Today is my birthday, and I decided to give you all a gift that few of you have been highly anticipating for a few months now. My most popular post on this site — probably by far — was last year’s Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2007 compilation. I spent about 3 days (and nights) on it (without sleep) and I was quite happy with the turnout. This year, I began starting to write this compilation in the first week of December. The collection begins with posts that start in January of 2008 and have been collected and shared in the last 12 months. Like last year, I’ve grouped them into different categories and written short descriptions on each post. There’s no order to the posts; I’ve used my bookmarks and a variety of social sites and peer recommendations to create this list. I hope this year’s list surpasses last year’s. Let me know how I did in the comments.

Here’s how this works: In the Internet Marketing Best Posts “series,” I take posts that are typically timeless — they’re not confined to a specific event or news occurrence — they’re valuable for the long haul in terms of Internet Marketing and creative strategy. Hopefully, you’ll see that these posts are still relevant in a few years down the road.

Last year, I ended 2006 with a great (and still pertinent) list of blog posts and articles that I felt were really the best in their class in the area of Internet Marketing. This year, I present you my favorite timeless posts of 2007, complete with descriptions about each blog post (which more than quadrupled the workload for me this time around, especially because I tripled the amount of links, but I had fun!) (Disclaimer: I’m certain that even with this list in excess of 250 links, I forgot a bunch of posts, so if you have any additional recommendations, please feel free to comment and I’ll add them!)

By the way, I still haven’t fully embraced video yet, so this will only include written articles. Maybe next year, folks!

Social Media Sites: General

• The Big Boys of Social Bookmarking: The Top 20 Sites (10e20): Chris Winfield ranks the top 20 social bookmarking sites by their Alexa rankings and gives a short description of what each does — in case you haven’t ventured beyond Digg.
• 24 Do-Follow Social Bookmarking Sites that Actually Work (Caroline Middlebrook): Get some powerful links on some of these lesser-known social sites.

A few weeks ago, the Bounty Fishing blog came out with an excellent and well-thought-out blog post about 27 Aquatic Lifeforms You Never Caught While Fishing. The story did quite well on Digg and on Reddit, with Reddit users noticing that one of the fish forms actually looked very much like the Reddit logo.

So what did Reddit founder Alexis Ohanion do? He changed the Reddit logo to that aquatic lifeform for several hours.

That story hit the front page of Reddit and on Digg, and 67 people voted on my comment:

Props to Reddit for visibly interacting with the community it serves.

Beyond the cool factor, Reddit is easily getting new users by paying attention to its user base and even creating surprises when not even necessary. (And Reddit doesn’t stop there.)

It’s great to build a self-sustainable social network and then be able to sit back and relax while the users run the show. It’s even better when you take part in the everyday details of your site and focus on your user’s experience. Not long ago, I wrote about how 17-year-old Andrew Sutherland was doing this on Quizlet. His site is successful on its own, but his involvement makes the user experience all the more enjoyable.

My ever-so-brilliant BFF wrote an interesting piece about whether blogs should be a primary marketing initiative or if email newsletters should still be in play. Lisa’s question was prompted by a blog post by Dawud Miracle which poses the same question. And Yaro Starak believes he has the answer: no.

I’m with ya, pal. Lisa writes about how Bruce Clay has both a blog and a newsletter. She says that the newsletter (surprisingly!) has more readers than her oh-so-personable blog. Surely, you’d think more people want to read Lisa’s humor and wit. I sure do.

But Lisa has a point. And yesterday I had a phone conversation with Gary Price about how podcasters are so immersed in their shows that they lose sight that the average person is not familiar at all with podcasting technology. To be completely frank, I still have doubts about the lifespan of podcasts and think that the multimedia overload is still too much to handle. (That doesn’t stop me from making occasional guest appearances on one social media podcast, though.)

The worst possible thing you can do is to slight someone else at the expense of convenience. The result is bad publicity, regardless of the benefits you believe it yields for the short term. If you screw up, it’s a public relations nightmare. Can we say damage control?

Here are three cases that were blown way out of proportion but could have been handled a lot better if the companies thought of the consequences before acting. There’s a bottom line: it’s a lot harder to sweep your mistakes under the rug, especially as a company in a world of conversing markets.

Case #1: Sprint Terminates Customers’ Accounts for Complaints

It’s been all over the Internet already. One of the more recent fiascoes occurred when Sprint forcibly disconnected service for 1,200 customers. From News4Jax.com, Sprint released a rather disturbing statement, saying:

Rather than continue to operate in a situation that was unsatisfactory for Sprint and our subscribers, we chose to terminate our relationship with those customers to allow them to pursue other options.