companies have 50 or fewer followers.
• • All of the companies can be found on Facebook, but only three have complete or professionally designed pages. Three others have unmanaged “community pages” which the companies don’t maintain and may not even be aware of.   Four of the 10 pages have fewer than 10 “likes.” Four have no wall posts at all, and four more have fewer than 10 posts over the last 60 days.
• • Seven of the ten companies have no presence on Google+, and only one has a complete, optimized profile there.

What should you do if your company’s social media strategy isn’t firing on all cylinders, or how do you avoid this fate if your company is just getting started in social media?The topic of social media marketing could fill a book (and has in fact, several), but here is a seven-step approach to get things moving in the right direction.

1. Research your company’s social media landscape, so you understand where your prospective buyers are congregating and active.

2. Listen to the conversation for a while before jumping in, so you get a solid sense for the tone, etiquette and group dynamics of each social venue as well the popularity of various specific discussion topics.

3. Develop content that answers the questions you see being raised. The more relevant your content is to the concerns of your prospective buyers, the more likely it is to be read and shared. In order to produce content on a regular basis without breaking the bank, find ways to re-use and re-purpose existing content (e.g. a white paper can be re-used as a presentation, a couple of blog posts and a bylined article) and spread the workload among several internal subject matter experts, so one writer becomes overwhelmed.

4. Respond to questions and engage your buyers and influencers in social media. Reach out. Interact. Build relationships. That will encourage followers to share your content and  customers to reinforce your messages.

5. Convert followers to known prospects or even customers through targeted calls to action. This is where the “R” happens in social media ROI. Any time you are able to engage prospective buyers with your content, give them an easy (but not obnoxious) way to perform a conversion action: sign up for your newsletter, subscribe to your blog, register for a webinar, download a white paper, or start a free trial. Make the action fit the content. Experiment. Keep it fresh.

6. Measure. The ultimate measure of social media success is leads or sales, but there are dozens of intermediate measures that, while not success metrics in and of themselves, are crucial for letting you know how your current efforts are working. What should you do more of, less of, or do differently? Running a social media program without metrics is like driving a car with no gauges. Not a good plan.

7. Persist. Building readership for a blog takes time. Building a significant presence on any social network takes time too. Establishing credibility, cultivating relationships, optimizing your online presence…none of this happens overnight. Stick with it. The losers are those with abandoned blogs, silent Twitter accounts, orphaned Facebook pages. Those who score in social media are often those who just keep shooting.

While most companies have now adopted social media marketing practices of some sort, many are still struggling to see the hoped-for results. If your company is in that group, you aren’t alone. Keep at it. Learn. Experiment. Measure. Tweak. Prevail.

Innovation is alive and well in the development of cool free and low-cost web-based tools and apps. It’s great to find a tool that automates some little process or provides a new capability you’ve been looking for, and fun to find a tool you didn’t even know you needed.

How can you quickly find out how far a link has spread on Twitter? Surf the web securely and anonymously when using pubic WiFi? Manage all of your social media accounts from a single login on your iPhone? Back up your Gmail account? Make more productive use of your time on social networking sites?

There’s an app for that—or cool web tool. Find tools to do all of the above and much more in this collection of helpful business, online and social media tools, apps and reviews.

Cool Social Media Tools

PingTags

A slick service that enables you to easily add a QR code to your business card which links to your LinkedIn profile and contact information. Anyone scanning the code can conveniently contact you without entering any additional information. And when you log in to PingTags, you can view analytics like how many people scanned your card and which links they clicked.

Buffer

Buffer is a tool for automatically posting content to Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. As the site puts it, “Fill up your Buffer at one time in the day and Buffer automagically posts them for you through the day.” It’s available at three price/service levels: free, Pro ($10 per month), and then a big jump to Premium ($99 per month). Nothing replaces real social media engagement of course, but used carefully and in conjunction with real-time monitoring, automation tools like this do have their place.

Storefront Social

One of the easiest ways to import an online store into Facebook, even incorporating translation and foreign currency support for buyers in other countries. Plans have a monthly fee (with the most popular priced at $30-$50 per month) but you can try it out for a week free.

Four51

Four51 offers two sets of tools for local business and consumer brands. FanTools uses “knowledge gained from across the FanTools network of small businesses to deliver plans” that enable local retailers, restaurants and other types of businesses to use exclusive coupon offers mixed with other content across their social networks to drive engagement and purchases. It’s priced for small business at $50 per month with a 90-day free trial offer to try it out. CommerceTools uses cloud-based technology to help companies streamline the distribution of products, supplies, services and content to individuals or groups by simplifying and automating order and fulfillment processes.

ALOT
***** 5 STARS

ALOT is a catalog of free “apps for your PC” in a range of categories including entertainment (comic books, TMZ, The Onion, IMDB search), food, games, travel, music, news (The New York Times, CNN, Fox News, Stock Market Watch), reference, social networking (e.g., apps for Facebook, Twitter and Evite) and more.

ShortStack

ShortStack is a tool that helps businesses customize their Facebook Pages with “contests, sweepstakes, videos, custom forms and more.” Yes, it is “Timeline ready.” The tool is free for pages with up to 2,000 likes, with pricing starting at $30 per month above that level.

Mywebees

Mywebees lets you display your website on your Facebook page. It’s not a copy of your site, but your actual site—displayed in a Facebook iFrame. It’s a very cool, easy way for small businesses to increase the interest and value of their Facebook presence. No word yet though on how this may be affected by Timeline.

Cool Twitter Tools

TweetReach

How many people saw that link you tweeted? Tweeted or retweeting it themselves? Which Twitterers exposed it to the largest audience? Find out in a snap with TweetReach. In just a few seconds, I discovered that a recent post I wrote on social media storytelling for PR reached 56,689 people via 25 tweets—over 10,000 people just through Jim Dougherty.

TweetStats

This free tool graphically shows peak Twitter activity for any Twitter handle. It takes a few minutes to load completely, but once fully loaded shows activity on your network by day of the week and time. I wasn’t surprised to learn that most of the activity on my network happens early in the morning, but it was interesting to note unexpected spikes in activity at midmorning on Monday and Tuesday and around lunch time on Wednesday and Thursday.

tweepi

An automated free tool to help “flush” Twitterers you are following who aren’t following back, follow those who are following you, clean up inactive users (requires paid “premium” subscription), force spammers to unfollow you, and find interesting new tweeps to follow.

Other Cool Web Tools

Clipboard

A free tool for clipping, saving and sharing just selected parts of web pages such an image or a selection of text. Clipped content can be kept private, shared only with friends or shared publicly.

AnchorFree

Concerned about your web browsing security and privacy when you’re away from home and using public WiFi? AnchorFree’s Hotspot Shield is a free (or optionally ad-free low-cost) VPN encryption service that provides secure, private web browsing anywhere. It works on desktops, laptops, and mobile devices. On mobile devices Hotspot Shield enables data compression, increasing the amount of data a user has under their mobile data plan and thus saving users money on mobile data. Hotspot Shield also protects users from over 3 million malware threats, phishing sites, and spam.

AirSpeed

A simple app that syncs contact information, emails and appointments between Google and Salesforce, eliminating time-consuming copying and pasting. After a 14-day free trial, the service is priced at $10 per month (or less per user for larger teams) with a 50% discount for non-profits and schools.

Teamplifier

A free online project management and collaboration tool, similar to Basecamp, that lets users switch between projects with one click, delegate tasks, track task changes, subscribe to tasks and receive notifications, and manage people on projects with groups.

Prezi

The new way to present—way beyond PowerPoint. Prezi is an online presentation tool that lets you pan and zoom around your presentation “canvas,” present online or offline, easily collaborate with teammates anywhere to develop a presentation, and add a timeline using “frames and a path to create a cinematic journey.” Pricing ranges from free (though your “Prezis” will be public and include Prezi branding) to $159 per year for the Pro version (your own logo, lots of storage space and more).

Cool iPhone Apps

MySocialMania (app)

A free app for Apple iOS devices that enables users to manage multiple social media accounts at once. A users can post to his/her Facebook wall, send a Tweet, share photos to Flickr and TwitPic, upload a video to YouTube, post a blog entry and manage other social accounts all from a single login and tool.

AtZip

A free iPhone app for discovering what events are happening in your area, who you know that’s going to each, browse ideas from nightclubs to museums to movies (along with ratings), connect with others who are attending the same events and share thoughts and photos.

5 Awesome Spreadsheet Apps for the iPhone by Search Engine Journal

Frequent best-of honoree Ann Smarty reviews five spreadsheet apps for the iPhone that “allow you to look at anything from profits and annual earnings, to employee checks and monthly expenses” anytime from anywhere. She notes that there are many others available, but calls these “arguably the best around.” All are priced at $10 or less.

250 best iPad apps: social media apps by The Telegraph

Brief reviews of top social apps for the iPhone including Flipboard—which “takes the activity from your social networks—Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and plenty of others are supported —and presents it in an attractive magazine-style layout…This app is must-have on all iPads”—Gowalla and Spout.

Social Search and Social Media Monitoring Tools

Topsy

Billing itself as a real-time social search engine, Topsy is reasonably good at finding topical and brand references across the social web. While it’s no threat to professional monitoring tools like Radian6, it’s a decent, free, quick-check tool for smaller companies and one-off searches.

Synthesio

Synthesio is a powerful, professional social media monitoring system that combines technology with human assistance for global brand reputation monitoring, topic monitoring, influencer rating and social community mapping. It is multi-lingual, customizable and filters out much of the “junk” picked up by other monitoring tools. This power and flexibility comes at a cost, however, as pricing is based on the number of search returns and starts at $1,500 per month.

PeopleBrowsr

A social media analytics and engagement tool that incorporates search, analytics and engagement capabilities. Within “engagement,” for example, you can evaluate the “degrees of separation” between a company and its audience, schedule tweets, and assign tweets to different team members for response / follow up. Pricing starts at $150 per month, but you can try it out first with a 14-day free trial.

Chatmeter

Chatmeter bills itself as “the first and only Local Brand Management service—the only platform that informs with daily alerts to monitor and respond to customer feedback from across the web combined with a dashboard to see the real impact on how customer experience is affecting online visibility for each location.” Priced at $40 per location per month (volume discounts for chains),  Chatmeter purports to save chains thousands of dollars in lost revenue by improving marketing effectiveness and providing the tools to easily respond to customers immediately for each of location.

Inefegy Social Radar

Inefegy’s Social Radar is known as a social media monitoring platform that is powerful, fast, has an outstanding user interface, and “now tracks some 40 million Web sites, including blogs, forums, image sites, news sites like CNN and the BBC, Twitter and more.” You can “request” a free trial, and the pricing is flat rate (you can run unlimited searches for one monthly fee), but specific pricing information is difficult to come by.

Cool Tools for Creating Infographics

10 Awesome Free Tools To Make Infographics by MakeUseOf
***** 5 STARS

An outstanding article by Angela Alcorn which provides guidance on how to create an infographic, followed by helpful, illustrated reviews of 10 free tools to assist in infographic creation, such as Stat Planet, Hohli, Creately (which also supports collaboration and easy flow chart creation) and Inkscape.

The 5 Best Free Tools For Making Slick Infographics by Fast Company

Noting that “It’s not enough to simply write about data any longer; the world wants visuals. While there are many professional information designers making a name for themselves, such as Nicholas Felton of Feltron.com, the majority of these digital artists are up to their eyeballs in high-paying work. Where does this leave you?,” Amber Mac reviews five free tools for creating infographics—four of which were covered in Angela’s article above, plus a new tool, Visual.ly.

Reviews of Cool Social Media Tools

Introducing PeerIndex: A New Companion to Klout for Social Media Influence Measurement by WindMill Networking

Neal Schaffer reviews PeerIndex, a competitor to Klout for social media influence measurement. Klout had an opportunity to become the standard before it stumbled badly in October 2011 when it radically changed its algorithm, calling its validity into serious question, then arrogantly refused to apologize and reverse course. A newer and (possibly) more accurate influence metric site is Kred, which is also worth checking out.

Is HootSuite Pro a Smart Investment? by Social Media Examiner

Nichole Kelly answers the question many of us HootSuite fans have been asking: is it worth it to upgrade to the Pro version? And after detailing the differences between the free and paid versions, her conclusion is…probably not, for most users. But it’s worthwhile (and HootSuite could make it more worthwhile, with a little work) for agencies and larger companies.

How to Back Up Gmail by Time Techland

Worried that Gmail could crash and lose all of your email history? Doug Aamoth details five different methods to protect yourself from just such a possibility, ranging from easy and free (e.g., Gmail Backup) to harder but free (forward to an email client such as Microsoft Outlook) to other slightly more involved but still free alternatives.

Search Social Media More Efficiently with Greplin

Josh Peters reports that Greplin is a powerful tool for topic-searching across your “personal social graph,” to find instances of people you’re connected to talking about topics you’re interested in. “Greplin social media search can access more than just your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts. With a basic account (free) you can also include your DropBox, Gmail and Google docs accounts to the search to include content you’ve created. With a premium account ($5 / mo) you can include Evernote, Yammer, Basecamp, Highrise, Google Apps, and Salesforce accounts with more to come.”

4 Great (free) Tools to Measure Social Sentiment and 4 Important Stats by Social Media Today

After highlighting four important statistics (among them: “53% of people on Twitter recommend companies and/or products in their Tweets, with 48% of them delivering on their intention to buy the product”), Nick Bennett reviews four free tools for measuring social sentiment, including Twendz and Twittersheep.

Content Tools: This Week in Social Media by Social Media Examiner

Cindy King reviews a handful of fairly new tools, including Storify, a content curation tool that “gathers content from various social media platforms to create your own story. You can then create a widget of this story to embed it in your website” and 23press, a low-cost tool that simplifies the process of moving a blog from one host to another.

Free analytics tools you should be using by iMedia Connection

Josh Dreller advises marketers to “Check out some of the following free tools that can help you collect, analyze, and take action on data. In fact, a combination of all these systems would certainly push your data-driven organization to another level. With these free analytics platforms, any company could truly compete with the advanced data tools and tactics of even its largest competitors”) the reviews eight free tools including Quantcast for demographics, 4Q for free survey analytics and TubeMogul for video analytics.

5 Productivity Tools for the Busy Social Media Manager by Social Media Today
***** 5 STARS

Leo Widrich shares five of his favorite tools to optimize his time on social media, including Refynr, which lets you “Create a social savvy filter of keywords you want to have included…(then) creates a ‘refyned’ news stream for you with only the most relevant tweets”), Triberr (an invite-only community of bloggers), and Tungle for setting up meetings.

48 Free Social Media Monitoring Tools by DreamGrow

Priit Kallas reviews four dozen free social media tools in two groups: one including the tools he uses most often (e.g., HootSuite and Social Mention and one arranged alphabetically from Addictomatic for searching “the best live sites on the web for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images. It’s a tool to keep up with the hottest topics” to WhoUnfollowedMe which enables the true Twitter paranoid to “check your unfollowers on your schedule, every 15 minutes.”

17 Alternatives to Klout by ReadWriteWeb

Acknowledging the Klout trainwreck and noting that no influencer rating measure will ever be perfect, David Strom nevertheless runs through 17 alternatives for Twitter influence measurement, Facebook metrics, Google metrics, tools with a multi-site focus (e.g., PeerIndex, which is “probably the closest competitor to Klout” according to David), and sentiment analysis tools such as Kred (which has since emerged as one of the top alternatives to Klout).

7 Apps That Rocked My Work by iMedia Connection

Jason Harty reviews his favorite seven work-related apps, including Editor by Pixlr for easy online photo editing (“If MS Paint ain’t cutting it and Photoshop is over your head, give Editor by Pixlr a look”), Evernote for online and on-the-go note-taking, and Jing for quickly capturing any portion of your computer screen.

Nine companies B2B marketers should know about by Velocity Partners

Doug Kessler provides brief reviews of nine marketing products/tools for B2B professionals, such as EPiServer (web content management for the .Net platform), Reevoo (a social commerce platform for brands and retailers) and Marketo (marketing automation software).

With more than 90% of companies now using social media to find employees and 82% having a Facebook page, there’s no question that business use of social media has become commonplace. But “use” and “success” are two different things. Many organizations, having now realized that the “build it and they will come” model doesn’t work in social media and that it isn’t just another channel for promoting news releases and marketing brochures, are stepping back and retooling their social media strategies.

If you’re developing a new social media program, revamping one that’s failed to achieve hoped-for results, or just trying to make an existing strategy more successful, one key component to start with is an analysis of your social media or digital landscape. This analysis will help you understand:

• • Where your prospective buyers are congregating in social media, and what they are talking about.
• • What your competitors are doing in social media.
• • Which voices are most influential in your market space.

Here’s a four step plan for creating a digital landscape analysis for your organization, to help build or rebuild a successful social media marketing strategy.

1. Evaluate how your competitors are using social media. For both strategic and benchmarking purposes, create a spreadsheet listing your top competitors and, for each, showing:

• • Social features on their website (e.g. do they have a blog, how prominently is it featured, social bookmarking links, social media account links, etc.).
• • Twitter metrics (followers, following, frequency of tweets, general level of interactivity).
• • Facebook / LinkedIn / Google Plus metrics (i.e. followers/fans/circles, how complete is their profile, level of activity).
• • YouTube metrics (total videos uploaded, subscribers, video views, recency of last update).
• • Other social activity and presence (Flickr, SlideShare, Wikipedia, etc.).

Collecting this information is Phase I. This will give you a rough benchmark for your own social media activity (if you already have an active program) and will help you identify any positive outliers—competitors who are far more successful than average in social media—to take a closer look at.

When creating your strategy, you’ll revisit this data and take a closer look at exactly what these competitors are doing (particularly the more successful ones). The point is not to copy anyone else’s strategy as your company’s approach should be designed to capitalize on your own unique strengths, but rather just to see what you can learn from competitors’ success and make sure you aren’t overlooking any obvious tactics or techniques.

2. Identify the key influencers in your market. The next step is to identify the influential voices in your community that you’ll want to reach out to, connect with, and begin building relationships with. These are the journalists, bloggers, analysts (industry or financial) and others who can help amplify your content, spread your story, and lend credibility to your messages.

If you’ve got the budget, the quickest and easiest way to build a list is by using a PR and social media monitoring tool such as Cision, Vocus or MyMediaInfo.  If not, or to supplement the results from those paid tools, do some manual research using free tools like AllTop, Technorati and Google Blog Search.

These tools will tell you who is talking about a particular topic, but not necessarily how influential or important any individual source is. In an ideal world, there would be a standardized measure of some sort. Since we don’t live in an ideal world, use influencer rating tools like Klout and Kred in conjunction with checking which blogs are featured most often on blog rolls of target bloggers (an informative though imprecise measure of influence) and the Pagerank of each blog. Combing these measures provides at least a rough guide to the relative influence of various sources.

3. Find relevant groups on Facebook and LinkedIn. This is as simple as searching within “groups” on each social networking site for your primary keywords and recording the results. Note how many groups you find, how large the groups are, and how active they appear to be. Business-related topics will generally have more, larger groups on LinkedIn than Facebook, while the opposite is typically true for consumer topics.

Once you’re in the execution phase, you’ll of course want to monitor, contribute to and interact within the most important and active groups on your list. But in the digital landscape analysis, it’s enough to flag these groups for further investigation.

4. Look for other places where people are talking about your industry. Your prospective buyers are likely having conversations in places well beyond the big five social networking sites. If you’re using a professional (fee-based) social media monitoring tool, start there to identify these message boards, forums and other sites where people in your market are asking and answering questions.

An excellent free tool for conducting this research is Google Discussion Search (run a search on Google, click “More” in the left sidebar then click “Discussions”). It takes a bit of manual effort, but you can build a fairly comprehensive list of discussion forums and message boards by running multiple searches on Google Discussion Search, capturing the results to Excel using SEOquake, then sorting the list by frequency.

With these four steps completed, you’ll have a comprehensive picture of your company’s digital landscape in place to serve as a basis for developing a new or revised social media strategy and tactical plan.

One of the most interesting aspects of web presence optimization (WPO) is how frequently bloggers and journalists write about the concept without actually using the term. They use terms like “search and social,” “inbound marketing,” “social media optimization,” “online reputation management,” “internet marketing” and others, with general agreement that the art and science of getting found on the web today require much more than just SEO–but no consensus on what to call it.

Rand Fishkin recently devoted 1,700 words to the topic of conversations about the industry’s nomenclature and inspired nearly 170 comments, all with no mention of WPO. Krista LaRiviere (see below), a co-founder of gShift Labs, is one of the few bloggers who have embraced the term.

Oh well, whatever you call the discipline of maximizing a company’s online visibility in a world where search is much more than Google-Yahoo-Bing and where web presence is much more than a corporate website, here are 18 of the best blog posts and articles from the past year on how to do it well.

Web Presence Optimization (WPO) Guides and Insights

The New Breed of B2B Buyer by Chaotic Flow

Joel York argues that “A new breed of B2B buyer has arisen, a species that is more connected, more impatient, more elusive, more impulsive, and more informed than its pre-millennium ancestors,” and that marketers need to understand how the B2B buying cycle has changed and adapt to the “new B2B buyer rules of engagement” across several traits including impatience (by making content easy to find in a self-service manner).

Inbound Marketing: Unlock the content from your emails and social marketing by MarketingSherpa Blog

Observing that email marketing efforts often produce “a mountain of content, but little of it gets used for marketing,” Adam T. Sutton shares tips from Chris Baggott on turning email content into optimizable content, such as publishing customer service answer emails as blog posts: “Sales and service teams write thousands of emails to answer customers’ questions…The answers to these questions are extremely specific to each customer’s situation. If published, they’re potentially valuable for long-tail (low volume, highly qualified) search traffic. What is the best parka for sub-zero temperatures? That sounds like a Google search to me.”

We’re Looking In The Wrong Place For Our Attribution Models by MediaPost Search Insider

Gord Hotchkiss explores John Yi’s concept of Pinball Marketing: “The new game of marketing is much more like pinball. The intersections between a buyer’s decision path and a product’s marketing presence are many, and each can send the buyer off in a different direction. Some of those intersection points are within the marketer’s control — and some aren’t.” WPO is about increasing the number of those intersection points and having as many of them as possible within the marketer’s influence, if not actual control.

Likelihood to Click by The Daily Numbers

David Erickson reports on recent research showing that “48% (of searchers) are likely to click if a brand shows up multiple times within a set of search results.” That figure seems low, but even if accurate, it makes a strong case for WPO activities designed to get a brand to show up multiple times, high in the search results, for core key phrases.

What Wins In Google Universal Search? Videos, Images & Google! by Search Engine Land

Barry Schwartz reveals that in Google Universal Search results, “videos are by far the most found results in Google, with image content a distant second,” while maps, blogs and news also rank highly—another reason companies need to utilize a diverse set of tactics in order to maximize their exposure near the top of search results.

Get Found: Stop Doing SEO, Start Doing WPO by iMedia Connection
***** 5 STARS

Krista LaRiviere of web presence optimization software firm gShift Labs quotes a client who told her that “once his marketing team started focusing on the company’s entire web presence (not just the website), organic search traffic increased, leads increased and business increased. His team noticed a significant difference within a three-month time period,” then provides a helpful six-step process for getting started with WPO.

6 SEO Jedi Tactics to Try Before Turning to the Dark Side by Search Engine Watch

The brilliant and always entertaining Angie Schottmuller uses a Star Wars analogy to argue for the benefits of white hat over black hat SEO, but several of her six “SEO Jedi” tactics apply to WPO, including universal search optimization (“Leverage the diversity of Google universal search results mixed with videos, images, shopping, books, maps (local), and news…video and image formats dominate Google mixed results, yet few sites actually apply SEO to these assets…Surround on-page images or videos with relevant textual content to help search engines better understand the asset and in-turn boost the relevance of the page as well”), clever link bait, and social media optimization.

How to cure your SEO blindness by iMedia Connection

Alan Bush writes that “The SEO process is multi-faceted and detailed, requiring coordination between client and agency, as well as among many departments such as marketing, IT, and more”—which is true, although the model he presents here is closer to WPO than pure SEO, incorporating as it does (in addition to traditional aspects of SEO like keyword research, competitor analysis and link building) social marketing, blogging, news releases and online articles.

SEO, Social Media and WPO

7 ways to make SMO work in the post-Google age by iMedia Connection

Contending that “The days of search engine optimization (SEO) as a critical audience-driving strategy for digital publishers are numbered. Forward-looking marketers need to educate themselves about a far more meaningful and effective way of bringing audiences to media destinations—social media optimization (SMO),” Ben Elowitz makes some excellent points (content is again becoming more important than technology) and provides some helpful guidance for driving more traffic through sites like Facebook and Twitter. But the truth of course is that SEO and SMO are both important and need to be practiced as part of a WPO strategy.

From SEO To Social Media, Getting All Channels To Drive Traffic by MediaPost Search Insider

Derek Gordon notes that “From newsletters to advertising, PR to social media, it’s no secret that a good marketing strategy leverages every available channel to drive traffic to Web sites…And all it really takes is (an) old mantra: work together,” and supplies some excellent tips for what is, effectively, WPO.

The Fabulous Collision of Search and Social by Social Media Today

Rohn Jay Miller offers keen insights into what he terms the “collision between social networks and search engines,” writing that social networks are remixing search in three key ways: through social content evaluation (“If a lot of people on Twitter like Bill Bob Thornton’s grilled chicken marinade, the link to his Website will move up in the SERPs”), social content results (browsing social updates or viewing user-generated content served up in Google results) and social network search (searching within Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter instead of using a traditional web search engine).

5 reasons why social media is good for SEO by Success Works

The delightful Stacey Acevero contends that “what most (marketing and PR professionals) don’t realize is that social media is in fact great for SEO and can help boost your search engine rankings,” then explains how this connection works, e.g., “Social media encourages the sharing of multimedia, and multimedia is shown to increase time on page. PRWeb did a study which concluded that including multimedia in news releases increases time on page by an average of about 30 seconds. Imagine what that could do for your blog and social media posts.”

Optimizing Social For SEO: A Three-Step Beginner’s Guide by MediaPost Search Insider

Frequent best-of honoree Janet Driscoll Miller lays out a three-stage process for making social and SEO work together, starting with claiming your company profile on the major social networks (at least Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, SlideShare and YouTube) and then connecting those accounts through a Google profile.

Social Content Seeding for SEO by Search Engine Watch

Pointing out that as the major search engines have incorporated social signals into their rankings, “now you need more than just backlinks to rank. You also need tweets, likes, and other ‘votes’ from social users to let search engines know that your brand is relevant,” Guillaume Bouchard explains how to produce content that is “shareable” (e.g., because it is unique, inspirational or entertaining) and encourage sharing on networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Online Reputation Management and WPO

6 Ways to Manage Your Online Reputation by Content Marketing Institute

CB Whittemore points out that “Using digital and social tools leads to more links to your website, better quality visits  and more indexing,” and offers half a dozen helpful tips for online reputation management, such as “Your goal is to ‘own’ as many first page search results as possible (yep, that’s pretty much the definition of web presence optimization) for your name and/or your company’s name with content you’ve created or positively influenced…Complete and robust social profiles allow you to own more of those page one results. Claim your profiles (on sites like LinkedIn, Google+, SlideShare, YouTube, Facebook, Flickr and Twitter) and make sure they consistently describe you and your company.”

Online Sentiment and Link Building by Search Engine Journal

Julie Joyce identifies six social networks where every business should at least have a profile (note though that these are oriented towards local, consumer businesses; Google+ and YouTube are more important for B2B firms than are Google Places, Bing Local or Foursquare) and outlines a process for tracking and responding social content and product reviews to avoid making a negative first impression in search.

Me, Myself and I: Helping to manage your identity on the web by Google Public Policy Blog

Andreas Tuerk explains how Google has attempted to “make it easier to monitor your identity on the web and to provide easy access to resources describing ways to control what information is on the web,” since your “online identity” is shaped not only by your postings but also by tagging and what others write about you.

HOW TO: Manage Your Online Reputation Using SEO by Mashable

Reporting that “Of the almost 80% of U.S. hiring managers who had searched for candidates online, 70% of them said they had rejected a candidate based on what they found in his or her search results,” Sarah Kessler provides a four-step process for improving the results of those searches, such as posting positive content: “Profiles on social networks are powerful tools for this purpose, as results from large sites like Facebook and Twitter often carry more SEO power than a single post on something like a personal blog.”

While B2C marketers focus on Facebook, LinkedIn is consistently cited as the top social network for B2B marketing. Part of the reasoning is that while Facebook is good for sharing coupons, promoting events, and showcasing corporate culture to potential employees, LinkedIn is powerful at generating web traffic and leads. LinkedIn now has more than 100 million 150 million members including executives from every one of the Fortune 500 companies; 80% of them influence their companies’ purchasing decisions, and those professionals have a significantly higher level of trust in the business-related information they see on LinkedIn than on other popular social networks.

And while LinkedIn’s features remain focused primarily on activity at the individual professional level, the network has added several features for enterprises over the past year, including most recently the Follow Company button for business websites.

So how can companies most successfully use LinkedIn to generate more leads and sales? What’s the best way to start and grow a LinkedIn group? How can you maximize the visibility and impact of your LinkedIn company page? How can you optimize results from LinkedIn advertising?

Find the answers to these questions and more here in 22 of the best LinkedIn guides of the past year.

LinkedIn Tips, Tactics and Best Practices

5 Tips to Get More Sales from Linkedin by Better Closer

In this concise but useful post, Bill Rice presents five tips for sales (and marketing) pros to take advantage of the capabilities of LinkedIn, from creating a clear profile (“More than boasting about the benefits of any particular company, a LinkedIn profile should make it clear what service it provides to its clients or customers. It should go on to explain what results you can provide for your clients, and how things will improve for them if they work with you”) to asking, politely, for recommendations.

LinkedIn Adds Job Title, Company Names To Text Ad Targeting by MediaPost Online Media Daily

Mark Walsh reports on the expanded options for audience targeting introduced in LinkedIn ads early last year, how LinkedIn ads work, how the enhanced options help marketers, and how they are likely to be received by LinkedIn users.

How LinkedIn Apps Can Promote Your Business by Social Media Examiner

Lewis Howes reveals, in his words, “the top apps you can leverage to get more leads, traffic, product sales, brand awareness, ticket sales, investors, sponsors, consulting engagements and more” including the WordPress app (which enables you to add a blog to LinkedIn), video autoplay, syncing with Twitter, and featuring events on LinkedIn.

How To Maximize LinkedIn For Your Small Business by Sanera People Development Company

Jason Seiden, the guy who trained the LinkedIn sales team on how to use LinkedIn (how’s that for a nice line to have on your resume?) details the process of using LinkedIn for business development by small business owners/managers, from setting clear goals and developing a simple plan to reaching out and never spamming.

10 Tips for LinkedIn Social Networking by Online Social Networking

Larry Brauner shares 10 tips for maximizing LinkedIn social networking success, among them: put significant time and thought into your profile, utilize keywords, “join every relevant LinkedIn group,” comment when you have something valuable to add, and most importantly (for any social network)–keep at it.

How to Grow Your LinkedIn Group Numbers by Flyte Blog

Rich Brooks supplies several tips for growing the membership in a LinkedIn group, from sending out invitations (even to contacts who aren’t yet on LinkedIn) to promoting the group through your newsletter or blog, along with ideas to increase group member engagement.

10 Things You Never Knew You Could Do On LinkedIn by Business Insider

Writing that “LinkedIn has been adding more and more social features that make sharing news and links with professionals in a specific industry easier than ever,” Steve Kovach walks through LinkedIn’s social sharing features, like the “LinkedIn Today” daily news digest, searching for updates on your favorite topics, and search-optimizing your company page and personal profile.

Advanced LinkedIn strategies for marketers by iMedia Connection

Kent Lewis examines “advanced strategies for optimizing your personal and company profiles” such as optimizing all of the elements of your profile, incorporating the Recommend API on your company bio page, using LinkedIn’s resume builder, creating a personalized LinkedIn home page, and using LinkedIn Q&A to conduct polls.

How Are People Really Using LinkedIn? [INFOGRAPHIC] by Mashable

Charlie White shares an infographic loaded with facts and statistics about LinkedIn use, for example: 61% of survey respondents said that LinkedIn was their primary social networking site used for professional networking (versus 22% who said Facebook and 4% Twitter). 81% of LinkedIn members belong to at least one group. And 37% of users say they update their profile picture frequently—while 12% have had the same picture since they joined.

7 Quick Ways to Turn Your LinkedIn Profile into a Social Media Marketing Workhorse by Copyblogger

Noting that LinkedIn users don’t use the site to browse through photos of friends, share 140-character status updates or watch videos of talking dogs, Lewis Howes (again) explains how to use LinkedIn for business: from optimizing your personal headline (it doesn’t have to be merely your current job title) to utilizing social proof to providing a compelling call to action (what do you want someone to do after viewing your profile?).

Will LinkedIn Replace Your Resume? by Market My Career

Interesting question, particularly considering that as this post reports, “LinkedIn (has) announced a product  called Talent Pipeline which will allow hiring managers and recruiters to track all passive and active candidates directly via LinkedIn. So whether a recruiter finds your profile on LinkedIn or someone passes along your resume, it will be stored, managed and share via LinkedIn.”

Tips for LinkedIn Company Pages

8 New LinkedIn Features Worth Exploration by Social Media Examiner

Linda Coles steps through some of the key changes made by LinkedIn early last year, such as support for company pages (and if you jumped on this right away, note that this area has been more recently enhanced, particularly in the product listing area), banner images, video support and blog post feeds.

How to Make the Most from LinkedIn Company Pages by Gloria Rand’s Blog

Gloria Rand offers an overview of LinkedIn company pages and how they differ from Facebook pages, with banner images, integrated YouTube videos, and most importantly, customer recommendations: “the real power of Company Pages is the fact that LinkedIn members who recommend a product or service on a company profile, will have those recommendations surface on their own personal profiles as well.”

11 Sales Attributes of a Company LinkedIn Page by Find and Convert

Contending that “If you are a B2B company, your LinkedIn company page could be as valuable (at least as requisite) as your website,” Bernie Borges serves up tips on optimizing each element of LinkedIn company pages, from the company overview and product/service descriptions through promotions, videos and your company blog RSS feed.

Recommendations: LinkedIn’s Customer Reference Program for B2B Brands by iMedia Connection

Ryan Derousseau believes that LinkedIn can function as a consumer/buyer recommendation platform for B2B enterprises much the way Facebook does for B2C brands, and provides several suggestions for capitalizing on this. One of the more interesting recommendations: “Add the recommendation button to your company’s product page on the company website. This allows people to click on the recommendation button, and share with their network that they suggest purchasing this good or service. This plugin will live on the site for other customers to see.”

How To Use LinkedIn To Improve Organic Visibility by Search Engine Land

George Aspland explains how to set up and search-optimize a company profile page. Great stuff, but be careful with recommendations that rely on employee involvement (e.g., asking employees to optimize their public profiles with your keywords and share company updates). This is an area where training and having a social media policy in place can be valuable.

Benefits of LinkedIn Company Pages by LeahBaade.com

Leah Baade reviews what LinkedIn company pages are, how they work, why they are beneficial, how to set up a company page, how to interpret LinkedIn’s analytics, and most importantly, what to watch out for, such as “The Latest News works a lot like Google Alerts – in that it’s not always accurate. Unless your company has a very unique name, or it’s frequently making top headlines, this may not be the best feature to enable. Try monitoring the company name or keywords for a day or two and see what comes up.”

5 Tips for Using the New LinkedIn Company Pages by Social Media Examiner

Stephanie Sammons reviews updates that LinkedIn made to company pages late last year, then offers five tips for optimizing use of company pages, such as posting “a ‘call to action’ to follow your page within relevant LinkedIn groups” to build up followers for your LinkedIn page and providing “interesting and value-added company page updates”—not just company news and job openings.

LinkedIn “Company” Pages: An (Undervalued) Gem for Organizations of All Types by Social Media in Organizations
***** 5 STARS

Courtney Shelton Hunt explains why “organizations of all types and sizes should establish and manage their Company Pages (organizational profiles) on LinkedIn,” outlines a three-phase approach to creating company pages, lists several examples of well-crafted company profiles, and presents survey results showing that LinkedIn is overwhelmingly the preferred social network people use when they want to engage with a company professionally.

Best Practices for LinkedIn Advertising

5 Steps to Successful LinkedIn Advertising by Social Media Examiner

Pointing out that “LinkedIn lets marketers target ads to users by important B2B demographics such as job title or industry or even focusing on members of particular LinkedIn groups. This is different—and arguably better-suited for B2B—than Facebook ads, which typically target users by lifestyle interests…(and) marketers can create an ad on LinkedIn in just minutes with a minimum spend of $10/day,” Janet Aronica covers the basics of LinkedIn advertising along with five steps to LinkedIn advertising success (such as split-testing different ad variations).

Relevancy Is Key to Reaching Professionals With LinkedIn PPC Ads by ClickZ
**** 5 STARS

Lisa Raehsler compiles a few LinkedIn advertising best practices and tips here, in terms of targeting (“Job function enables you to loosen the targeting criteria a bit and select users within a specific job function such as ‘accounting,’ ‘creative,’ or ‘marketing’”), ads (“It’s common for the CTR of your ad to decline if you continue to display the same ad week after week. A best practice is to refresh your ads at least once per month with new ad text or images”), bidding and budgeting.

A Starter Guide for Advertising on LinkedIn by PPC Hero

Jessica Cates outlines the process of setting up a business account (so you can keep LinkedIn advertising access separate from your personal account) and an advertising campaign on LinkedIn, from rotation and targeting through bidding and tracking conversion data.

The inbound marketing experts at HubSpot along with Jeff Ente of Who’s Blogging What have just published an outstanding collection of social media insights, 54 Pearls of Marketing Wisdom by “26 of the world’s best marketing experts.” The assembled pundits weighed in on one or more questions regarding social media strategy, mobile marketing, online content, guidance on allocating resources between social networks and more.

Among the experts are Seth Godin (author, most recently, of We Are All Weird), Jeff Bullas, Sarah Worsham, Ian Lurie, Sharlyn Lauby, Valeria Maltoni, Heidi Cohen, Maddie Grant and Joe Pulizzi. Quite a lineup.

A few highlights of the 66-page report include:

Seth Godin: “I think the relentlessly ebbing of perceived privacy is happening faster than most people thought it would. This is leading to both small pockets of frustrated, trapped people who are afraid of what’s known about them, and a larger portion of the population that’s redefining what they think is normal.”

Linda Bustos (on Google+): “I notice that retweets of my blog’s articles are down since it’s launch, understandably, especially since Google Reader removed other sharing options in favor of the Plus button…I’m also surprised that there’s room for another social network. This and new sites like Pinterest show us there’s still room for new social networks, provided they offer something Twitter and Facebook don’t.”

Sharlyn Lauby: “After what seems like countless failed attempts at social by Google (Buzz, Wave, Orkut, etc), Google+ is already enough of a hit to force marketers to leverage, if only for its search implications.”

Heidi Cohen: “With increasing smartphone penetration, the following mobile marketing elements are the cost of entry: mobile website (fast loading, streamlined to main mobile function and easy to use), mobile search, and email marketing (the top mobile device activity). optimize to be read on-the-go with mobile call-to-action and phone number. ”

Dave Chafey: With mobile I always start with the current level of mobile usage for a company through analytics – to make sure decisions aren’t swept away by the ‘mobile web access to replace desktop access by 2014′ hype. Sure, for some brands in fashion and publishing mobile access is more than 20% in 2011. But for many others it’s in the single digits. Most mobile usage will be around search and the social networks, so make sure these work locally.”

Maddie Grant: “Marketers should stop marketing and start connecting. Start solving problems. Start building relationships.”

Joe Pulizzi: “Every piece of your content should be excellent enough that customers are compelled to share it. With Panda and four (maybe five) major social networks, the best content will rise to the top. That means, velocity will not be as important as truly impactful content.”

Michael Lazerow: “Content needs to be not only interesting, but also engaging and shareable. Content is constantly evolving, so brands need to stay ahead of the curve as best they can. Before you publish anything, think to yourself: is this something I would share with my social network? Is this something that my audience would identify with?”

Cameron Chapman: “The way that content is distributed now is both fantastic for those who are publishing content, and disastrous for the general public. On a daily basis I come across content littered with errors, either intentionally or accidentally, that is being passed around as gospel. Content creators need to take it upon themselves to verify everything they’re putting out there.  In many cases, it goes unnoticed, but when it is noticed, it destroys your credibility. I hate to see an infographic or any content that obviously involved a lot of time made useless because someone didn’t fact check.”

And there’s much more, including my thoughts on social network resource allocation on page 39. It’s a hefty document, but the wisdom is handed out in easily digestible bite-size chunks. Want to be ready for what’s coming in social media tomorrow? Download 54 Pearls of Marketing Wisdom today.

What is the distinction between “traditional” public relations (PR) and online / interactive / social PR? Is there really a difference anymore—or is the boundary blurring?

One part of the confusion stems from the fact that in PR, as in many other crafts, the tools change and advance but the fundamental skills required remain the same. PR pros now use tools like Twitter, PitchEngine, PRWeb and Vocus in place of fax machines, media packets, wire services and Bacon’s, but the fundamental skills of storytelling and relationship-building remain crucial.

Another part of the confusion is based on the changing definition of “media.” Every print publication now has an online version. Many “traditional” journalists now write blogs; does that make them bloggers? What really is the distinction between megablogs like TechCrunch or Mashable and an online publication? And some multi-author blogs have morphed into hybrid portal/news/blog sites that are difficult to categorize.

Regardless, while the “art” of PR retains some constants,  the “science” has clearly evolved. What are the best practices for pitching journalists in this new environment? What are the (current) best practices for pitching bloggers? How can PR pros optimize their use of social media tools? How can you make a press release more friendly to blogs, Twitter and search engines?

Find the answers to these questions and more here in a dozen of the best social PR guides of the past year.

Pitching Basics – Rules of Engagement by Blogging PRWeb

Noting that “The perfect pitch is one that involves getting to know your target reporters and showing a genuine interest in helping them, rather than treating them as a means to an end,” the delightful Stacey Acevero of Vocus shares a helpful list of “do’s” (e.g., do your research, do be concise) and “don’ts” (e.g., send generic pitches) for successfully getting others to write about your product / service / news / client etc.

Blogger Outreach Remains Crucial for PR Pros by SocialTimes

Jay Krall of Cision explains why blogger outreach remains important, how to find relevant bloggers within a particular topic area, and how to evaluate–and not evaluate–blogger influence, for example: “take one of the many varied specialties of lawyers who blog on topics like e-discovery or a particular state’s tax code – a blog with fewer than 10,000 readers may in fact serve as the tastemaker for the entire topic space. What makes sense instead is to judge a blog’s performance relative to its peers in the same topic area.”

Top 5 Innovative Ways PR Pros Are Using Social Media by Mashable

Leyl Master Black presents five creative ways for communication professionals to use social media, among them: tapping into breaking news (“social media opens the door to a number of new tactics that can be deployed in a matter of minutes … if you’re quick on your feet”), creating proprietary influencer networks, and connecting with media / bloggers at events.

How to Turn a Blog Post into a Press Release by ProBlogger

Erika Gimbel outlines a six-step process for turning a blog post into a press release (“Both have many of the same elements: strong headlines, top-down format (most important stuff up front), etc.” as she points out), starting with making sure the post is newsworthy (“how-to” guides work well for blog posts, not so well for news releases) and ending with using third-person AP-style writing for the release.

Small Business…Big Coverage! by Blogging PRWeb

Guest blogger Jon Gelberg contends that “you don’t have to be Apple or Google or Sony to get the attention of the press. All you need is an understanding of how the press (and online media) works and how best to get on their radar,” then describes how to find the right journalists and editors in a particular topic area and successfully pitch them on your story idea and expertise.

18 easy-breezy ideas for building a relationship with a journalist by Ragan’s PR Daily

Joan Stewart supplies “a handy list of how to prepare for, and conduct yourself during, a meeting” with a journalist or editor, from becoming familiar with that individual’s stories beforehand so you can discuss them intelligently, and bringing a media kit (or at least some brief background information) to asking how else you can help them and snail-mailing a real, paper thank-you note within 24 hours.

What brand marketers can learn from PR by iMedia Connection

Rebecca Lieb, author of one of the best SEO books ever, observes that “Press releases don’t work (the way they used to) any more. They are no longer a private, one-to-one communications channel (once mailed, later faxed to newsrooms). Now, the second a press release is distributed over a wire service, it’s immediately picked up by all the major news services and web portals.” Today, press releases have to be search-optimized, written for a broader audience of influencers than just journalists, and (ideally) discussed in the right forums.

Pitching to Google’s Fresh New Algorithm via News, Blogs, Events & Google+ by Search Engine Watch

Lisa Buyer reports that optimized news releases are now more important than ever given Google’s recent algorithm changes that promote the freshest content on news-themed web searches, then offers tips pertaining to PR SEO, online newsrooms, utilizing news blogs, capitalizing on events, the impact of Google+, content quality vs. quantity and more.

Six Tips For Making Your Press Release Twitter Friendly by Mediabistro

Pointing to a recent study showing that “Twitter drives more traffic to press releases than Facebook,” Tonya Garcia details half a dozen tips for making news releases Twitter-friendly, such as using numbers (““If you have data within a press release, call it out in the headline”), using hashtags properly, including multimedia, and making quotes tweetable.

8 ways to get people to discuss your new product in social media by WebInkNow

David Meerman Scott passes along tips learned while promoting his most recent book, Newsjacking: How to Inject your Ideas into a Breaking News Story and Generate Tons of Media Coverage. Among his recommendations: don’t reveal too much too soon (“I never used the word “newsjacking” anywhere on the web prior to November 14, which was launch day. I find that people have short attention spans. If I say ‘a book is coming’ but people cannot actually read it, few will act. So I chose to keep quiet.”), inject some controversy, and respond to people in real time.

5 excruciatingly dumb things PR pros do with social media by ragan.com

Suggesting “look around and you will see a huge gap between those who get it and those who only think they get it,” Priya Ramesh warns communications professionals not to do “dumb” things in social media like using a formal, business-like tone on social networks (nerdy); using social media as a broadcast medium rather than a conversational forum; and—my favorite—”joining the shiny-object bandwagon without a strategy.”

8 Steps to Leveraging PR for SEO by gShift Labs
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Krista LaRiviere of gShift Labs notes that PR has taken on added importance in web presence due to Google’s recent Panda algorithm changes, which reduce the value of directory links, increase the influence of social signals on ranking, and reward content in certain topic areas for freshness, and provides and eight-step process for getting SEO value from every news release—beginning with keyword research and working through optimization, backlinks, and online distribution through an SEO-friendly PR distribution service.