In the past week, there has been an influx of online marketing tips and how-to’s on industry blogs covering everything from how to optimize eBay stores and contextual ad campaigns to social media marketing for business-to-business. We thought these were some excellent sources for creating a more universal online marketing campaign.

At the end of the day, it’s about sales, not traffic. And if it’s about sales, then it must also be about people, not clicks. This seemed to be the focus of yesterday’s one-day SEW Live in Columbus, OH (you might call it SES Lite), as marketers explore the transition from search engine marketing to social media marketing.

The saying “all publicity is good publicity,” has, I think, been pretty much dismissed by now.  But to what degree, and in what instances?  Sage Lewis, founder and president of Sage Rock, considered those questions (among others) during his talk on “Measuring the Impact of Social Media” at yesterday’s SEW Live event.

The social media has emerged with a boom during the past few years. The social media sites enables a website or a blog with good content to generate traffic as well as create awareness.

The SEO industry walks the proverbial tight rope every day, offering legitimate services to clients that can help them interact better with search engines, while at the same time dodging the stigma that SEO is merely spam tactics cleverly disguised using smoke and mirrors.

The reason that search engine optimization is garnering a negative reputation, however, may actually have more to do with shady social media optimization practices than anything else.

Newsvine puts me on top of their technology page within hours of my article release on the newsvine algorithm.

Yesterday I had the chance to do a podcast interview for Tom Parish which he just posted on his Talking Portraits website.

You have by now likely read many collections of rules related to best practices for social media optimization.

As if it needed it, the online world just got another acronym: SMO. Not to be confused with EMO, or the Yiddish pejorative schmo, SMO stands for Social Media Optimization, as introduced to the attendants of the Search Engine Strategies Conference in Chicago.

At the upcoming Search Engine Strategies conference in Chicago I’ll be sitting in on a panel about social media optimization.

American sculptor Horatio Greenough coined the phrase “Form follows function,” which was later popularized by architects Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright.

What follows is a Q&A with AddThis.com co-founder Dom Vonarburg.

Kauffman eVenturing is featuring several new articles focused on helping entrepreneurs evaluate different aspects of online marketing, from search engine optimization and key word advertising to blogging, online publishing and using eBay as a distribution channel.

I was recently reading a post on Marc Pentermann’s blog that suggests social media optimization is pretty much SPAM for social media.

There is an exceptionally interesting meme developing around the idea of social media optimization.