Earlier this week, we discussed the New Orleans Saints and their sponsored tweets for NOLA.com. Essentially, the idea is to attract more Saints fans to the site, but some are wondering whether or not these kinds of tweets, especially for …

Currently, there’s a silly trend populating Twitter feeds everywhere, one that uses the #ItsOkayToCheatif hashtag. The tweets responding to the trend are primarily from bored kids who are trying to sound deep and compelling, or maybe even humorous. Ultimately, it’s …

It’s infographic day at WebProNews, and now that we’ve learned about Google’s war against spam in awesome graphic form, we now turn our attention to Facebook; specifically, when will that witty post you’ve been holding onto get the most Facebook …

For some, the argument can be made that NBC’s new hit The Voice is a little too much like American Idol to differentiate itself and remain a true primetime player. Sure, the rules are different. Contestants are broken down into …

Now that social media participation has become an integral aspect of the marketing mix, businesses are finding ways to increase the return on their social participation through paid amplification. The impact on SEO alone can make this an attractive place …

MerchantCircle, an online network of US local business owners, revealed in its quarterly reports that more local businesses are turning to Facebook and other social networking sites like Twitter, as a low-cost option for their marketing efforts.

Social Media is celebrated for its power to cultivate influential relationships and foster viral conversations. As consumer attention shifts away from traditional mediums and migrates to the golden triangle of mobile, PC, and next generation Web appliances, businesses are racing to engage in the hopes of capturing fleeting awareness and igniting affinity.

I’ve been writing about how Social Media links are impacting Search Engine results lately.  It’s really an area we have consciously tried to stay ahead on because we think that Social Media link sharing is going to have an even greater impact on search in the future.

Social media is maturing as are the people embracing its most engaging tools and networks. Perhaps most notably, is the maturation of relationships and how we are expanding our horizons when it comes to connecting to one another. What started as the social graph, the network of people we knew and connected to in social networks, is now spawning new branches that resemble how we interact in real life.

Many are claiming this year as the year of "social mobile".  Even Facebook’s CTO announced that one of the primary objectives for Facebook this year is mobile, a statement that is backed with increased emphasis on its geolocation tool – Facebook Places.

For companies trying to make sense of social media and online marketing, it’s important to take a step back from all the “TwitFaceBlogTubeIn” mania for a second and look at the nature of how these things are going to work for the overall business.

A few months ago Facebook officially did away with the idea of adding “boxes” of custom content to Facebook pages and instead forced users into adding “applications” as the primary way to add custom layouts, tabs and content.

While this change is old news and has been covered widely, Facebook continues to tinker with the interface and so I’ve been getting lots of questions again about the steps involved in adding custom content and thought I would do a quick tutorial.

People say social media is unicorn, but it’s really just a horse.

Sure, social media empowers customers like nothing before it. And of course, social media creates a new level of real-time accountability for companies previously accustomed to asynchronous communication. These are the ways social media is different. But in other ways, it’s largely the same.

Let’s compare email marketing and social media.

The concept of quality over size when it comes to an audience is nothing new, and frankly when it comes to social media, the sermon is getting a little tired. We’ve heard it plenty of times. 

However, Twitter has been sharing some interesting information on its media blog lately that really drives the point home, providing data to back up the notion that quality over quantity is important when building a healthy Twitter following. 

People who say social media isn’t measurable aren’t looking very hard.

The truth is that there are at least 25 viable metrics you can use to evaluate the success of your social media efforts. The challenge isn’t measurability, it’s knowing which measures are meaningful.

Here are the 6 critically undervalued social media success metrics.

Over the holidays, I had some time to really dive into the LinkedIn B2B LeadGen Roundtable discussions. One started by Ann Thornley-Brown, President & CEO, Executive Oasis International, Toronto, caught my attention.

Companies that seek to expand their market reach to growing populations of customers spending time online have turned in significant numbers to search and social media as marketing channels. The world of search and social as an intersection with content marketing is quickly emerging as well.

The rise and rise of Facebook continues unabated, and it has moved well beyond just being a social network, it’s also a vital marketing channel for businesses of all sizes.

While most businesses have taken the first step of setting up a standard Facebook page which includes a feed of comments, photos and helps them gather fans; few have taken their Facebook pages to the next level.

I’ve received a series of inbound requests for comments based on a report from Gartner, an IT analyst firm, that estimates as many as 70-percent of social media campaigns will fail in 2011.

Which is more valuable to business – Facebook or Twitter? It’s a question that business owners struggle with every day in the quest for building a larger customer base, and retaining the customers they already have. It’s a question that won’t have the same answer for every business. It’s also a question that requires the evaluation of a great deal of variables on a per business basis. 

Social media has walked the fiery coals of skepticism and has brilliantly performed as a marketing, customer service and relationship building tool beyond expectations.