“Internet Marketing Ninjas, led by company founder Jim Boykin, is the ideal match for WebmasterWorld,” said Tabke. “I couldn’t have asked for a better situation than a long-time member acquiring WebmasterWorld.”

WebmasterWorld is just the latest in a series of forums Boykin has acquired. Other recent pick-ups include Cre8asiteforums, and the Developer Shed Network.

“2012 has been a major year for IMN and I feel privileged to be a part of WebmasterWorld,” says Boykin. “I’ve been a member of WMW for over 10 years, and I’ve learned so much from so many there. I have so much respect for the community members and it gives me the uttermost pride to be able to work with the community to move WMW into the future. I am very humbled and ready to listen to, and work with, this amazing community.”

WebmasterWorld Director of Operations, Neil Marshall, offered the following statement: “I’m delighted to be involved with Jim and his team at Internet Marketing Ninjas. This is an exciting new era for WebmasterWorld and I’m really looking forward to continuing to develop the site for the benefit of its members, and retaining the site’s world-renowned, quality discussion forum for webmasters and their businesses. Thank you to Brett Tabke, for giving webmasters an independent vehicle to meet and to discuss current hot topics, turning the site into a major brand for webmasters. I’m sure the whole team is ready to keep that going forward and to develop new ideas for today’s Internet marketing businesses.”

WebmasterWorld is a place where there is a great deal of discussion from webmasters dealing with Google various algorithm updates. Such discussions often give clues to new major algorithm changes that Google makes before they are officially announced (although there is often a lot of talk that leads to false alarms).

It will be interesting to see how the forum evolves under new ownership. From the sound of it, the community itself won’t be changing much.

Tabke says he intends to invest his future efforts into the PubCon conferences.

Each account is tailored to accomodate a language: @StateDept (English), @USAbilAraby (Arabic), @USA_Zhongwen (Chinese), @USAdarFarsi (Farsi), @USAenFrancais (French), @USAHindiMein (Hindi), @USAemPortugues (Portuguese), @USApoRusski (Russian), @USAenEspanol (Spanish) and @USAUrdu (Urdu).

Users can tweet questions anytime during the month, but answers will only be provided to selected questions on each Friday afternoon of January during the Department’s Daily Press Briefing. A video clip of each question that is accepted and addressed by the Department’s Spokesperson, Victoria Nuland, will then be posted on the State Department’s YouTube Channel.

So what could anybody possibly have to ask the Department of State about? Hmmm? Especially considering they are the government and this is the Internet and we are users of Internets, is there anything we’d like to hear them address? Anything at all?

Then there was this.

Seriously, though, I don’t think people quite understand that you can ask the questions with #AskState any time during the month of January. Most of the tweets you see out there right now are people simply repeating the news that you can direct questions to the Department of State using the hashtag. HEY. YOU CAN ASK YOUR QUESTIONS NOW OR ANYTIME – YOU DON’T HAVE TO ONLY DO IT ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON. THE STATE DEPARTMENT SAYS THEY WILL ONLY ANSWER YOUR QUESTIONS DURING THE BRIEFING ON FRIDAY. YOU, HOWEVER, CAN POST QUESTIONS ANYTIME. MMKAY? THX!

“We’ve added a critical piece to our puzzle with the acquisition of Toolbox.com,” said Ziff Davis CEO Vivek Shah. “The IT community relies on itself to make decisions and be informed. Owning the leading professional networking site is a significant strategic advantage for Ziff Davis.”

Toolbox.com will become part of Ziff Davis’ B2B Focus, which was formed when the company acquired Focus Research.

This makes the fourth acquisition for Ziff Davis in the past year.

Toolbox.com has 2.3 million registered members.

Ziff Davis sites already reach 40 million per month. Properties include: PCMag, BuyerBase, LogicBuy, Geek.com, ExtremeTech, AppScout and B2B Focus.

FailDesk is the brainchild of two IT guys and the editor of Geeks Are Sexy, who have taken up the cause to comfort and cheer up their IT comrades who “work so tirelessly and diligently to make sure ‘the system stays up.’” Launched earlier this month, the site is a one-stop destination for their brethren to commiserate and find “IT-related humor while at the same time giving you a place to submit your own funny stories, pictures or videos.” Here’s a sample of some of their offerings, which I have to admit are pretty solid knee-slappers:

Beyond the quick-laugh images you’ll find there, some war-torn IT soldiers have submitted personal accounts of some of the more vexing and humorous incidents they’ve encountered in the battlefield. The stories are equal parts likely to make you shake your head in amused disbelief and cause you to lose your faith in humanity’s ability to find their way out of a plastic bag. Worthy of note: going from what submissions I’ve read on FailDesk, printer problems are an epidemic. I wonder how many times some of these IT support guys’ eyes have glazed over as they drifted into a grinning fugue while fantasizing about this.

If you plan to submit something, put your best foot forward because you may even be given a prize if your story is good enough. It’s also worth mentioning that I will not be held responsible for any loss in productivity due to any IT guys at my office turning their attention to this site instead of working to keep the system up.

At least in regards to the PC gaming environment.

The success story of Steam’s online service is the industry standard, but there are others like Direct2Drive and Impulse. Electronic Arts, famously known as the makers of the Madden NFL Football series of video games, has also jumped on the digital distribution service with Origin, which offers EA-published games available for immediate download. The concept is a brilliant one as long as you aren’t one of the people who requires a jewel case with some cover art to legitimize your purchase.

There is, however, one issue in regards to using EA’s Origin service: consumers are at the mercy of EA’s DRM, which can apparently be applied whenever EA sees fit. Take the plight of an Origin member by the name of MaximumTacos. While the silliness of the name may be hard to overlook, the shafting he received from EA concerning access to games he’s already purchased is not.

The story of MaximumTacos’ EA issues hit the web yesterday, and after popular threads on Reddit and The Escapist’s forums, everything began to take shape. What we have is another user going to the EA forums and posting a profane message that made mention of the MaximumTacos user name.

Mind you, the post was not made by MaximumTacos, it just mentioned the user name during the profanity-filled rant, and because MaximumTacos had the audacity to allow his name to appear in a TOS-violating forum thread, he, and not the user who authored the post, got banned. Not banned as in banned from the forum, but banned from accessing the EA games he had purchased via digital distribution methods.

Or, as EA’s online customer support put it:

Angad: Please note that your account [maximumtacos@gmail.com] has been permanently terminated from the Electronic Arts Online service for violating the terms of services. The account will no longer be accessible in any way, and all property, items, and characters associated currently are or will soon be deleted.

This bears repeating: Electronic Arts banned the account of a user in such a way, they no longer have access to games they’ve already bought and paid for, all because someone else mentioned their user name during a profane rant.

Does that even make sense? Apparently to EA, it does, because they aren’t backing down even in the face of being so completely and utterly wrong with their punishment. As for the offending post in question, EA even referenced it when they informed MaximumTacos about the suspension, which turned into an outright ban:

Chat log: soldier shapes / camo to watch for, and the people camping in corners with it./quote so its no longer INFARED = IR YOU NOOB B—- C— maximumtacos

As you can see, MaximumTacos was the target of the profanity, not the author, but yet, he’s the one who gets banned? Does that make sense? Furthermore, does cussing on an EA-owned forum warrant an outright bannishment from EA, one that prevents access to content that’s already been bought and paid for? Here’s an image of what MaximumTacos was greeted with when he tried to access his copy of Battlefield: Bad Company 2:

For years, DRM advocates scoffed at the idea that it would be used for bullshit like this — the refrain was always that it was about preventing piracy. But managing rights is what DRM was built to do, so that is what it’s used for.

What’s next from EA? Banning a reviewer who didn’t like their 2013 version of Madden? Or, perhaps banning someone who tweets about their dissatisfaction with an EA product? To cover his plight, MaximumTacos is starting a blog to document his dealings with EA, but at this point, I’d seriously consider legal representation, because not only is EA’s punishment entirely too severe — complete banishment from products for swearing at an EA forum? Isn’t that like 10 steps beyond what’s appropriate? — but it wasn’t even enforced against the right person.

It’s in the game, apparently.

The new pluck comes with 14 pre-built social apps. The company says Forums is one of Pluck’s most popular apps. We asked Semelsberger to talk a little bit about the relevance of forums to today’s web, as social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, etc. have become so prevalent. Following is what he had to say.
 
“Forums technology definitely pre-dates the social tools you mention, but forums haven’t remotely been superseded by Facebook et al. We would argue that forums serve a purpose that these other tools don’t. We and our brand customers certainly value what the social tools deliver – we offer applications with similar functionality as part of Pluck – but we appreciate the reasons that consumers continue to like forums.”

“When we look at companies who are good at powering and channeling customer passion, it’s clear that Forums have a place. Take the Dallas Cowboys for example. Their Facebook Discussions only had ~2K posts in 18 months, even though they had more than 1MM Facebook Fans (~0.002 posts/fan). Their web-based forums had more than ~750K posts from ~125K members in the same time period (~6 posts/fan). Realizing that people love to engage deeply with the Cowboys on their website (3000x more posts/fan), they replaced their Facebook Discussions with Pluck Forums, enabling fans to have a consistent read/write experience across the web and Facebook.”
 
“Forums scale. They have a structure that supports enduring, lengthy, multi-threaded conversations, which some of the social tools you mention can’t replicate. Forum content is organized by topic and sub-topic, which makes forums content easy to navigate even when the volumes of interactions are enormous. We power the forums at Runners World, for example, which have accumulated millions of posts over tens of thousands of topics, but the volume of content hasn’t constrained participation in the least. Nearly 3 million AARP members use Pluck Forums to talk about an enormous variety of topics. The Knot, a site dedicated to brides and weddings, has over 8 ½ million Pluck Forums users.”
 
“In our experience, another reason forums are attractive to our brand customers is because it is so easy and natural for their community management staff to be part of the forums conversation. Brands that do this tend to want to exercise some control over the tenor of the conversation, or want to convey authority and credibility among members of their core audience. This certainly is hard to do in some of the social tools’ ‘frontier towns.’

Forums are more likely to be of persistent value to both our brand customers and their community members. Lots of forums content – discussions of the best way to light a family photo shoot, for example – will never go out of date.”
 
“In general, we see that Forums work extraordinarily well for things like category discussions (for digital retailers), Q&A and general advice (e.g. Runner’s World and the Knot have very vibrant Forums). With Pluck 5 we’ve given Pluck Forums a lot of versatility beyond the native capabilities of generic forums. Brands can easily configure Pluck Forums so that it works as a Question and Answer application, for example, which is attractive to digital retailers. We’ve added Polls as a Pluck Forums feature, which lets consumers or staff members inject structured queries into ongoing topical conversations. We’ve added our Trust Filters to Pluck Forums, which gives consumers the ability to ascertain who among many Forums participants are their friends, are noted authorities or are highly regarded contributors.”

For more on the benefits of forums, read these articles:

Are forums and Q&A sites more important to search now?

Could forums be more valuable to your brand than Facebook/Twitter?

Google gives forums more links on SERPs

Forums are relevant in social media marketing

SITE Intelligence Group, a private company that monitors extremist chatter on the internet, has identified posts on a Jihadist forum that call for the killing of Letterman for jokes he made regarding the death of a terrorist leader.

According to SITE the threat was made by Umar al-Basrawi, a “frequent commenter” that the group has tracked making comments on other Jihadist forums. The site where the threats appeared is Shumukh-al-Islam, an Al-Qaeda depository. Basrawi has over 1,200 comments on that site.

“It’s a clearing house for Al-Qaeda material. it gets the most Al-Qaeda supporters,” said Adam Raisman of SITE.

Apparently, Umar al-Basrawi didn’t like a joke that Letterman made regarding a man named Ilyas Kashmiri, a suspected Al-Qaeda leader killed in an airstrike. Here’s what the post said –

He said that Kashmiri was killed in an airstrike in Pakistan (the news was not yet reported about the leading mujahideen, and Allah knows best),” the message said. “Then, he showed his evil nature and deep hatred for Islam and Muslims, and said that Ilyas Kashmiri was killed and he joined bin Laden. Then the despicable one put his hand on his neck and demonstrated the way of slaughter!! Meaning that the Americans slaughtered Mullah Ilyas Kashmiri (we ask Allah to protect him), just as they slaughtered before him Sheikh Usama bin Laden (may Allah have mercy on him).

And the threat -

Is there not amongst you a Sayyid Nosair al-Masri (may Allah release him) to cut the tongue of this lowly Jew and shut it forever. Just as Sayyid (may Allah release him) did with the Jew Kahane.

We ask Allah to paralyze his tongue and grant the sincere monotheists his neck. O Allah, amen.

Letterman isn’t Jewish, but I’m assuming that fact is probably irrelevant to Basrawi.

Twitter is making light of the situation –

Although this isn’t the first time that Letterman’s public persona has put him in danger, it might be the most severe of the cases. Back in the late 80s and early 90s, Letterman had a notorious stalker named Margaret Mary Ray. More recently, a former Late Show producer tried to blackmail Letterman with information about his office affairs.

SITE says that they advise Letterman to exhibit same level of caution that he would use regarding a threat from an obsessed fan.

No matter how much time and how many resources are spent on your brand’s social media presence, more can always be done, so many will have to find they have to be selective in areas of participation and time spent. If your budget and time aren’t as restricted, you can build an enormous social presence around the web in the places that matter. Just remember, more can always be done. We at WebProNews certainly have plenty of room to expand and improve our own social strategy, and chances are you do too. 

So, with all of that in mind, here are some ideas you can use to build your social presence. 

Twitter

1. Post regular Twitter updates everyday. That doesn’t mean spam or post them constantly all day long, but there should be enough regularity to where your followers know you’re there and don’t forget about you. That said, don’t talk just to talk. Have something valuable to say. If you produce content, share your links. Some may not think it’s a good idea just to pump out your own links on Twitter, because it’s "about the conversation", but the way I look at is this: if someone is following me, they’re probably interested in what I have to say. If I’m writing articles, those are in essence, what I have to say. That doesn’t mean that it’s not about the conversation. 

2. You should engage in conversation on Twitter. Start conversations that don’t necessarily pertain to your own links. Listen to what others are saying, and join conversations with them, regardless of if they are directly related to your brand or not. 

3. Monitor your brand. Respond to @mentions (good or bad). Respond to direct messages. 

4. Post pictures and videos using services like TwitPic, TwitVid, Yfrog, etc. These things can help humanize your brand and increase engagement with others. They can be conversation starters. People like visuals. 

5. Create relevant lists. Create lists of other Twitterers that can provide value to others. You don’t necessarily have to, but it might be a good idea to create a variety of lists for subjects related to your niche. If you have a car blog, for example, you might have a list of car brands, a list of other car bloggers, a list for mechanics, a list of auto part vendors, etc. 

Facebook

1. Have a Facebook Page for your brand. If you’re running a business, you need a Page, not just a personal profile. What you do with your personal profile is up to you, but your page should be up, and it should be promoted. 

2. Post regular updates throughout the day. Just like Twitter, I see nothing wrong with sharing links to your content here if you write articles or blog posts. I should note that this should be actual helpful content though – not just posts about why people should buy your product. Nobody wants to be a fan of a page that does that. 

3. Respond to comments on your Page. Get involved in conversations. 

4. Update your photos and videos. You don’t have to use third-party services for this on Facebook. 

5. Experiment with landing pages for your Facebook Page. It doesn’t have to go right to your wall. You can direct fans to any information you want to provide. 

6. You can use "notes" to put blog-style content right in Facebook should you choose to do so. 

7. There is a virtually unlimited number of Facebook apps. Look for ones that might be able to add value to your page and get people engaged in a helpful way. This will also take some experimenting. 

YouTube (and other video sites)

1. If you create videos, you need to have them on YouTube and other video sites/networks. This is key for getting your videos out to a wider audience. 

2. These sites are also communities. Respond to comments and subscribe to others. Make friends in the communities. 

3. Push subscriptions to your channels. Keeping people subscribed means keeping them engaged as you continue to produce content. This can help build a following. 

4. Even if you don’t create your own videos, it doesn’t mean that you can’t get involved in conversations and comment on others’ videos. 

5. You can create "favorites" lists of videos that can be helpful, even if they’re not your videos (similar to the Twitter lists).

MySpace

1. MySpace may not be the current flavor of the week, but make no mistake – it’s still got a lot of users. Makes friends on MySpace with like-minded individuals and businesses, and expand your network here. 

2. Like anything else, keep up with your comments and direct messages, and engage in conversation on and off your own page. 

3. Have a professional-looking design for your page. 

4. Highlight your best content. 

5. Update your page regularly with new status updates, blog entries, videos, etc. 

Google Buzz

1. Update Buzz regularly throughout the day with links and general conversation. Basically, treat it similar to Facebook or Twitter. 

2. Engage in conversation on and off your own Buzz posts. 

3. Spend some time making your Google Profile (which is connected to Buzz…and appears in Google search results) the best it can be. Provide links to your other profiles. 

4. Integrate other options that are available and applicable to you (Google Reader sharing, Picasa photos, Orkut, etc.)

5. You can apply these to other networks like LinkedIn and FriendFeed as well. 

Digg, Reddit, Delicious, StumbleUpon, etc. 

1. Share links to others’ content on social bookmarking sites like these regularly. This will help you build a following. 

2. Have buttons to make your own content easy to share on these sites. 

3. Engage in conversations in the comments of links you share and links others share on these sites. 

4. Become friends with others like-minded and interesting people on these networks. 

Forums

1. Find relevant topics in forums that are also relevant to your business and get involved in existing conversations. 

2. Start your own relevant conversations. Don’t just get in there and link to your content. It’s tacky and people will see through it. You can often provide your link in your profile anyway. 

3. If you have built up enough credibility in a forum, you might be able to share a link of your own from time to time in a legitimate fashion, like for example, if you wrote an article on the topic being discussed that helps to answer a question that is being asked. 

4. The more actively you engage in useful conversation, the more credibility you will gain, and you can come to be looked upon as an expert in your field. 

Blogs

1. If you have a blog, keep up with the comments. Respond and stay involved in the conversations. If people disagree with you, which they often will, don’t make a big deal about it or try to prove them wrong. You might just be driving them away. Keep it constructive. Respectfully disagree and maybe elaborate on why you stand by your position, or if they change your mind, maybe tell them you hadn’t looked at things that way. 

2. Take the time to participate in conversation on other relevant blogs. You can basically think of blog comments as mini forums. The same rules pretty much apply. 

Photos

1. As I said, people like visuals, especially current users of sites like Flickr and Picasa. Update photo sites regularly. Again, this can help humanize your brand and even open you up to different audiences. 

2. Participate in conversations in comments on and off of your own photos. 

3. Promote your presence on these sites. On your own site/blog, maybe have some links pointing to these accounts.

The Right Person/People for the Job

1. You want to make sure you have the right person or people representing your brand in all of these communities. You don’t want someone that doesn’t really understand your company’s vision or position  to be out there giving people the wrong impression. 

2. Whoever is representing your brand should have a grasp on current news and strategies related to what your business provides. In other words, they should be knowledgeable. It wouldn’t hurt for the people involved to have a designated amount of time each day just reading news. 

Finally, just keep everything up to date and current. Don’t let profiles go sour. Don’t let comments, questions, and messages sit there to rot. You’ve got to keep up with it all. So, with that in mind, don’t bite off more than you can chew in social media. Look at how much of this you actually want to do, and plan time and resources accordingly. 

This is by no means all that can be done. There are plenty of other communities I didn’t mention, and probably a great deal more strategies that I didn’t touch upon. I think the things mentioned in this article should be a good start though. 

What did I leave out that you would add? Please do so in the comments. 

"The Small Business Corner is designed to give those of you who are running your own AdWords accounts the opportunity to share best practices in discussions with your peers so that you can make sure your AdWords account is doing all it can to support your business goals," says Google’s Miles Johnson. "This new category is not about troubleshooting specific account issues, but rather about sharing and learning from the experiences of others."

Johnson throws out: choosing the right tools to measure results, how to write great ads, and finding the right frequency to sign in to AdWords as topics of discussion.

There are already more topics to discuss in there, and given that AdWords are a pretty popular small business marketing tool, I’d expect this forum to get a great deal of discussion going, which should make for a very useful resource.

Google’s newly redesigned SERPs place a great deal of emphasis on conversations, as I mentioned in this article about optimizing for this new design. There is increased emphasis on social search and real-time search, which both utilize Facebook and Twitter to a great extent, but I want to talk about the Discussions option.

When a user chooses to view Google’s "Discussions" results for a query, they are presented with options for time: anytime, past hour, past 24 hours, past week, past month, past year, and custom range. They’re presented with sorting options: by relevance or by date. They’re presented with options for all discussions, forums, or Q&As. They can refine this even further by filtering for discussions of any length, short, medium, or long. In addition, they can sort by standard results, sites with images, and page previews, and by all results and results from nearby locations. That’s some pretty deep down drilling.

Anyway, no matter which parameters you choose to search by under discussions, the non-everything options are Forums and Q&A.

Businesses looking for increased exposure and visibility ought to consider answering questions from consumers in areas that they are qualified. This has always been something to consider for a successful online marketing strategy, as forums and Q&A sites not only attract targeted traffic, but appear in search results, not to mention it just helps you sell your expertise in your line of work. The difference now is increased visibility. Google’s search options may not be new, but they’re more visible now, and you can pretty much count on them getting used a lot more.

Q&A sites are also not new, but lately it seems that we’re seeing an increased focus on them from a variety of players. Yahoo, the top Q&A site recently served its billionth answer, but others are bringing different elements to the Q&A table. Some are integrating local business listings with them to provide. Others are finding their own unique spin. Google itself even purchased Q&A property Aardvark recently. It will be interesting to see if this becomes more heavily integrated with the Discussions option.

Read more about why forum participation can benefit your marketing strategy here.