This is a guest post by Itamar Kestenbaum. Follow him on Twitter..

Every time I tell someone I’m a Community Manager, I get a varied response. But the response doesn’t vary enough. The response is usually something along the lines of “Wow! So you tweet and facebook for a living! Kewlz!” or “So do you blog on the interwebs all day, or sumthin?” Another favorite is “What’s that?” That last one might be the most honest of the three, since asking a Community Manager whether they tweet for a living is like asking a construction worker if they cat-call for a living, or a doctor if he asks people to say “ah!” for a living.

Really, many people trying to describe Online Community Managers, end up sounding like this:

Others may know what Community Manager is, but don’t know exactly how much it entails. While the Community Roundtable do a great job of defining the role of the Community Manager, many people still wonder about this newly developed role. So I challenged myself to create a list of 10 responsibilities of the Community Manager that extend beyond the realm of Facebook and Twitter (and yes, even blogging). In no particular order, here they are:

Make Friends In the Industry

Community Managing is super easy when you’re working for a well-known tech company in the middle of Silicon Valley. But what if you’re Community Managing for a company that makes matchbooks? No matter what industry you’re in – get to know the people in your industry. Who are the heavy hitters? Who are the influencers? Who can you get to know that will be useful to your employer or client’s place in the industry?

If you’re representing a matchbook company, you might want to know the other matchbook manufacturer’s Marketing pros, the top CEOs of the large matchbook companies, and the press.

Get to know the press before you need something from them. Don’t wait until you need a story published, or until you want to be used as a source. Instead, get to know them, and become the person they happen to be reminded of when they want a quote on something.

Knowing the right people is always good – but when you’re a Community Manager and want to establish your company as a thought leader in the industry, it’s a must to get on a first-name basis with people in the industry if you expect to position yourself in it.

Mark Thompson of Search Engine Journal has a great article entitled How To Find Industry Influencers. Check it out!

Look at Boring Stats — and Make Them Interesting

This has a little to do with the Social Media platforms, but mostly with analytics. You know, those line-charts and stats and pie-charts and percentages and… Well, you get it. While these things might make you yawn your jaw off, they’re actually what makes your job worth your company’s time and money.

A Community Manager who does use social platforms needs to be able to track its effectiveness in… um… getting people through the door. I remember sitting in an ROI webinar with New Marketing Labs’ Justin Levy, and he more or less skimmed through 5 or 6 different measuring tools like Grader, and of course, Google Analytics. He also gave a simple example of how to measure Social Media ROI:

What you really want to know when measuring Social Media ROI is how much money each incoming warm lead is worth. These are leads that click a link, go to the site, and fill out a form or call. So if you’re spending $200 a day on your Social Media campaign, and let’s say your product is $100 worth per item, let’s say you’re bringing 100 people to the website, and your Google Analytics shows a 15% conversion rate to a warm lead, and a 15% conversion rate of warm leads to paying clients purchasing one item.

So we have the 100 visitors, and out of those we have 15 people filling out a form or calling, 15% of them will convert. So 2.25 people out of every 100 person visit per day will convert into a $100 sale per person. So you’re putting $200 into that day, and you’re bringing in ~$225. So your return on investment (not including any other factors) is 112.5%. Make sense?

Have at Least A Little Knowledge of SEO

Don’t know much about History, don’t know much of Biology, don’t know much about SEO – but I do know that it’s extremely important, and that spiders scour the web indexing websites. I also know that when you blog and post, most blog platforms have a pinging system that automatically tells the search engines to check again for the new update. Also, use phrases you think people will be searching for when they want to come across your article – those are used as keywords. Apparently, according to Interspire.com – hyphenated websites like www.free-website-templates.com would rank higher than comapanyname.com if both their sites had identical content. Also, <h1> tags apparently rank higher with the keywords in them. So put keywords in your titles. And of course – the axiom – links, links, links. Always have links pointing in to your site, and more recently, it’s become important to link out as well (for Bing ranking).

I’m not an SEO expert, and I don’t claim to be. But I do know that keywords are important, I know that tags in posts are important, and I know the basics of how new posts join the rest of the interwebs. If SEO isn’t your expertise – let the experts do their job. But you have to at least get the gist.

Develop Relationships with Clients

Someone once dubbed the job of the Community Manager as being the loneliest job in the company. That’s because you’re literally in limbo between the best interests of your company and the best interests of your clients. You need to make sure the customer isn’t just happy and views your company in a good light – but is also able to talk to your company at any time, and can get almost everything they want without a hitch. On the other hand, sometimes there’s a limit. Sometimes you need to juggle the interests of both and still keep the customer satisfied. That’s where the expertise of a community manager comes in. If you’ve developed a good relationship with your client already, you should have no problem drawing lines where necessary.

I mentioned that I wasn’t going to touch Facebook and Twitter, so I’ll recommend that if a happy customer writes a review via email or Yelp – give them a call and thank them. If a customer calls in to thank you personally, follow up with an appreciative email. Make their experience with you as sweet as possible. Social Media isn’t only Social Networks. Sometimes it’s plain-old personal communication.

Chris Brogan once said that “the difference between an Audience and a Community is which way the chairs are pointing.” What he meant by that is that it’s just as much your job to help sustain them as it is theirs to sustain you. An audience just sits and listens. A community participates.

Get Co-Workers Involved Online

You absolutely have to get other people in the company involved in your Social Media efforts. It’s an imperative part of your job to not only control and monitor your company’s reputation, but to create it to begin with. And there’s no one better to create reputation with than the employees themselves. Your sales people are on Facebook half the day, and your receptionist tweets way too much during work. Put them to good use!

Here’s a great example: Many Yelp reviews are taken down within a few days of being posted. Ever wonder why? Apparently Yelp has an algorithm that automatically removes isolated or near-isolated postings. This means that if you had a bad experience at Joey’s Pizza, you’ve created an account and written a bad review and never touched the account again, within a few days your post will be gone. Yelp believes that not all users are created equal. Meaning, the more active you are, and the more active friends you have, the more clout your post has in the pool of other posts for that venue.

So what does this have to do with getting co-workers involved online, you ask?

Lots! So let’s say you work at Joey’s Pizza. You may not be able to spot the active Yelp users as they walk into your shop, and you sure as heck can’t write fake reviews for yourself all day long! So what can you do? You can get your co-workers and friends to be active on Yelp. Have them write reviews about their local restaurants, their movie theaters and parks. Have them review everything except your pizza shop. Then, when they get any satisfied customer through the door, they can invite them to Yelp to write a review. The fact that you and your co-workers are active on Yelp will immediately positively affect their clout, and their reviews will stick. That’s how you use your co-worker’s use of the web to further the company’s marketing strategy!

Organize Logistics of Social Media Generated Operations

Unfortunately lately we’ve been seeing a growing need for help in countries due to natural disasters, and lot of companies have been stepping up and taking socially responsible actions. Many companies joined forces to help Haiti victims, and this is a prime example of a situation in which you as a Community Manager may need to deal with the logistics of something that’s transpired via you Social interactions. So over the past month or so, many a Community Manager have had to figure out what logistics and intricacies are involved in shipping supplies to Haiti – something they’d never dreamed of dealing with before. This includes everything from acquiring permits, to negotiating with shippers, to figuring costs out with any non-for-profit you may be working with.

Also, a Community Manager might need to deal with the day-to-day sales process for a customer they’ve brought in. To make sure a customer brought in through social channels is treated correctly, it’s recommended that you see them through as much of the process as possible – even if it means being the middle man between them and the sales team through the entire process.

Whatever you do – see things to their ends. Don’t assume that other departments will “take it from here.” If things get out of your hands – at least always check back to make sure things had gotten done.

Connect Good Will for Brand

Earlier in this post, I mentioned the Haiti relief efforts. Good will is a great way for you to get the kind of positive light surrounding you that you look so hard to create by just being sincere all the time. On a day-to-day basis, sincerity and good customer service are great ways of slowly but surely generating a good reputation. But actually doing good things for the community, or helping a crisis like Haiti’s can be the perfect way to generate a much louder halo around your image. Larger companies may mobilize a large fundraiser, but smaller companies can host smaller community drives as well. Whatever good you do – make sure people know you’re doing it so your company gets bonus points for being super nice-like! This reputation will not be forgotten next time they’re looking to use the service you provide. So as Community Manager always look for an opportunity to leverage the company’s current clout to help the community.

Work With Web Developers to Update Your Site for Web 2.0

I’ve seen some huge companies with disgusting websites, and smaller companies with much better up-to-standards website. The difference is updating your website to Web 2.0. Once the web 2.0 style and standard came around (and its eventual crushing of IE6,) it’s become painfully obvious that a lot of companies don’t meet the standard. But I’m not going to coach you on how to design a web 2.0 website. To learn more about that – go to http://www.go2web20.net/ – it’s the best site for tips on tools to use, apps, and general info on anything web 2.0, and it’s edited by the one and only Orli Yakuel.

Anyway, your job as a Community Manager in this respect is not large, but it is important. The job is to guide the web developers and programmers so that your new web 2.0 site reflects the image and personality that you portray online, and more broadly, the brand’s image.

For example, nobody wants to be the Social Media figurehead for a company who’s website looks like this: http://www.emmis.com/. By the way, Emmis Communications is a HUGE company, and their website absolutely stinks. Go figure. Maybe they don’t care.

Strategize With Webmaster to Create Better Conversion

Just like any other advertising effort, your job needs to be measured. So try and come up with strategies with your webmaster that will lead to an easier measurement. The same way you create different landing pages for different ads, create specific phone numbers relating to specific campaigns. Do the same thing for your social networks, and your other interactions. I’ve seen some websites have a landing page that’s not accessible through any other venue except a twitter link. It makes your client feel special. It makes them feel unique, and valued. And it helps you track where they came from better – just like with ads. It’s not inventing the wheel – it’s measuring the success of marketing.

Also – where are the calls to action on your site? This is also something the Community Manager and webmaster collaborate on often. You need to make sure that the calls to action on the site correspond not only to the natural tendencies of a web user (for example, eyes always gravitate to the top right,) but to the message you’re broadcasting across other platforms as well.

Keep your campaigns consistent.

Create and Execute Email Blasts

As part of your relationship with the community you’ve created, it’s sometimes your job to be the guy who sends out emails to everyone. I’ve come across several email blasts that made me unsubscribe immediately, and remove any affiliation with the entity. That’s usually because they are advertisements and ruthless self promotion on an almost-daily basis. What I suggest for this segment is to first know the process of executing an email blast. You will need to write the blast, explain the concept to your Graphic Designer, and then have the coder code the email correctly for HTML format. Once that’s done – you need to blast it out correctly. My favorite tool for e-blasts is MailChimp. Another fantastic Email blasting service is Blue Sky Factory – and they have a good blog with tips on how to come up with the perfect email.

Conclusion

Anyway – I think you get the gist. I think Amber Naslund illustrated it best with her two year-after-year blog posts entitled Being A Director of Community when she said that “These people are spokespeople, Trust Agents, communicators, networkers, brand ambassadors, and representatives of their community all wrapped into one.” While the role of the Community Manager is still evolving and becoming increasingly imperative as we go along, there’s definitely something to be said for this amazingly innovative stage of its evolution. Community Manager positions are becoming more commonplace, and as the position establishes itself, it also defines itself.

Then again, I’m a Community Manager myself, so I’m terribly biased! What do you think? Is Community Management important? Are there companies that can do without a Community Manager? How do you think the position will evolve over the next few years?

Itamar is the Community Manager for Moishe’s Moving Systems. He also consults companies on Internet Marketing. You can follow him at @tweetamar or on his blog at itamarkestenbaum.com.

Photos by Shutterstock.

[ 10 Community Manager Responsibilities that Don’t Involve Twitter and Facebook is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Read more about The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, a primer to social media marketing. Or you can subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

Did you know that New York City offers more opportunities than the standard tourist attractions? Did you know that there are other hotels beyond the Hyatts, the Hiltons, the Omnis, the Sheratons, and the Marriotts of the world in NYC? I know when my parents come to NYC, they go to what’s familiar. When you go to a conference in Manhattan, you probably seek out hotels that you’ve also heard of. Face it, it’s a competitive landscape out there, especially for tourists who flock to familiar names but perhaps do not realize that there are other options in the city. How does one small hotel possibly compete with these hotel franchises? Is it even possible?

We can say that it is. In fact, the Roger Smith Hotel did it quite successfully. Now known as the “social media hotel” of NYC, Roger Smith is attracting a really incredible bunch of people who have raved about the ambiance and the company’s approachability online. I spoke with Brian Simpson, Director of Social Hospitality, for more insights into how social media became an asset for Roger Smith, and I learned some great things. Brian Simpson is a cancer survivor and discovered Twitter in the spring of 2008 when he endured the grueling process of chemotherapy for a period of 7 months. Twitter, he says, “became my way of talking with a community of people.” He explains that “Twitter allowed me to be social without having to be IRL.” After he joined the Roger Smith staff (as Assistant Director of Food & Beverage), he helped spread Roger Smith Hotel’s amazing stories, including three years of archived video, across the social media space.

Thus, Roger Smith Hotel has made an impression on us through social media, particularly Twitter. Brian explains that he initially built up followers by searching for interests that were relevant to him as the individual performing outreach on behalf of Roger Smith. Once connected, he looked at their friends and followers to see if there was an opportunity to branch out and make new friends. He says, “The use of Twitter was mainly for the brevity and ability to drive traffic to our blog and booking site rogersmith.com. I really found the genuine ability to connect with people valuable and we have continued to use this as just one of many pieces of the funnel hopefully driving people to be more involved with us outside of just booking a room.”

Brian explains that “conversations are happening and it is up to me to either be part of them or not.” Part of this, for him, revolves around being approachable and building up relationships privately via direct messages or on the Twitter stream. He explains, “I listen and try to contribute where it matters most – I never sell… its about people and stories.”

Indeed. But Roger Smith’s story is only part of what we’ve seen in the social media space. Therefore, I asked some people for their impressions of the hotel. Joseph Jaffe, Chief Interrupter of Powered, Inc., said that without social media, there was “not a chance” that he’d have heard of Roger Smith Hotel. Similarly, my good friend Jonathan Fields, who is a NYC neighbor, said that it is “doubtful” that he’d have heard of Roger Smith Hotel if not for Twitter. I personally learned about Roger Smith Hotel at a social media conference and was told that it’s the place to be. The word of mouth has traveled, because Pamela Slim learned about the hotel from Jonathan.

Has it been a success? We think so! Pam says “I think their efforts are fantastically smart from a business perspective. Targeting an audience of social media heavyweights that frequently visit New York City is a really useful marketing strategy. It feels really good that they “get” the social media world and go out of their way to make you feel good for staying at their hotel. I was very motivated to tweet about the hotel when I was staying there, which can only help spur business from my followers.” Jaffe agrees, saying “I think their efforts are great; it’s almost a backchannel in of itself. Today, it appears every retail or business concern says ‘follow us on Twitter’ or ‘be our friend on Facebook.’ Roger Smith Hotel, through their bevy of ‘humans,’ actually participates. They go out of their way to welcome any social media-initiated guests in person. When I want to book, I just DM them and ask for the ’social media rate.’ I’m not even sure if this exists or not, but it makes me feel special. More importantly, they’ve created a go-to place or space for community. When I was there a couple of weeks ago, Amber Naslund and Chris Brogan were both there at the same time. This isn’t by coincidence.”

While I haven’t really gone for a night on the town, social media has given me a taste of what I’m missing. I’ve learned that Roger Smith Hotel is a boutique hotel with event rooms suitable for parties and workshops. It’s located central to Midtown Manhattan (Grand Central Terminal, perfect for out-of-towners!) and is a “homey and cutesy” hotel with “lots of character,” according to Jaffe. Pam says that she’s experienced great service and low prices (especially with their Twitter discounted rate) — and the “rooms were spacious” too. Apparently, according to Jonathan and Pam, they have great bacon. Jaffe plans to keep coming back and continues to recommend it to others.

Roger Smith has really penetrated a heavily saturated market, and they’ve done so with grace. Pam says it quite well, “Many businesses can learn from the RS Hotel to not just wait for business to come from regular channels, but to reach out to ideal clients who are also heavy social media users. If you court the right kind of people, you can bring waves of great business through your door, and make it really hard for someone else to break up a great business relationship. I have no reason to stay anywhere else when I come to New York, because it feels like my right place.”

That’s a great takeaway. Social media affords you a platform to reach out to people who, by virtue of being “connected online,” can help spread your message virally. As it stands, though, that platform is saturated. Taking advantage not only connecting with people but building relationships with them before selling. Selling should not even be a big part of the picture. At the end of the day, we know most people are active on social networks because they have some reason for being there (be it to make a sale or to establish authority, for example), but through your regular interactions, you need to recognize that these are byproducts of your genuine and authentic involvement. If you’re constantly broadcasting and not building bridges, your social media engagement will only travel so far.

Roger Smith Hotel also teaches us another thing: you should take advantage of your market by giving them opportunities exclusive to their communications channel. Both Pam and Joe talk about the social media/Twitter discount. It’s an “exclusive” opportunity to make members of a specific community feel valued by giving them discounts specific to this channel. Dell has been employing this tactic for years with much success. Add general relationship building to the mix — and aggressively work at it — and you have a recipe for success.

Brian explains that you really need to work at it and have the right mindset, and while you can continue to grow your follower base, having one true follower is really what’s most important. It’s not always about the quantity but about the quality. “Day 1 was all it took. Once we had one follower, I was happy. It has never been about the numbers but more about the people.” Of course, business is a result of that: “Our goal is not to drive sales; it’s to build a channel of people that believe in us as people first. The business tends to follow as people want to trust the people they do business with, and especially in challenging ecomonic times, the relationships become even more important.”

With so many advocates of the hotel, the Roger Smith Hotel way has really paid off. Building strong relationships is worthwhile to their business’s bottom line, but you need to jump in with your entire body. Brian says, “Be real and be patient. These are long term relationships that do not happen overnight. Respect and trust is earned. You cannot force or fake followerships. They will fail if you do.”

It’s true. Be real, be social, and be involved. If you are and if you work at it, the rest will follow.

[ How a Small New York City Hotel Put Itself on the Map through Social Media is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Read more about The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, a primer to social media marketing. Or you can subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

As we know, Twitter is an incredibly powerful platform and enables businesses and individuals to build strong relationships with customers and peers. I, too, find that Twitter has been incredibly powerful for me to connect with real life colleagues, readers of Techipedia, family, and everyone in between.

I consider my current @tamar network, though, either quite knowledgeable or clueless and inactive (as in the case of my family — I still love them but they’re not the target audience for my Twitter account, which is rather social-media focused). I’m not sure there’s much “in-between.”

I’m also something of a Twitter purist. My only questionable tweets are actually about business projects (yes, I am NameCheap’s new marketing consultant as Michelle Greer moves onto bigger and better things). I try to limit the types of tweets that I send and keep them professional or relevant to my audience. However, there are times when I actually want to step outside my shell and assume the other parts of my identity I don’t often display under the @tamar persona.

Enter a second Twitter account. In this account, one of several “secondary” accounts I maintain, I actually utilize Twitter retweets on a fairly consistent basis, share informative tidbits, and let my hair down a little more. I tweet more frequently too, using HootSuite (my favorite Twitter application by far) to schedule tweets down the road. I promote good content. I promote new people. I promote friends. I even enter contests. I’m a little more free in terms of my approach. Since I’m a bit more reserved as @tamar, I can easily say that I have a little more fun.

I won’t be providing the username of this Twitter account here, nor can you find it under a search for Tamar Weinberg. My point for keeping it separate is to leave my regular network and to build up relationships with people who would otherwise not know me by @tamar. With Twitter being so incredibly large and vast, there are different types of mini-communities. Call them cliques if you will. Many don’t overlap. Taking advantage of those has been a great opportunity for me.

There are good reasons why you should consider a less focused approach, perhaps by letting it all hang out and being more casual.

New eyeballs based on a less-than-laser focus

I started my secondary Twitter account completely from scratch. I did not tell anyone about it. That was the point. I didn’t want the same network to be following me, nor did I follow the same people I normally would follow. I wanted to potentially reach people who would otherwise not know who I was.

Takeaways: When you’re a new Twitter business account trying to build up followers and fans, you might want to be a bit inventive to find new prospective customers. Using multiple accounts is a good way to do that. In your primary account, you might want to strictly use it to empower your customers and share business opportunities. This account might be more on the conservative side (like my use of @tamar), offering only professional tweets and a sprinkle of personal tweets (or none at all). In another secondary account, you can attempt to vary your Tweets with a broader reach, highlighting other related non-competitive businesses and information that may be relevant to your business goals. Some prospective followers might have an interest in the primary account; others might have an interest in the secondary account. People who might not even find your primary account might stumble upon your secondary account and vice versa. Have a broader presence via multiple accounts can help extend your reach. Better yet, having multiple employees at your company engage in Twitter can also help further your company goals. It’s why Zappos is always the big Twitter brand awareness case study.

Networking opportunities based on growing out a secondary persona

One of the biggest questions I face in my consulting role is the question on whether to combine business and pleasure on Twitter. (The answer for that is: “it depends.”) The @tamar Twitter account is my personal brand and what I love to do above all else, but it’s business account with just a bit of personal stuff. Having a second account lets me branch out even further to other potential followers without ostracizing my current followers who have come to expect 1-2 daily tweets related to social media. Having a second account lets me network with like-minded individuals who are interested in different things outside the standard “social media” persona (but even so, I still do tweet about social media).

Takeaways: Give people the opportunity to learn about the other facets of your business personality. As a business, you might be incredibly involved in a big charity project, but if you tweeted about that all the time on one account, you might lose potential followers on that account. You may opt to dedicate another account to talk about side projects and other opportunities.

As an example, if you’re a business who predominantly focuses on IT infrastructure solutions but recently was involved in a tremendous Thanksgiving initiative through your local food bank, you certainly are within your right (and should) tell people about it. You might use the primary account to talk introduce the initaitve but you might opt to be more specific and provide more frequent updates in a secondary account. People looking to follow your involvement in the Thanksgiving charity effort might choose to follow the secondary account. At the same time, people might discover you as a business through that secondary account — and they may be your biggest fans or champions.

How does this relate to real life marketing?

A good marketer knows that marketing outside your network is important. Building secondary and tertiary networks is a good way to maximize your exposure and to get additional eyeballs to your service offerings and products. It’s not enough to be insular and focus on your groups of friends. You may find people who are surfing outside your social circle who might be potentially interested in your products. Sometimes it’s most effective to venture outside your cocoon. At business networking events, try to get to know people outside your group of trusted colleagues. You never know who you might meet.

What’s the catch?

This strategy of trying multiple accounts won’t work for everyone. There are a few obstacles you will face if you engage in this tactic, but they’re nothing too difficult to address.

• The issue of time. It’s hard enough to manage one Twitter account, so how could you possibly handle a second one? Scheduling relevant Tweets in advance should help take the burden off of your shoulders.  For your secondary account, though, don’t spend a significant chunk of your time building that account.  Devoting a mere 15-30 minutes every day to keep the content fresh and engaging should be sufficient. Always focus on your primary account. The second account is intended to be a lower priority but one that you should still not neglect.
• Ghost writing. You may have all your eggs in one basket — your primary Twitter account — and that’s just fine. Some people might not be able to assume a “secondary personality” on a second account. You don’t really have to “ghost write” at all. Just try not to have this secondary account mirror the first one. Your goal should be to capture more eyeballs by varying your tweets across more than one account.
• Transparency. You might also ask, “if this secondary account represents a company, how should I identify myself in the interest of being transparent?” The answer is: “do what makes you comfortable, and be transparent if it feels right!” If you represent a business, you probably want to make it known. If not, then it’s your call. My personal desire not to associate my second account with “Tamar Weinberg” is simply a personal choice as the account doesn’t represent anything but a mishmash of thoughts and ideas. I think that your goals should be clear, though.
• How do I get more followers? You can build followers to these accounts through Twitter tools such as Tweet Spinner. Using varied keyword targeting lists per username might be a good idea; that way, you’re likely to get a diverse following.

If you want to test out other personas (one where you can be more “human” versus one that is “strictly business”), you might find a lot of success with this strategy of assuming different identities and branching out to find prospective customers using varied methods. Just don’t tell people where and how to find you. Let new prospects find you organically based on your messages and reap the rewards.

Update: A good friend of mine, Mark Drapeau, writes his feelings behind his secondary Twitter account here.

[ Why You Should Have a Secondary Twitter Account is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Read more about The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, a primer to social media marketing. Or you can subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

As a blogger, I’m sure you receive a fair number of emails pitching you with products. As someone who does public relations for companies, I’m sure you carefully pick your bloggers for the pitch. We both have difficult jobs. Bloggers have to weed out the crap and PR pros need to find the right people for the job.

The job of someone who does blogger outreach can be difficult. They’re tasked with contacting bloggers about different initiatives, sending out story ideas and “press releases” (hopefully with a social component, since those are preferred by many bloggers). Unlike traditional journalists, if you’re doing blogger outreach, your focus should be a lot more on relationship building with the right people.

It’s not always the people doing blogger outreach who don’t get it right. Public relations representatives sometimes actually do a great job sending targeted pitches to the right people. They invest a lot of time finding just the right bloggers, carefully cherry picking out the right people to whom to send a perfect pitch. These are the people who really make a solid effort — they review the blog content and realize that their pitch might be a further extension of content that they had already seen on the blogs they are targeting.

When the pitch goes out, it’s up to the blogger to take the story to heart and possibly share it with their readers. Sometimes they won’t, and they’ll ignore the pitch altogether. That’s just fine. Sometimes they might respond with a “thanks but no thanks” response that shows that they at least put effort into considering a fit on their site. That, too, is just fine. If you’re sending a carefully crafted pitch, you’re probably sending it to a handful of people and hoping that a small percentage of those bloggers is actually receptive to your message.

Imagine If You Had to Pitch to Bloggers

What if you were involved in the task of blogger outreach? Let’s say you worked with a client to give away a freebie to readers of specific blogs. The client approves the pitch, which you targeted to the blogger, and you send it off to the chosen bloggers.

Now let’s assume one of the bloggers responds with, “I have read your email carefully and it would appear that you have omitted the part where you request my advertising rate card.”

(Yes, forget about organic promotion. The money is where it’s at for some bloggers, and story tips or ideas are unwanted. I bet you’d wonder what the FTC would say, especially given that this particular blogger has a disclaimer stating that they will never post sponsored or content where money exchanges hands.)

Instead, you decide to clarify your specific role in this initiative. You say, “this is merely a story idea as there’s no advertising budget. Would you like to run with the story?”

The blogger responds with something that goes along the lines of, “they could pay you to email me, maybe they should pay me to blog about it.”

They then write two nasty tweets about a poor approach that they likely thought you never saw.

Yes, seriously.

Perhaps some of you PR pros are nodding your heads in agreement at this point. “Hey, I’ve had that happen to me!” It becomes painstakingly obvious that some bloggers have zero respect for the people they are dealing with, realizing that their fame and authority as a blogger puts them in a position to request favors or speak down to people sending requests to them. I’ve seen and heard it before. That means you’ll get more requests for money, and the sadder thing is that if you meet them in person, their attitudes aren’t much different. It becomes clear in your dealing with some bloggers that they operate on a firm foundation of “pay or walk away.” (Do their readers know how greedy they’ve become? Do their readers even realize that most of the content on these blogs is likely swayed by the glory of financial riches?)

But greed is not what this blog post is about. It’s about how you should handle yourself as a blogger.

Your Responsibility as a Blogger

There are some social media etiquette rules that people sometimes forget to follow, I suppose. After all, words onscreen are not facial expressions, and it seems some people lose sight of human emotion when they get caught up in the fame of becoming a well-known blogger.

As bloggers, we might hold the public relations representatives to a higher standard, but relationship building goes both ways. If an organic story pitch is not of interest to you, that’s fine. Let it be. Demanding that someone pay for content with because they emailed you a story idea is a way to burn bridges, not build them. If you feel that you must respond to the email, your tone is everything. Convey your thoughts nicely, even if it pains you to do so.

Bloggers typically have a lot on their plates; those working for big publications who have to fulfill a daily quota of stories can see hundreds of pitches per day. They’re overwhelmed. It’s hard enough to churn out content, and then there’s a pile of email waiting for their attention in the form of story pitches and ideas. Yet those sending story pitches are overwhelmed too. They’re tasked with weeding through hundreds of blogs (if there are even that many in the specific niche), reading the content to get to know the blogger better, and finding the right angle to pitch the story to. And that doesn’t even account for the deadlines they have. But as mentioned earlier, relationships go both ways, and the approach goes both ways too. As the blogger, you have the upper hand.

Here are seven rules that you should always follow as a blogger when dealing with public relations pros (though some can be applied to your relationships with anyone):

• Rule #1: Act professionally. Remember that professionalism is everything. This relates to courteousness too. Keep your tone polite.
• Rule #2: Be humble. By blogging, you’ll reap some nice rewards (and awards). Don’t let that fame get to your head. You might be great and receive a lot of accolades, but it doesn’t make you any better than the people you deal with. In most cases, you’re not as important as you think you are.
• Rule #3: Remember who you are dealing with. PR people aren’t in the ad sales industry.  Their goal is to send press pitches, not to buy ads on your site.  If a blogger outreach consultant or social media agency emails you a story pitch, read their signature.  If it doesn’t say “media buyer” or if they haven’t explicitly asked for your media kit, chances are they can’t follow through with an ad buy.
• Rule #4: This could be the start of something big. The right PR person is just as connected with the rest of the world as they are with bloggers themselves.  In fact, a relationship that starts on the right foot might actually translate to better things down the road, including special event invites and freebies that might as well be equivalent to a really good ad deal.  Perhaps, real ad sales will follow.  A bad first impression will never get you to that point. A great first impression can be very rewarding.
• Rule #5: It’s a relationship, stupid! Did I mention at all in this article that these are still interpersonal relationships? To quote The Happiness Project author Gretchen Rubin, act the way you want to feel.
• Rule #6: Remember where you were when you started. There’s more to blogging than just dollar signs. There’s relationship building (see rule #6), influence, branding, and more. Don’t have a narrow focus because the grass seems greener when the riches are easily attainable. At the end of the day, blogs are a relationship-building tool. That’s probably how you got to where you are now, by sharing your voice and providing insights that helped build those relationships, like having your readers trust you. Think about what you did before to get you where you are today. Never stop doing that either. The options might be more plentiful nowadays but you should stay true to why you started blogging to begin with.
• Rule #7: You need PR people as much as they need you. Maybe not now, but your future could depend on them.

Bloggers have a real opportunity here, but it should be said that they need to evaluate why they’re blogging and what keeps them doing it. Did passion drive them to blog? Is that still the case? Thankfully, of the thousands of people I’ve met in my past 4 years of publicly blogging, there aren’t that many individuals who cause alarm or worry. Most of you get it. You realize that there are other people sitting behind a computer screen to talk to you, and they’re not much different than you are.

Bloggers have a responsibility to themselves but they also have a responsibility to everyone around them. There will be times when despite how the public relations person sees it, the story doesn’t fit the blogger. But handling that correspondence gracefully is what will separate one blogger from others. Handling all incoming inquiries professionally (and even quickly) can do wonders on indirectly building up your blog (and maybe even your brand) with high regard.

You don’t just build your blog on your blog. There’s this thing we also call offsite optimization, which is a big term for SEO but also can apply to growing your blog. Every single blog-related correspondence you have with someone matters to your bottom line. That’s why email communication should be treated with utmost respect and caution. Handle those communications gracefully and you’ll be viewed the same or better than beforehand. (The only way to go from there is up!) If you choose the impolite and inconsiderate way out, you’re hurting your blog and yourself.

Do you have any stories to share about blogger relations? Did I miss any rules? The comments, as always, are yours.

[ Blogging Etiquette in the Face of a PR Pitch: What Miss Blogging Manners Would Do is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Read more about The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, a primer to social media marketing. Or you can subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

This is a guest post by Glen Allsopp, a 20-year-old genius who has been in this industry for as long as I remember — and you can tell he’s got a knack for brilliance. Follow him on Twitter.

There are a few jokes going around the blogosphere right now regarding what it means to be a social media expert. Now that the stay-at-home-moms (and dads) are finding their way to a five-figure Twitter follow count, they’re offering all types of services and branding themselves as all-round experts.

Despite the title of the post, having worked as the social media manager for Fortune 500 companies, and a lot of knowledge here being totally personal, I do not think of myself as an expert. In fact, I don’t think becoming a social media expert is something that people should be worried about; they should be focused on becoming expert communicators instead.

Because of the less serious checklists that are being passed around the web right now, I thought it would be a good time to look at what some of the influencers online are really doing, and how you can join their ranks if you’re so inclined.

Highlight Others

Do you ever read the tweets of Chris Brogan? I know there are a lot of them, but that’s because he’s spending a large portion of each day highlighting the work of others. Darren Rowse? Brian Clark? Daniel Scocco? They might not tweet as much, but they are definitely focusing their attention elsewhere.

I’ve personally taken this concept so far that I now have a pretty new box at the end of most blog posts which highlights other bloggers that I enjoy. Right now, you’ll find the likes of Tamar, Jonathan, Lisa and Rebecca in my feed reader, and consequently, in that box.

You can help your bid to become more transparent online by sharing what you enjoy. Plus, if you know anything about how blogging works, you should know that no blog is a competitor.

Grow Biggers Ears

I did have another way of saying this, but Chris’s term sounds better. Quite simply: the true social media experts are willing to listen to the ideas of absolutely anybody in this space. That could be from traditional media, my sister, a friend, the radio, or even a small child. If someone has an idea I like the sound of, I’m not going to care about where it came from – I’m going to see if I can use it.

Remember, to make an impact in the social media space you have to become the best communicator. And, to fulfil that position, it requires you to be willing to give your time, attention, and logic to people with a variety of different ages and backgrounds.

Accept a New Normal

When I talk about accepting a new normal , I’m talking about two different aspects of life. The first is personal. Take my own situation as an example. Because I have quit my job, and I blog about personal things, I have written about quitting my job and in turn found that this interests a lot of readers.

In terms of influence though, people email me about whether they should quit their job or not, and expect that a 20-year old from England really should know the answers to such important career advice. Influencers accept that they have a position to hold and won’t abuse it for a quick buck.

Not only do experts accept a change personally, they also accept that the business world is changing and the way to get sales no longer means interrupting your audience via every medium they hate being interrupted in.

If you resist the changing times, you’ll just get left behind.

Make Everything Else Irrelevant

In aiming to be the best communicators, it’s important that we don’t discriminate anyone by age, gender or ethnicity when working with them. However, as an influencer, you must remember that while many people will praise you, lots of others in the same niche will not even know who you are. Therefore, aim to constantly focus on producing the best products / posts / services that you can, to make your previous background or achievements irrelevant.

For example, when I first started making money online, I was 16 years old. I knew that unless I went above the effort of everyone else who was blogging about my topic and offering services to clients, people just wouldn’t take me seriously. Because of this, I believe the influencers in any niche should be the people who are the most passionate about their industry doing well.

If you feel the same, then you must also realise that these people don’t fit a cookie-cutter image. Social media experts realise that you can’t control what people say about you online, but you can continue to focus on putting out your best work possible, whatever your medium can be.

Despite all the noise online, it’s still possible to become a signal.

Ignore Social Media Checklists or ‘Top’ Lists

It’s nice to be featured in press both online and off, but allowing that to influence your ego or strategy is just silly. The people that deserve to be the influencers are the ones that realise 10,000 random followers can not be compared to 1,000 or even 500 people who genuinely care about what you have to say.

You don’t become a social media expert by promoting yourself as a social media expert. In fact, if you don’t mind me letting you in on a little secret, there is no way to become an expert in the eyes of everybody anyway. Instead, what you should be pushing to become is the biggest communicator, thought-provoker and connector in your niche.

Then, and only then, will people really start to see you as an expert at something. And perhaps it will be deserved.

Glen Allsopp writes about the topic of Viral marketing at ViperChill. He’s also a huge fan of Tamar and very thankful to have her offer him this opportunity.

[ 5 Things True Social Media Experts Do Online is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Read more about The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, a primer to social media marketing. Or you can subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

While not acknowledged or acclaimed by most social media marketing “experts,” StumbleUpon is a fine tool that can bring lots of traffic — both the targeted and untargeted kind — to your website. But with all other social networks, there are rules of engagement that are determined by the community.

Brief Overview of StumbleUpon

Since everyone is mostly raving about Twitter and Facebook as of late, I’m going to briefly define StumbleUpon and explain how it works. More information and tips for usage can be read in The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web. This description of StumbleUpon has been taken from the book:

StumbleUpon [is] a social content discovery engine with bookmarking features. StumbleUpon is different from many other social sites in that it works via a toolbar installation on your browser. Once it gathers personalized information from you (hobbies and interests), you can start surfing with StumbleUpon to find brand new sites that are related to your interests as suggested by other users on the service. The more active you are on StumbleUpon, the more opportunity there is for you to grow your network and expose your own content to more and more StumbleUpon users.

Great, now we have that out of the way.  This post is going to touch upon other parts of StumbleUpon, especially user behaviors that I’ve observed recently.

I’ve personally found StumbleUpon to be a great tool to find good and exciting content, and I’ve even made some friends through the “toolbar.” Relationship opportunities on StumbleUpon are endless, especially since it’s a social bookmarking service based on interests.

StumbleUpon Etiquette Guidelines

One of the most powerful elements to StumbleUpon is the ability to share stories with your friends as long as they are subscribed to your favorites. Truth be told, most people accept every incoming friend request they receive. The motivation behind this is the desire to broaden one’s reach, even if the subscriber is sending them completely off-topic content. As someone who always has incoming stumbles awaiting my perusal, though, I think there are some rules of thumb (no pun intended) that should be followed at all times.

• Avoid pushing all your stories: What would you do if you never really subscribed to the New York Times because you just weren’t that interested but you received an endless stream of New York Times stories in your email inbox all day long?  You’d probably get sick of it, right?  Exactly.  Therefore, while I appreciate that you have a great design site that you update 5-6 times a day, please don’t send me every single uploaded photo.  And you there with the SEO/tech blog, that goes for you too. It’s just overwhelming and selfish.  Instead, find the cream of the crop of your content, your best works.  Give people the opportunity to navigate through your site to find better content.  If you send them 5 stories everyday, they’ll never have time to actually go through your site to find gems because their StumbleUpon activity is limited to clearing out their toolbar of pending Stumbles.
• Diversify the sources you send from: To follow the previous bullet point, spice it up a bit.  I don’t want to get news.yahoo.com stories 5 times a day from the same Stumbler.  It shows that you have a vested financial interest in Yahoo News. (This is not a real example, readers.)  There are some Stumblers who do this very well.    Others just don’t get it.  If you can’t diversify the sources you send from, at least do us a favor and don’t do it so frequently.   Once a week is good, but don’t do it any more than that.
• Use the toolbar, check your inbox, and give back to the community: StumbleUpon’s success, at least for sending out and receiving stories, thrives on its toolbar.  I see right now that I have 13 pages waiting for me.  If this number exceeds 99, you could be in for trouble and get caught with hundreds of crap pages to wade through.  Don’t let it exceed that number.  As much as I hate some of the stories being sent to me, I know I have to get through the queued items in my toolbar to avoid an INBOX_FULL message.   The INBOX_FULL message typically appears when a Stumbler sends another user stumbles, but users cannot respond to the original Stumblers because their toolbar is full with hundreds of sites being queued.  Personally, I think this does a disservice to the StumbleUpon community and StumbleUpon should absolutely disallow this behavior.  Until then, there will be users who take but can’t give back to the community.  If you want to build a genuine relationship that benefits you in the long haul, accept other stumbles.  Don’t expect me (and others) to want to help you if you have no time to help us.
• Look what other people are Stumbling and submit similar content: Over the past few months, there has been one user who has sent me Stumbles relating to her home improvement store.  Typically, if you can put an interesting spin on that content, that’d be great. However, these pages are not social content.  They’re category pages (sink repair, anyone?), articles about chisels, and random junk that no average person really wants to read.  She’s not alone; I got some high-level machinery equipment store stumbles from a guy who I subsequently unfriended based on the sheer spam of it all.  (No, I do not need a core bit or a granite blade, thank you!)  If you don’t realize what other people are submitting to StumbleUpon, don’t bother using it.  If you take time to see what other community members find interesting, then you might get inspired to craft content that would be interesting to the social internet at large. Still stuck? Check out these viral ideas.
• Don’t send other social networking vote requests through StumbleUpon: StumbleUpon is a network of content that you believe someone else is interested in.  It’s not a way to pawn for votes on other social networks.  Not everyone has accounts on the social sites you’re asking for votes on.  And if you’re using StumbleUpon to solicit votes on Digg, do you think Digg doesn’t notice?   If your content isn’t good enough to succeed on those social networks on their own, StumbleUpon isn’t going to help you.  If you want success on your Digg (or other social network) submissions, you better to do it under the radar.
• Send well-designed content you really believe in:  It’s not just a matter of sending the content of the page itself.  Design and aesthetics of the page are of paramount importance.  This could be a small item like the font or header design — you could even do AB testing to confirm.  If it looks like you put effort into making the entire page beautiful, you’ll see results.  If your page looks like it was slapped together in Frontpage, you better realize that you’re not getting a “thumbs up” from most of the your site’s visitors because you are showing implicitly that you don’t care.  You can be a brilliant writer with a great essay.  If that essay was slapped onto a website with a cruddy design, nobody will care.  I know I certainly don’t.

StumbleUpon Best Practices

StumbleUpon has its own algorithm to determine whether an item gets viewed often or not and by who.  While nobody knows the StumbleUpon algorithm, the following is suggested.

• Don’t thumb up everything: Be selective with the incoming content.  Don’t thumbs it up just because someone in your network sent it to you.  That likely reduces your influence as a stumbler that StumbleUpon would want to trust.  I can’t believe that people actually thumbs up the Digg pages that are sent and the granite blade product page.  Seriously?!
• Participate often: If you actually clear your StumbleUpon toolbar, you won’t anger someone with an INBOX_FULL message because they simply won’t get one when sending you messages.  Participation ensures that you will be able to build friendships and get more people who would be interested in seeing what you have to share.
• Review pages often: Give your two cents on content, both newly discovered by yourself (add pages to the StumbleUpon database!) and by friends.  Let people know that you’re serious about the network so that they want to associate themselves with you.
• Write a unique review: If you really care about the content you’re promoting, show it by writing a real review for the content rather than letting StumbleUpon pre-populate the review field with a “from the page” blurb. Putting effort into the review shows that you want other people to see it. If you can’t spend 10 seconds to write “great post,” don’t spend any time at all. (Thanks Kristi!)

StumbleUpon is a great network and can be hugely powerful if you use it properly.  Like all social networks, you need to give of yourself and think about what the community wants.  It’s not just about you. If you think about the greater good, you can be a very powerful influencer in the StumbleUpon community.

Want more social media etiquette guidelines? Hop on over to my earlier post.

Did I miss anything? What other StumbleUpon missteps have you encountered? What other suggestions would you make?

[ StumbleUpon Etiquette Guide and Best Practices is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Read more about The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, a primer to social media marketing. Or you can subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

This is a guest post by Samir Balwani, the founder of Training Social, a resource for those interested in social media training. Techipedia readers can use code Tamar for a 15% limited time discount when registering.

One of the most common questions in social media is – “is it worth it?”. Because of the nature of the marketing tool, each industry differs to the point that people just aren’t sure.

Many would use a blanket statement that it’s useful. They’re being disingenuous. Every industry can benefit from social media. No matter what, there is some way you can use it it. However, the question remains to be answered – is it worth it?

When it comes to profitability, increased revenue, and efficient use of time – the question of “is it worth it”, takes on a life of it’s own. There are two things we must understand before we can define if social media adds value to your business.

1: Opportunity Cost – Every time you spend a minute on social media is one minute you potentially lost revenue. This inherent cost needs to be included in any equations you make when allocating resources.

2: Social Media has Abstract Returns – It’s difficult to measure return on social media. It’s nearly impossible to forecast return on social media. This fact makes it difficult to quantifiably determine where resources should be spent.
Recognizing there is a cost to everything you do – time is money – and that social media returns are not only difficult to measure, but also impossible to forecast is an important first step.

The good thing about social media is that the opportunity cost tends to mostly be time. Whatever you can do to minimize the time you spend learning social media, and making your processes more efficient is worth it.

To determine returns, we’re forced to think in industries. Certain niches are more likely to see greater returns from social media.

High Return Industries

These industries tend to see high returns in social media marketing, quickly. Consumers are actively looking for and want to engage with most businesses that fall into the following categories.

1: Restaurants and Hospitality – Most hospitality establishments already understand that idea of good customer service. They realize how important word of mouth is to you’re their business model. Social media makes the word of mouth marketing that restaurants and hotels already profit from and makes it more efficient.

2: Businesses With Return Customers – Have a business that drives return customers? Social media can help you create a long-term relationship with your consumer that ensures they continue to visit you, and not a competitor.

3: Large Brands – Bigger brands have two things that smaller companies don’t: an already built community, and money. These two advantages make creating a high return not only easier, but also more likely.
4: Online Driven Companies – Social media can be used to drive traffic to online websites. Communities, social news sites, and online sharing can be leveraged to build a site following.

Low Return Industries

These types of businesses tend to take a long time to create return in social media. They also often require large investments to create an initial community. Nonetheless, in the long term, social media can be a viable marketing strategy even for these industries:

1: Small Clients / Large Profits – Businesses that only have a handful of clients that are under contract will see a low return in social media. Their communities don’t tend to be large, and if they are, are made up of non-customers.

2: Impulse Bought Products – Products that don’t gain anything from “recommendations” tend to see a small return from social media. Unless the product is a fad, it is doubtful that an online community will impact the buying habits of consumers looking at an impulse bought product.

I’m sure I’ve missed a few and that my generalities are just that. If you know of an industry or “return” that I forgot, please share it in the comments. Don’t forget to just share your thoughts.

Samir Balwani is the founder of Training Social, a resource for those interested in social media training. Techipedia readers can use code Tamar for a 15% limited time discount when registering. Don’t forget to follow Samir on Twitter.

[ Is Social Media Worth it for You? is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Read more about The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, a primer to social media marketing. Or you can subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

Here’s a truism that Facebook PR is not sure how to readily admit. There really aren’t 350 million members on Facebook. Take my husband’s grandfather as an example. He’s an 89-year-old guy who doesn’t really have his passwords all in the same place, nor does he have an acute sense of hearing to realize that when his grandchildren say “hey grandpa, I’m making a Facebook account for you!” he should respond with “Oh, I already have one.” Consequently, the guy has three Facebook profiles, all of which were created for him by three different members of his family.

Got any family members who boast more than one Facebook profile? You’re likely not alone. Now consider your industry. I have several friends who have both a personal profile and a business profile. These are users who like Facebook but find it rather difficult to merge the personal and professional into one cohesive online identity. I’m sure the internet marketing industry isn’t alone in this regard.

Let’s now consider the hundreds of profiles that you’ve seen that don’t identify a person at all. Surely you have been befriended by those people representing “WWW [yourdomainhere] COM” or “Green Seo.” These are individuals posing as entities who assume personal profiles. You know, Facebook actually prohibits these types of accounts in their Terms of Service, but Facebook’s staff doesn’t actually act upon these infractions, apparently. With over “350 million members” on Facebook, it’s too difficult to isolate all of the rule breakers.

These examples above illustrate a typical usability question faced by Facebook users (well, except for Grandpa). Despite the fact that Facebook has the most customizable privacy settings of all social networks (though we could argue with their effectiveness in a whole other post), people don’t like maintaining a “business” identity on the same profile as their “personal” (fun?) identity.  As a result, relationship-building becomes a challenge.

The Facebook Friending Dilemma

One of the questions I get asked very often is how employees are supposed to cope with incoming friend requests from their clients, bosses, and individuals they have a working relationship with through their place of employ.  While there’s no clearly defined rule (it’s a question of personal preference), I usually urge the person not to be resentful or offended if the relationship gets ported over to a professional network or other public space (such as a Facebook Fan page).

I actually practice what I preach.

See, I’m one of those Facebook users who have been on the service since February 2004, which is quite a long time considering Facebook was open to about three schools at the time that I signed up.  Back then, my Facebook friends were mostly connected to me via my neighborhood through religious affiliations or though college or primary school.  There were no business colleagues on my friends list.

In due time, that started to change as I built face-to-face relationships with co-workers and then started building friendships in the industry.  It helped that Facebook became an open network that invited everyone in.  It was both exciting because I could know more about my business partners but scary because I would have to start ignoring Facebook friend requests in order to be true to my reasons for being there: to build strong interpersonal relationships with people who I actually know and who really matter.

How I Use Facebook

Facebook, to me, is about maintaining real relationships. With every single individual I am connected to, I want to feel comfortable responding to a status message or a photo update. And if you’re my Facebook friend, you should feel comfortable doing the same. However, many people connect and forget. That’s not how I want to use the network, and that’s why I won’t accept your friend request.

A few weeks ago, jwz posted a great piece on how to access Facebook via a feed reader. To keep on top of friends’ happenings on the network, I subscribed to the relevant updates. I now have status updates in my feed, and finally, I can see both happy and sad news. It has helped strengthen that friendship bond;  I can now easily keep in touch with friends and those who are serious about using the network to keep their peers in the know about what is happening to them every day.

I posted about how I network on Facebook (among other networks), over two years ago, but I have over 700 pending Facebook friend requests from people I do not know. Many of these incoming friend requests (with the exception of possibly 0.05% of the requests) have no introduction, which I personally find a social media etiquette misstep — especially when I have no idea who you are.  For the others who took the effort to connect, I am thankful that you thought of me, but if I don’t know you, I hope to get to know you in the future. We’re just not there yet.

Much has changed in the last 2 years.  I’m now constantly neck-deep in social media projects, am working with amazing people, and I’m passionate about the people I work with and the work I do.  Facebook has become more open than ever and everyone has decided to join. In fact, I noticed substantial changes in my friendships on Facebook, so I decided to update the Facebook charts I prepared in 2007 to provide an updated look of my friendship breakdown for January 2010.

As I prepared these charts, I unfriended a handful (52) of Facebook friends, especially some who befriended me when I was more accepting of Facebook relationships (before it was saturated with people I didn’t know). Why?  We never got to know each other, and nothing happened after that initial friend request.  Facebook has facilities that help foster real friendships, and when these facilities are ignored in the context of the friendship, the relationship does not feel genuine. If you befriended me in the last 2-3 years and have done absolutely nothing to maintain that friendship, you were axed.  It’s not you and it’s not me; it’s us.  There was nothing between us and the relationship dissolved.

Today, my 1,508 Facebook connections are broken into the following categories:

• Extra-curricular Programs refer to friends I met on vacation, through summer programs, or though other related activities.
• Neighbor typically refers to those living nearby but may also be affiliated through religious organizations.
• Industry and social media connections are further broken into additional categories, as seen in the charts below.

Consider the difference between my friendship circle in 2007 (graph featured below).

My industry (internet marketing/blogging) connections (who are 99.7% of my pending friend requests) have saturated the space, and more of my co-workers have signed up. (It might just be that I’ve been able to work with more amazing people.) I removed all my “Random” connections for reasons specified earlier. Digg is now part of social media and will be explained in the final chart.

Let’s look at the industry and social media subcategories.  First, here’s the breakdown of industry colleagues that I currently have on Facebook.

As you can see in the chart above, I further broke down my Industry peers to explain the origination of these friendships.

• Some of these friends have mutual real-life friends (outside typical industry connections).
• Many of them (more than half) were individuals I met at search conferences, but other conferences (SXSW, events that Mashable was involved in in the capacity of host or media sponsor, and the first IZEAFest) also represented my Industry connections. With regards to Search Conference, I refer to Search Marketing Expo, PubCon, and Search Engine Strategies, but I also met a few people at Affiliate Summit.
• Some friendships originated through work-related communications that lasted a long period of time, so a relationship developed, was enhanced, and was solidified with the acceptance of a friend request.
• Other industry connections that have simply flourished since the very “early days” of social media.  I may have met these individuals by chance (long-standing relationship) or through the blogosphere or forums.

In nearly all of these cases, I have met my friends face-to-face.

The chart above illustrates the breakdown of the “social media” friends.  These are friends who have no direct ties to the industry, but in using social networks, we’ve formed close bonds and friendships.

• Digg is by far the largest; as a former “top user” of the service, I built strong relationships with employees and users of the social news site.
• There were other typical social networks in this grouping as well, including Flickr, FriendFeed, Kirtsy, Mixx, Plurk, StumbleUpon, Tip’d, and Twitter.
• I also consider bloggers who have forged real-life relationships with me to have connected via social media.  This is different from forums/blogosphere of the previous chart because they are not connected to me in the search marketing or social media capacity.
• Both “IRC” and “Forums” that I reference relate in this chart to the pre-social media days. And yes, IRC does refer to Internet Relay Chat.
• In the early 90s, I was involved with AOL both as remote staff and as a participant, so I still maintain friendships that originated from these old hubs.
• (In case you’re wondering who Craigslist is, he’s a guy I sold an elliptical trainer to a few years ago.  It turns out that we have several mutual real-life friends.)

These friendships are a mix of people I’ve met face-to-face but also consist of individuals I have just communicated with for such a long time that we’ll easily hit it off when we actually meet in person. There are only a small number of individuals I have not met in person on this list.

As you can see by the breakdown, Facebook is about real relationships, and when I look at your name, I want be able to justify that friendship.  Facebook is an extension of the real world in the virtual space.

Evaluate Your Connections

Knowing who someone is when seeing their profile without having to look at their place of employment or common friends is important.  If you have Facebook friends that you can’t place from a hole in the wall, it might be a good idea to purge.  It’s totally up to you.

When you connect with someone on Facebook, ask yourself, What do these online connections signify? Are you establishing a friendship so that you will do something with this individual in the future, or are you simply establishing a friendship just because you can?

Why LinkedIn Makes More Sense than Facebook

If the prospect of friendship makes you feel antsy, especially from individuals you are not comfortable letting in, it’s not awkward or rude to suggest that the online relationship be established elsewhere.  LinkedIn is the likely choice because it is a “set it and forget it” social network. There’s not much you can do with the connection once it’s confirmed. On LinkedIn, once you’re connected, that’s usually it. Someone might request a recommendation of you or contact you via messaging facilities, but you can’t do much to deface update your colleague’s profile or build upon that relationship in the confines of the social network.

On Facebook, however, there are hundreds of opportunities to upload pictures, comment on statuses, tag people in notes — and yet, among business professionals (outside of overt “no-no” marketing tactics spam), that kind of activity is typically ignored. Many business people just don’t do anything with Facebook with their business colleagues. That’s why I consider Facebook a personal network for real friends. Knowing someone online (or offline) doesn’t grant you an “in” to their personal space.

If You Insist Upon Using Facebook

Let’s face it. Facebook has its pros. (LinkedIn does too, and it’s a terrific professional network.) I’ve decided to create a public Facebook page to be updated regularly that broadcasts what business colleagues are often looking at me for anyway: social media news. The public page is one of two Facebook pages (the latter being for my book) that I plan to maintain to share fun social media information and tidbits. The profiles will both feature different stories — and they won’t be about me.

For a little bit of history, I created a fan page for myself when Facebook first launched its Fan pages. It was an experiment in personal branding and a way to have fun to connect with people I otherwise may never know. The page mostly was stagnant for awhile, but after Facebook’s page redesigned that made it look like I was talking to myself, I decided to kick it up a notch. Neil Patel provided several compelling reasons as to why I should. I recently invited some actual Facebook friends who I thought would find the information therein interesting — I hope you saw it as a way to connect in the professional sense (and nothing else — thank you Curtis)

I must emphasize that my Facebook page is not about me, but it addresses this age-old debate about how to — within Facebook’s Terms of Service — handle the personal and the professional. Since most people who want to connect with me on Facebook know me in a more professional capacity, I will be using my Facebook page to engage them professionally. (As it is, my personal page is mostly about my kid anyway. Would you really comment on those updates? Sure, some of you might…)

Looking Ahead

If I don’t connect with you right now, don’t take it personally. One day, I hope to meet every single person who added me as a Facebook friend in the last few years (and those who continue to do so) face to face. I want to put a face to a name and build a relationship that will last. Those are my goals for my current set of friends and I hold everyone to the same expectations. All friend requests will remain open indefinitely, because I’m hoping one day to get to seal the deal and make the friendship a reality.

Until then, connect with me on LinkedIn or on my Facebook page. I’d be honored to have you join me.

[ Want to Friend Me on Facebook? Please Use My Public Page or LinkedIn Instead is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Read more about The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, a primer to social media marketing. Or you can subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

It’s my birthday! And like last year, I have a gift for you.

Every year, I read hundreds (thousands?) of articles on the topic of Internet Marketing, from SEO to social media to web usability and then some. And every year, I hand pick the best articles that I’ve read and compile them in a resource that I hope will last a long time. Here’s my list for 2008. Here’s 2007. Here’s 2006. I painstakingly go through these resources with the hopes that these posts will serve as references for you in years to come. Yes, that’s right. Despite the changing landscape, the articles I list here are typically those that I feel are “timeless” in that they could be referenced in the future and still have utility. These posts are not in response to newsworthy events, nor are they displayed in any particular order. They are strategic guides that hopefully will enhance your internet marketing experiences in the future.

Every year, I can only read so many articles. I try to keep this as exhaustive as possible, but even so, I don’t know every great resource. Like last year, I enlisted in help from my followers on Twitter, many of whom gave me some great posts to add to this list. If you’re looking to be included on 2010’s list, you now know what to do.

Like last year, if your article is highlighted in this comprehensive post, there’s a badge for you to proudly celebrate this achievement on your site. Thanks again to David Mihm who specializes in Portland Web Design for creating them. Scroll down to the bottom of the post to grab the code you need for your post or site.

Without further ado, I now present to you the best internet marketing posts of 2009.

Social Media: Getting Started

• Why You Have to Engage in Social Media, Even if You Don’t Want to (A Smart Bear): Jason Cohen (@asmartbear) makes a compelling argument into why social media must be considered, even if you have no interest in it. The article has examples of how social media worked too.
• The Poetry of Social Networking to Court Customers and Invest in Relationships (Brian Solis): Brian Solis shares his foreword to Sean Percival’s book, MySpace Marketing.  In it, he offers some thought-provoking insights into what must be understood before going into social media marketing.  And… Brian Solis is the most eloquent writer I have ever seen in the blogosphere.  This post is really poetry, as are all his other writings and blog posts.
• 40 Key Elements to Getting Started in Social Media (Louis Gray): Mike Fruchter writes an awesome blog post on Louis Gray’s blog about how to get involved in social media, from branding to blogging to Twitter to community. It’s definitely a worthwhile read.
• Marketing on the Social Web: A Few Key Ingredients (Michael Fruchter): I love the graphic. But more than that, Mike’s post explains that social media is really about using social channels appropriately to communicate and converse — and as an extension of that, you might just end up being able to sell something. It’s really not that hard!
• How Big Brands Can Start Testing Social Media (Conversation Agent): It’s really not that hard to get into social media marketing. It just requires a small shift in mindset.
• Why Social Media is Scary (Steve Radick): Why is social media scary? There are challenges to be overcome by junior employees, developers, managers, and even senior leadership. Steve Radick tackles them all in this post.
• The ABCs of Online Networking (Your Job Stop): I love Joanna Lord’s article — every single letter of the alphabet has an application in online networking. Don’t overlook these — at least consider them!
• What Social Media is and What Social Media is Not (Louis Gray): So many people don’t get what social media is. Mike saves the day by straightening them out.
• Is it Too Late to Catch Up? (Seth Godin): Seth Godin suggests ideas that will make social media slowly work for you as an organization.
• Creating Your Social Media Plan (Outspoken Media): This good primer talks about securing your brand, setting metrics, knowing who you are, setting a presence, engaging, and assessing success.
• 6 Steps for Creating a Social Media Roadmap and Plan (Green Marketing 2.0): Lorna Li writes very introductory post on what social media is and what you can do with it with some great insights.
• A Corporate Guide for Social Media (Forbes): Forbes actually gets it when it comes to social media strategy in the workplace. Have a read and see for yourself.
• 20 Ways to Drive Leads Through Social Media (Kyle Lacy): Here are some of the things you can do to start seeing some movement in this thing they call “social media marketing.”
• 10 Tips for Social Media Marketers (PR Squared): Todd Defren tells you how to jump into social media marketing. What can you do today?
• How to Create Measurable Objectives (Altitude Branding): We’ve talked about goals and strategies as it relates to social media marketing, but let’s break them down even further.

Social Media: Implementation and Execution

• 7 Reasons Why Social Media Marketing Campaigns Fail, and How to Fix them (Stuntdubl): Todd Malicoat never blogs, but when he does, he writes great posts like this suggesting that if your social media marketing campaign is failing, you may have had the wrong strategies in place. Good thing he proposes how to fix them also!
• Two Approaches: Shotgun vs. Laser (Web Strategist): There are two (of many) approaches you can take in your social media strategy. Which approach best suits you?
• How to Make Social Media Work for Non-Consumer Brands (Mashable): This is a good B2B social media article which is chock full of examples.
• Ways to Be Human at a Distance (Chris Brogan): Chris Brogan always talks about how businesses can be human again. So what are they to do? He breaks this article into some of the basics of presence, how to converse, how to add multimedia to those conversations, and the topics of conversation.
• How to Manage Successful Social Media Promotions (Mashable): How can you get feedback from social channels to offer exclusive deals to your followers on social media communities? Read this Mashable guide.
• How to Build a Social Media Cheat Sheet in Any Topic (ReadWriteWeb): Marshall Kirkpatrick writes an amazing guide on how you can find thought leaders in any industry.
• The 12 Step Social Media Program for Traditional Marketers (HubSpot): Here are a few things agencies looking to replace different pieces of their business with social media can do.
• 10 Creative Contests Powered by Social Media (Mashable): You can use social media to do many things: build community, make business decisions, and more. Let a contest help make these ideas a reality.

Social Media: Small Business

• Why Small is the New Big in Social Media Marketing (Jonathan Fields): Jonathan Fields explains why small businesses have a real advantage over large ones when it comes to biting the social media bullet. This is a great read.
• 5 Advanced Social Media Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses (Mashable): Here are five techniques proposed by Samir Balwani that go beyond the mere social media presence, including contests.
• How to Promote a Small Business Website (Small Business Trends): This article isn’t totally social media focused, but it’s part of it.  If you want to market a small business website, social is just part of your overall marketing mix.

Hiring for Social Media

• How to Evaluate Social Media Street Cred (Logic+Emotion): Do you know if that person is able to handle a social media marketing initiative? How omnipresent is he? How well-versed is she? David Armano suggests to study out the candidate first; they shouldn’t just be focused on Twitter, for example.
• 25 Signs You’ve Got a Strong Social Media Consultant or Agency (The Buzz Bin): Beth Harte and Geoff Livingston explain that social media consultants need to know a lot more than about the basic tools out there.
• Why You Shouldn’t Trust Social Media to SEO Consultants (Social Media Explorer): The fact that a few in the SEO community have a narrow approach with regard to social media engagement troubles me.
• 10 Questions to Evaluate a Social Media “Expert” (Conversation Marketing): Well, how did you fare in this quiz?
• I’d Like to See a Social Media Consultant or Agency That… (Direct Marketing Observations): I really liked Marc Meyer’s post here. It was actually how he and I built up a relationship.
• 25 Tips to Choosing a Social Media Consultant (Kyle Lacy): How do you find a social media consultant? They might want to pass this test with flying colors.
• Hiring for Social Media: What I’d Look For (Altitude Branding): Amber Naslund has a great series on good and bad approaches for social media job description and tops it off with what she’d look for if she were to hire for the position.

Social Media: Measurement and ROI

• Measurement Strategies for 5 Social Media Goals (PR Communications): John Cass talks about the various goals you might get through social media and the various ways to measure these goals.
• Are We Too Worried with Finding the ROI of Social Media? (The Viral Garden): What are big brand saying about the ROI of social media? Check Mack Collier’s post to find out.
• 100 Ways to Measure Social Media (Inside the Marketers Studio/David Berkowitz): Who said you can’t measure social media?
• Social Media Metrics: What We Need to Track Sales (Samir Balwani): Samir Balwani writes a great post on some of the ways you get ROI from social media.
• Measuring Social Media ROI: Does Size Matter? (Mark Hayward): Mark Hayward shows the ROI of social media. With a plan, you can measure effectiveness of SM.
• Social Media: Who Can Show Us the Real Value? (Econsultancy):  I like the measurements this article provides. The Online Consumer Engagement Value report idea is a good one.

Social Media: General

• Web Promoters: What Qualities Make Up the Effective Ones? (The Future Buzz): Adam Singer writes an excellent piece on the qualities that make up the most popular “power users” of the social web — that is, those individuals whose content people want to consume always.
• 11 Ways to Lose Friends and Followers Online (Social Media Rockstar): This reminds me of my social media etiquette post; there are just so many things you can do that will not win you any friends on social networks. Brett Borders explores the behavioral triggers that don’t win you any new friends at all.
• The A-Z of Social Media for Brands (Econsultancy): They say it’s “social media for brands.” I say it’s “social media for everyone.”
• Is Social Media Overrated? (Samir Balwani): This post serves as a reminder that social media is just one part of the marketing mix, and you still need to strategize and allocate resources intelligently. What is social media about? At the end of the day, it’s about real connections to consumers. (No, it’s not about the tools!)
• 10 Ways to Be a Great Social Media User (Search Engine Journal): Vince Blackham writes a great post on Search Engine Journal about how to be a great social media user, with tips such as contributing, diversifying your efforts, being real, being meaningful, and more.
• Experts Talk About Social Media Training (Samir Balwani): Samir has a great interview on the background on social media marketing with 5 experts. (Note: I was interviewed. Normally I don’t self-promote in this roundup, but the quotes are good, and Jason Falls, who was featured, is one of my role models.)
• Social Media Tips for Optimizing Time Spent by Marketers (Online Marketing Blog): Social media takes time, but yes, you can optimize it with tips from Adam Singer.
• Answers to Social Media Questions You Should Know (Online Marketing Blog): Here are some great questions and answers from Lee Odden on the typical questions you face in social media marketing.
• The Social Media Conversion Scale (Logic+Emotion): David Armano provides a graphical chart showing the various stages of social media acceptance. Where are you on the list?
• The Hardest Things to Teach Your Clients About Social Media Marketing (10e20): A collaborative list of what things you should or shouldn’t expect of social media marketing.
• The Seven Deadly Sins of Social Media (Search Engine Journal): I love how Jennifer Horowitz equates social media with the 7 sins. She has some great comparisons.
• 23 Social Media Marketing Tips from Dell, Comcast, HP, Wells Fargo, Best Buy, General Mills, Ford, UPS, Home Depot, Cirque du Soleil (Online Marketing Blog): Lee Odden takes advice from the best minds in social media who have worked in the corporate world. This is a fantastic interview!
• The Real Lesson in the Yelp User Review Lawsuit (Nine by Blue): The bottom line is that people need to realize that they can’t control the message. The best solution is to proactively address the situation and make it work for you.
• 5 People Who Broke the Rules of Social Media and Succeeded (Mashable): Real success stories and the experiences learned is the subject of this article.
• Which Social Media Channels Should You Be Using? (The Jordan Rules): This is a great chart and article on the best social media channels for both B2B and B2C companies.
• Share This or Else! What Makes People Share Content? (Samir Balwani): What prompts people to share content — and how does one capitalize on this? Samir discusses human psychology and explains how this correlates to content that is shareable.

Twitter

• Twitter, the Most Important Website Since Google (97th Floor): Yes, Twitter is that important. Chris Bennett features some great parallels in his article.
• Twitter, Customer Service, and Good Brand Management (Conversation Agent): Valeria Maltoni writes a great primer to why Twitter is important for customer service, but then goes a step further and tells you what tools you can use to monitor your brand (and some that cost money and let you respond).
• A Twitter Basics Primer (The Buzz Bin): When you use Twitter for marketing or whatnot, you should consider why you intend to use it and what you plan on getting out of it. This is a basic article but goes into great depth.
• Who Should Tweet? (Samir Balwani): Samir talks about the pros and cons of Tweeting by company representatives, from the CEO to a brand. He suggests a “character” to be the face of the brand on Twitter, sort of like a mascot.
• 8 Twitter Networking Tips: From Online to In-the-Flesh (Twitip): Whether it’s getting instant responses or meeting people in real life via tweetup, some Twitter tips are not to be forgotten.
• The Ultimate Guide to Everything Twitter (Webdesigner Depot): This is a crazy in-depth guide on Twitter, but it’s already outdated since there have been a lot more news and apps that have come out since. Still, though, you can tell that there has been in immense amount of work put into it, and it definitely deserves recognition.
• You’re On Twitter, Now What? (Conversation Agent): How do you want to use Twitter? There are many goals you can achieve with the site.
• 4 Real Offline Uses of Twitter (Dream Systems Media): Twitter marketing is happening online, of course, but it’s happening offline too. Just a few weeks ago, I saw a Twitter decal on a car. It was rather cool. Here are four other ways people are promoting their Twitter accounts.
• How to Use Twitter to Grow Your Online Business (here.org.uk): This is a nice beginner business guide of the various things you can do in order to be seen as a credible and useful Twitter user.
• 101 Tweets on How to Use Twitter (SEO 2.0): Tad offers 101 ways to use Twitter in retweetable format. Tips include being active and tweeting daily, limiting using Twitter for broadcasting, focusing on company-wide social media policies, and more.
• Connecting with Customers on Twitter: 9 Tips for Success (10e20): Jake writes a great piece on what you should be doing on Twitter in order to be successful.
• Top 10 Reasons Your Company Should Not Tweet (BL Ochman’s Blog): Not everyone will be able to use Twitter. Here are 10 reasons why you as a company entity should avoid it.
• How to Integrate Social Media into Product Marketing (Social Computing Magazine): This is a nice detailed guide on how you can market products via social media. (P.S. Sending products to bloggers helps too!)
• The Tao of Tweeting (Mashable): Good art via Twitter is not that hard to achieve. Soren Gordhamer shows you how.
• Breakdown: 4 Ways Brands are Earning — and Buying — Followers on Twitter (Web Strategist): Jeremiah Owyang explores the Twitter space to see how followers are being earned (or not) on Twitter.
• The 10 Twitter Commandments (Econsultancy): Patricio Robles says that doing these sins is like shooting yourself in the foot.
• How to Use Twitter to Find Local Blog Content (Hyperlocalblogger): Twitter can bring you local traffic, so use it wisely to build friends and a following in your neighborhood.
• 137 Small Business Twitter Tips (Small Business Trends): One hundred and thirty seven people were asked to offer their best Twitter tips, and this has been aggregated and put in a document (PDF, but not linked to this page) for all to see.
• From Corporate to Personal: The Four Types of Social Media Profiles (Web Strategist): What kinds of brand profiles do you find on Twitter?
• 62 Ways to Use Twitter for Business (WebWorkerDaily): Be it credibility, growing your network, or marketing (and then some), this article is a good way to inspire yourself to grow your business Twitter presence.
• 8 Lessons Learned as a Brand on Twitter (tins/Rick Klau): Rick Klau works for Google. He talks about what he has learned by maintaining a brand presence on Twitter: specifically, Google’s Blogger account.
• Make Tweet Love: Top Tips for Building Twitter Relationships (Brian Solis): This is an excellent compendium of tips to get the most out of Twitter, both by Brian Solis and then his own Twitter friends.

Facebook

• How to Create Rich HTML Tabs on Your Facebook Page (10e20): I know Jesse just contributed an awesome article on this blog but Victor’s guide here is also pretty good.
• Why You Need to Create a Facebook Fan Page (Quick Sprout): Neil Patel decided to build a Facebook fan page that was interactive, using it as a case study for why it would benefit you as a business to maintain one and what would be necessary to make it engaging.
• 10 Key SEO Strategies Every Facebook Owner Should Know (Inside Facebook): We all know Facebook tips and tricks, but did we know we can marry the schools of thought of Facebook optimization and SEO? Let’s dive into Justin Smith’s tips.
• How to Build Facebook Community (Socialbrite): If you’re looking to meet some goals with Facebook engagement, you have to actually be able to engage your audience and participate. This article presents fourteen tips for achieving this goal, most of which are common sense but which may inspire you to get more active.
• How to Win Facebook Friends and Influence People (All Facebook): Nick O’Neill’s post on how to become a Facebook power user (read: genuine) is great.
• The Beginner’s Guide to Advertising on Facebook (Jonathan Volk): If you’re looking to advertise on Facebook, be it for your product for via affiliate marketing (in Jonathan’s case), take tips from this guy. He makes 6 digits a MONTH.
• How to Violate Facebook Etiquette and Piss Off Your Friends (All Facebook): Sure, there’s no right or wrong way to use social networks, but there are still socially acceptable limits.
• Are Your Facebook Fans Truly Engaged? (Conversation Agent): Valeria Maltoni shares the findings of a Frozen Frogs study with regards to engaging Facebook followers.  It’s good to know that there are ways to bring Facebook community closer together.

LinkedIn

• 10 Ways to Use LinkedIn to Find a Job (How to Change the World): Thought you couldn’t get a job on LinkedIn? Think again!
• 10 Tips to Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile (SEOptimise): This is a beginner level LinkedIn howto, but it’s amazing to see how many people actually do not follow the basic rules of engagement for LinkedIn!
• Top 10 Reasons Why Your LinkedIn Question is Getting Mostly Pitches (Conversation Agent): Valeria Maltoni writes a great piece about why your LinkedIn community involvement may not be so great for you when you start getting an abundance of pitches. What can you do differently?
• 7 Ways to Get More Out of LinkedIn (Mashable): Taking advantage of the professional network isn’t hard. Here are 7 ways to get the most out of it.
• How to Ensure Your LinkedIn Profile is Effective (Web Worker Daily): Meryl Evans has a good writeup on how to optimize the features of LinkedIn to make a pretty spiffy looking profile.

Leveraging Other Social Media Sites

• How to Get Media Attention and Traffic Out of BusinessExchange (Small Business Trends): Not many people know about BusinessWeek’s Business Exchange, but Anita does, and she explains how you can get visibility out of it.
• 10 Tips to Get the Most Out of Posterous (Make Tech Easier): Posterous is the new lifestreaming app. Shevonne tells you how to actually use it and take advantage of its features.
• 10 Useful Tips to Using FriendFeed (Make Tech Easier): FriendFeed is still going strong, and its community is pretty powerful. Shevonne Polastre tells you how to make the most of it. Big emphasis on point #9. That’s the way to maximize the potential of FriendFeed.
• How I Use FriendFeed (Webomatica): If you wanted to know a little more about the potential of FriendFeed, check out Jason Kaneshiro’s post.
• FriendFeed Groups – The Fast Track to Content and Community (Knowthenetwork.com): How can you use FriendFeed groups to your advantage? Easy.
• Tools to Analyze Delicious Tags, Bookmarks, and URLs (Search Engine Journal): I normally do not put toolbox posts in my yearly roundup because I look for posts with actionable ideas to be put to use. However, how many of you actually knew that Delicious has tools to help you get the most out of it?
• 3 Easy Tips for Improving the Potency of Your StumbleUpon Account (Search Engine Journal): This post by Ryan Caldwell explains how you can improve your StumbleUpon account, but I’d argue that the information could be applied to other social bookmarking sites or social networks as well.
• Getting Links AND Content from Flickr (Search Engine Land): Using Flickr to build content isn’t so hard once you get inspiration from this article which features a case study and suggested scenarios that you can use Flickr with to help.
• 4 Tools to Track Flickr (Search Engine Journal): If you are tasked with monitoring Flickr for the purposes of listening to the conversation or finding out statistics on the photos you’ve uploaded, you should check out these tools to make your job a whole lot easier.
• 6 Tips for Getting the Most out of Foursquare (Mashable): Foursquare is new for many, so learn it and soak it in while it’s still hot.

Blogging

• 13 Tips for Marketing Your Business with Your Blog (Problogger): Most businesses have one goal with their blog: marketing. Darren Rowse gives you 13 ways to do just that.
• 25 Things I Wish I’d Known When I Started Blogging (Web Distortion): Paul Anthony (@webireland) writes an incredible high-level blogging guide, which, if followed, will definitely bring you ahead of the competition. Guaranteed.
• Do You Make These 10 Mistakes When You Blog? (Michael Hyatt): This is a good article on the common pitfalls facing bloggers, from not posting enough to posting too much and everything in between.
• Blog Post Ideas that Always Generate Buzz (The Future Buzz): In case you needed to be inspired even more to write good blog posts, Adam Singer covers even more angles for the aspiring blogger.
• A Crash Course in Comments (Chris Brogan): So many people don’t value the connections that can be had if you write meaningful comments on blogs.
• How to Find the Best Free Images/Photos/Graphics for Your Blog Posts (Smackdown!): Some really great public domain image search tools are reviewed in this article. Plus, of course, there’s Creative Commons licensed images too. And I’ll add another favorite: everystockphoto.com.
• 10 Things to Do Before Launching Your Blog (Small Business Trends): Maybe everyone reading this already has blogs.  Maybe you don’t.  If you’re about to start, read this guide.  If you’re starting a new one later on, read this guide.
• How to Write a Review (Blogging Tips): This is a different kind of blogging post, one that pertains to writing reviews of products. If you want to write a complete review of something, be sure to follow the guidelines highlighted in this post.
• 100 Ways to Find Ideas for Your Blog Posts (LifeSnips): If you’ve lost blogging inspiration, Steve Aitchison will bring you out of the blogging slumps. You can’t really run out of blogging ideas after reading this article unless the motivation isn’t within you.
• How to Make (and Keep) Your Blog Content in Demand (The Future Buzz): Adam Singer explains how you can keep your blog in demand, making it referenced and looked at regularly.
• 101 Ways to Promote a New Blog (Daily Blog Tips): Some of these ideas are rather unconventional, but I like ‘em.
• 19 Reasons Why You Should Blog and Not Just Tweet (The Future Buzz): Everyone Tweets nowadays, but there are reasons why you should blog instead. Some of Adam Singer’s points include demonstrating passion, getting full analytics, limits of 140 characters, and being in full control of the content and the website.
• How to Make Blogging Work for Your Business (Wordtracker): This is a great guide by Chris Garrett into what blogs can do for you and how you can build your blog to be successful for your business.
• Suggested Guide for Writing Effective Blog Posts (PMA Media Group): Blogging isn’t always just about opening a “new post” link and typing your thoughts. For some, it’s just not that simple. You might want to start with ways to inspire yourself and include some SEO keyword ranking tips as well.
• 10 Steps to Creating an Authority Blog (David Walker): Bloggers, take note: the presentation and the content of your blog is everything. There’s more than that, though, and David Walker walks you though it.
• 5 Ways to Increase Your Blog’s Search Traffic (Search Engine People): In Glen Allsopp’s guest post for Search Engine People, he says that you can increase your blog’s search engine traffic by applying some tactics to old (already published) blog posts.
• 5 Ways to Turn Blog Comments into Conversations (SEO Scoop): Blog comments should be ongoing conversations, but how do you do that? Barry Welford explores ways to make blog comments more engaging.
• The Complete Guide to Video Blogging (Mashable): Ever wanted to be a video blogger? This in-depth Mashable article by Leah Betancourt talks about the roots of video blogging and how to get started.
• How to Use Curation to Make Your Blog Better (Influential Marketing): I love how Rohit Bhargava compares PostSecret to success in blogging. He offers great tips here.
• Starting a Blog? These 50 Lessons Will Help You Succeed (The Future Buzz): Using data gathered from the Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2009, Adam Singer gives solid actionable tips on how you can start a blog and why it’s important that you do.
• 22 Reasons for You to Blog (Gloson): The youngest person who will ever make it to my top posts is totally Gloson. He’s 11 and gives you 22 reasons why you should blog.
• 8 Tips for Building Community on Your Blog (Problogger): If you really have a strong blog, you have potential to also grow a strong community. But how? Darren Rowse provides the insights.
• How to Create a High Quality Blog (Dan Blank): Pretty pictures and solid advice make this blog post a winner for anyone — companies and people — looking to craft a high quality blog.
• A Short List of Content Elements for Your Consideration (Broadcasting Brain): Before you publish your blog, ask yourself the following questions. Due diligence, my friends.
• How to Make Your Corporate Blog More Social (Social Media Explorer): Dan Zarrella shares small ideas but smart ones that can make your corporate blog a lot more approachable.

Reputation Management

• Top 10 Ways to Save Your Online Reputation in 2009 (Small Business Trends): Business need to step up a notch and be a lot more personable to avoid a reputation management fiasco. Most companies need to start by simply acknowledging each and every incoming request from a customer as alluded to in #2.
• Using Social Media For Reputation Management (DirJournal): Some of the tips here aren’t discussed in other articles, such as focusing on video and optimizing for local search.
• How to Build a Reputation Monitoring Dashboard (aimClear): This is an incredibly huge post by Marty Weintraub on how to set up a reputation management monitoring dashboard, from doing the keyword research to finding additional keywords to monitor to actually building it. It has lots of screenshots and good actionable information that you can get started with today.
• A Common Search Reputation Management Timeline (Search Cowboys): To summarize this post, if you don’t act to prevent reputation management issues, you’re doomed in the search world.
• Be Proactive With Your Reputation Management (Vertical Measures): My book talks about how maintaining social media profiles can help you with your reputation management issues. This post echoes that sentiment and provides specific social networks that you should establish your presence on.
• How Companies Should Respond to Negative Reviews (Outspoken Media): You shouldn’t always let criticism sit.  Sometimes you can respond.  What would you respond to, though?  How should you do it?
• The Dos and Don’ts of Online Reputation Management (Search Engine Journal): This article is a simple easy list to follow for reputation management issues. Yes, you can push down negative search engine results, but you need a plan. You can get some direction on that plan by reading this article.
• 5 Ways Negative Reviews are Good for Business (Small Business SEM): Matt McGee explains why negative reviews aren’t too bad after all. Just make sure you don’t get mentioned on Consumerist or Boing Boing. (Of course, if you get there, it’s probably because your customers exhausted all avenues, which you should’ve been abreast of earlier!)
• Online Reputation Management in the Future (WebProNews): Chris Crum interviews several experts about the possible diminishing impact of reputation management services — that is, when everyone has a reputation management issue, is it going to be less of a concern?
• The Online Reputation Management Guide (Outspoken Media): Outspoken Media has produced an incredible online reputation guide. Rhea Drysdale talks about the nuances of assessing, building, tracking, and monitoring your reputation online.

Content Development/Marketing

• Writing Content for the Buyer’s Decision Journey (Conversation Agent): Valeria Maltoni talks about the buying funnel and gives good examples of companies that do it well.
• 10 Secrets for Creating Viral Content (The Buzz Bin): It’s all about others — NOT yourself.
• The Doctor McCoy Guide to Healing Sick Content (Copyblogger): What do Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy of Star Trek and good writers have in common? Mark Dykeman offers a few parallels that just might get you thinking of your article-writing (or blogging) strategy.
• Beyond Headlines: How to Get Your Audience to Read Every Word (Copyblogger): Dave Navarro’s article on Copyblogger explains how to entice an audience and force them to read every word. The idea is to communicate similar tastes, triggering a sense of need, and promising valuable information.
• 30 Simple Ways of Improving Bounce Rate and Conversion Rate (SEOptimise): This article has some great ways to convert visitors into members, buyers, or regular users of your site. Are you listening?
• 12 Types of Content Strategies SEOs Should Know and Use (Search Engine People): If you want to build traffic and links to your site, you might want to get some ideas from Jeff Quipp. Hint: this type of post is in the article, but that’s not really why I do it. At the end of the day, it’s great to provide a valuable resource for me and for you!
• 9 Strategies for Finding Incredible Content (Search Engine Journal): This post on Search Engine Journal actually proposes some pretty unknown sites that you can leverage for article content inspiration.
• Practical Guide to Finding Link Bait Inspiration (SEO Smarty): Ann Smarty presents a pretty good guide for content inspiration, but not just any type of content: her guide gives you ideas on finding great link bait topics.
• The Psychology of a Linkbait (Search Engine Journal): Loren Baker paraphrases this article by saying, “You can increase your chances of linking success by remembering one simple rule : the best links come from real human beings. Here are ways to appeal to those real human emotions in linkbaiting.”
• Why Most Get Content Marketing Wrong (The Future Buzz): It’s a matter of formatting your content properly. If you miss the ball, you will fail.
• Top 10 Reasons Why Your Content Marketing Strategy Fails (Conversation Agent): Might as well try to get it right, right? Let Valeria help.
• The 10 Commandments of Content Marketing (Social Media Explorer): I like Kat French. She explains why your content marketing strategy might just not work in a nice list format with good descriptions.
• 49 Creative Ways You Can Profit from Content Marketing (Copyblogger): To be ahead of the game, you should be creative about it. Here are 49 things you can think about right now.

Web Development

• The “Just Create Compelling and Useful Content” Lie (Sebastian’s Pamphlets): Sebastian highlights the elements of a successful website. Hint: it’s not just great content alone.
• Things to Ask Before You Redo Your Website (Seth Godin): Seth asks thought-provoking questions that are to be considered in your next website redesign.

Video

• Online Video for Business: The Three Types of Business Video (ReelSEO): We’ve heard about viral videos, but that’s only one type of business video. There are two other types of videos, according to Daniel Sevitt. He goes into each type by explaining what they are and providing metrics for success.
• How to Succeed on YouTube (Search Engine Marketing Group): If you’ve been looking for some good ideas for how to achieve viral success on YouTube, read what Sheena Melwani says from experience.
• 5 Important Web Video Lessons for Small Business Owners (Mashable/OPEN Forum): How are you going to make your video stick? Josh Catone highlights 5 videos and explains the lessons learned.
• How Video Promotion Launched a Rap Career: A Complete Guide (Shoemoney): This article might be specific to a rapper’s evolving career, but there are general video promotion ideas in here as well.
• 34 Ways to Use YouTube for Business (WebWorkerDaily): These tips are broken down into expertise, advertising, and customer service.

SEO: Strategy

• The SEM Toolbox: 79 Tools and Tips Every Search Marketer Should Have (SEO Contrarian): Ari Ozick provides a list of the best tools ever needed to do your job as a search engine marketer. Categories include backup tools, backlink discovery tools, link management tools, competitive research tools, keyword tools, domain tools, and a whole lot more.
• SEO Hierarchy of Needs (Bruce Clay Blog): What step are you on when it comes to your SEO needs? What must you do next? This article by Virginia Nussey features a graphic that mimics Maslow’s hierarchy with an SEO spin.
• Search Engine Ranking Factors (SEOmoz): Every year, SEOmoz comes out with a list of search engine ranking factors, which is incredibly valuable if you do anything remotely related to SEO or search engine marketing. Of course, it’s not perfect since the algorithm is kept under wraps, but this information has been guesstimated by trial and error.
• Big List of Search Engine Ranking Factors (Huomah): David Harry revisits the discussion of the factors that he believes affects search engine rankings. And since he just came out with the recent training course SEO Dojo, which has been an incredible success, it’s a good idea to read this and listen.
• What Aspects of SEO Should You Be Spending Most of Your Time On? (SEO Book): Peter Da Vanzo gives a good beginner’s guide for how to get into SEO for your new website.
• Google is the Other Woman: The Relationship Algorithm (Foot in Mouth): This article uses an interesting parallel to judge how Google judges your site for algorithmic preference, but I actually would contend that all search engines typically follow the same rules of thumb. I love the analogies!
• Future-Proof Your SEO (Huomah): Here’s an article which will actually likely be outdated in a few years, but I thought it was still good enough for the purposes of understanding the search landscape today with regards to what works and what doesn’t in search engine optimization.
• The 100+ Ranking Variables Google Uses, and Why You Shouldn’t Care (SEO Book): In January, Aaron Wall predicted that search marketing success will come from engaging people. This is absolutely starting to take hold, especially as people actually talk about their favorite websites and search engines respond in kind. Twitter integration in search results, anyone?
• Big Project, Small Budget: Where to Begin Your SEO Campaign (Search Engine Guide): If you are trying to SEO your site, you may want to start thinking about the areas you should put more emphasis on–perhaps because your budget constraints may limit you to only one of these areas.
• 12 Easy Mistakes that Plague Newcomers to the SEO Field (SEOmoz): Even though this is a basic article on SEO, sometimes even seasoned professionals lose sight of this stuff. You can count on the “reciprocal linking” (read: link exchanges) to be a big mishap in “established SEO firms” from the amount of emails I get with that request daily across all my blogs. UGH
• SEO for Large eCommerce Sites (AudetteMedia): Adam Audette is the SEO for Zappos. That means he knows a fair bit about optimizing billion-dollar business websites. He explores the techniques he uses for his big client in this article.
• Creating a Sweet High Value Keyword List in 5 Minutes (SEO Book): Aaron Wall shows you how to create a high-value keyword research list in 5 minutes, then features a video on how to actually see what you just did.
• 5 Free SEO Tools You’re Probably Not Using Yet (Search Engine Marketing Group): Here’s my question. Have you even heard of these yet?
• How to Optimize for Conversion in Organic Search Results (Search Engine Land): SEO should be ROI-centric. If that’s not on your agenda, read this article and start thinking along the lines of driving real conversions.
• 7 Rules for Writing URLs (Small Business SEM): If you do anything related to search engine marketing, understanding the URL structure and how to actually optimize it is important. Matt McGee offers tips on how to do this.
• How Using Google AdWords Can Be the Best SEO Tool in Your Arsenal (RedFly Marketing): Dave Davis presents some pretty invaluable information on the potential for Google AdWords to be an incredible asset for search engine optimization. Yes, you read that right.
• How to Up Your SEO Income by a Factor of 10 (SEO Book): Ari Ozick’s guest post for SEO Book is a darn good one – you won’t know until you test. It’s really that simple.
• SEO Best Practices: New Policies Based on Updated Correlation Data (SEOmoz): It’s time to start reevaluating your SEO tactics. SEOmoz has looked at what works and reported on their findings.
• 5 SEO Essentials: Charting Effective Search Engine Optimization (Online Marketing Blog): Dana Larson’s approach toward effective SEO is great. Most people forget about that in such a social media centric world.
• 6 Key Tactics for Organic Success (Search Engine Guide): Jen Laycock provides six great tactics for organic success: keywords, content, code, optimization, links, and patience. Yes, patience is a big one!

SEO: Information

• Small Business SEO: Costs, Expectations, Realities (Small Business SEM): This isn’t a “SEO how to” article. We always see enough of those. What this is is a good article by Matt McGee on what you should expect when you actually buy SEO consulting.
• 5 Tips for Avoiding Deceptive SEO Companies (Small Business Trends): Since we’re talking about SEO, we might as well tell you what to look for so that you do NOT do business with some of these companies. Look for reputable companies if you ever need to focus on search engine optimization. Your rankings depend on it.
• Setting Up an SEO Shop Overnight! (High Rankings): Jill Whalen rants about the “SEO shops” that give SEO the snake oil bad name. There actually are good SEOs out there.
• 8 Short Steps to Forecast and Estimate SEO ROI (SEO ROI): Want ROI for your SEO efforts? Gab Goldenberg offers 8 steps on how exactly that can be achieved.
• You Don’t Need SEO to Rank in Google (Sugarrae): Rae explains that SEO by itself simply isn’t the key to high rankings. Good content and marketing is really the key; SEO is just a secondary requirement.

Link Building

• Get Your Link Building Requests Answered (Dream Systems Media): Matt Siltala writes an incredibly valuable article that answers how to get people to link to you once they’ve already established rapport with your competitors. He also brings in four experts who weigh in on the question.
• Why Link Building May Not Work (Best SEO Blog): Sometimes your link building practices won’t work. Michael Martinez explains why beginning about 1/3 of the way down in this article.
• How to Get Backlinks (Internet Marketing Techniques and Theories): Leo calls this post “very long.” I think I agree with him.
• Secrets of How to Escape the Link Building Trap Now (SEO Theory): If you don’t want to build links, you might pursue these other opportunities to build links that don’t violate any guidelines. There’s also a service review in here for a link building program run by a pretty well known guy in the SEO space.
• Buy Text Link Ads with these 101 Sneaky Tips (Search Engine Journal): Gab Goldenberg tries to stay under the radar when buying text links with 101 ideas that hopefully won’t get you caught.
• Indispensable Link Building Applications (Wiep.net): Wiep Knol has a toolbox filled to the brim of great link building applications. If you do any link building at all, make sure to familiarize yourself with these applications.
• Link Building Techniques, Interactive Agency Approach (Zeta Interactive): I get about 4-5 link building requests across multiple web properties a day. When reading this article, I realize that for 99.9% of these requests, none of these techniques (personalized requests, transparency, knowing the target website, etc.) are employed at all. Is that really so difficult? I guess it is when you outsource link building to interns.
• A Big Bunch of Link Building Ideas (Search Engine Land): Debra Mastaler is a link building genius and when she talks, I always listen. In this article, she explores the consequences of actually linking out to other websites and what you can do to build other types of links.
• Link Building from A to Z (SEOmoz): Wiep Knol is one of the foremost link building experts and has covered an entire alphabet of ways to get new links.
• 10 Goals for Link Building Campaigns: Moving Beyond “Get More Links” (Search Engine Land): Garrett French writes a great in-depth guide on how you can build links, suggesting countless tactics and link prospect sources.
• Link Building Evaluation Journal (Search Engine Journal): Building links to a website? How could you enhance your link portfolio? Dave Snyder suggests different ideas for different metrics of the link, be them the age of a domain, the anchor text, or the relevant authority of the link page.
• 10 Link Building and Tracking Tools for SEO (Online Marketing Blog): Got links? Start testing them. This Top Rank Marketing blog post explores ten possible tools from which to do this.
• 11 Effective, Efficient Ways to Use Limited Time to Build Links (Search Engine Land): If you’re tasked with building links but yet do not know how to manage your time, you might want to read this and follow Debra Mastaler’s suggestions.
• Link Mixology: The 12 Kinds of Links Your Site Needs (Michelle MacPhearson): Michelle MacPhearson writes a good point on what kinds of links you should be getting if you intend to market your website.
• 21 Link Builders Share Advanced Link Building Queries (Search Engine Land): Not all link building tips and tricks have to be Link Building 101. Here are 21 great advanced tactics that can help you get a little more out of link building.

PPC

• PPC Advertising Pitfalls: Don’t Just Do What Simon Says (Search Cowboys): Lisa Myers talks about the common pitfalls when engaging in a Google AdWords PPC campaign and explains that most people fall into these because Google AdWords is so easy to set up that many business owners waste money every day.
• The Golden Rules of Keyword Research (SEOptimise): Choosing keywords for PPC should not be too difficult, as long as your keywords are relevant, specific, local, smart, sneaky, and flexible. Explanations within.
• Top 5 Mistakes Made by PPC Newcomers (Latitude Group): Maybe you’ve decided to go into PPC marketing. If you do, don’t make these mistakes in Google AdWords.
• When Pay Per Click is NOT Right for You (Search Engine Journal): PPC? What’s that all about? Brian Carter explains why PPC is an asset and why it might be detrimental for you. If you have no idea what this is and might consider trying it, read this article first.
• How to Write PPC Ad Copy (Search Engine People): If you’ve ever done Google AdWords or any other PPC, you know that the best copy is important to drive clickthroughs. Just HOW to optimize those messages is the subject of this article.
• 6 Habits of Highly Effective PPC Managers (NVI Solutions): If you do any Pay Per Click, you should possess these six traits at the minimum, which include the desire to test and tweak, leveraging your web analytics, and staying informed of policy updates.
• Writing Your Best PPC Ads (Search Cowboys): If you’ve ever done Pay Per Click marketing, you might want to follow some of the tips Kate Morris offers on this post.
• SEM Training Strategy: Overcoming Common Mistakes (SEO Book): Aaron Wall explains how to maximize your PPC and SEO campaigns.
• How to Prevent Competitors from Seeing Your AdWords Ads (Jennifer Slegg): If you are really the competitive type and don’t want your competitors to see your Google AdWords ads, take Jen’s advice and lock ‘em out!
• 9 Tips to Write Effective Google AdWords Copy (Search Engine Journal): Saad Kamal knows his Google AdWords. Do you?
• 7 Incredibly Valuable but Underused Free Tools for PPC Marketers (Search Engine Land): Brad Geddes talks about some of the most useful tools to help boost your Pay Per Click campaigns.

Affiliate Marketing

• Cut the Fat: Some Quick Tips to Instantly Gain Profit (Jonathan Volk): Jonathan Volk’s gives affiliate marketing tips based on his own trial and error.
• Are You Ready for an Affiliate Program? (NVI Solutions): I usually talk about affiliate marketing on the hows of setting it up. But what if you’re a merchant who is considering it? Then read this and see if you’re ready.
• The Most Powerful Way to Presell Any Product or Service (Dosh Dosh): Dosh Dosh discusses the way to lure potential buyers into buying your product like all affiliate marketers should really be doing.
• PPC Affiliate Marketing 101 (Jonathan Volk): In case you were new to the affiliate game, here’s what you can do to get started with affiliate marketing using Pay Per Click.
• Interview with Rae Hoffman AKA Sugarrae (SEO Book): Rae Hoffman talks to Aaron Wall about her success as an affiliate marketer. This interview is pretty damn good.

Analytics

• 6 Tools Every Google Analytics User Should Have (Unofficial Google Analytics Blog): I’ve never heard of any of these Google Analytics tools before!
• Google Analytics Mega Post: 23 Google Analytics Tips and Tweaks (Search Engine People): Google Analytics out of the box is a powerful package. You can tweak output even further, though. To get started, read this article.
• The Complete Google Analytics Power User Guide (VKI Studios): This is the most in-depth Google Analytics user guide that I’ve ever seen.
• Using Analytics to Measure SEO Success (Search Engine Land): Jill Whalen explains that rankings aren’t good success metrics. Instead, focus on your analytics. Here’s how.
• Google Analytics for Local Search (seOverflow):  This is how you can use Google Analytics for some great local optimization.  This article is choc full of great detail, and while it’s local-focused, there’s good actionable insight for anyone using Google Analytics in some way.

Usability

• Is Your Website Easy to Buy From? Tips You Can Test to Improve Your Site’s Checkout Process (Conversion Room): Want to make sales on your website? You better hope it’s usable. Here are some areas you can test to find out if your site is good for the average buyer.
• Are You Guilty of Crimes Against Usability? Let the Jury Decide (Search Engine Guide): In this usability blog post, Stoney deGeyter equates your customers with the jury. Business owners should study those juries to find out what judgments they are passing on your site.
• Why Usability and SEO Go Hand in Hand (Search Engine Land): Search engines like usable websites, just like people do. It’s in your best interest to appreciate the value of this.

Landing Pages

• 9 Effective Tips for a Better Landing Page (Search Engine Journal): Saad Kamal offers good tips for great landing pages.
• 30+ Principles to a Better Landing Page Design (Landing Page Optimization): You’ve read about the types of landing pages, but how do you actually design one? You can follow the tactics tried by people who already have found success.
• Landing Page Types (Lyris HQ): This article presents a concise list of landing page types, from PPC landing pages to transactional landing pages.
• 7 Tips to Increasing Landing Page Conversions (Search Engine Journal): Lauren Vaccarello explains how to craft the content on your landing page to actually see conversions. One great tip: avoid marketing speak and use simple English instead.

Local/Mobile Search

• Mobile Search Guide (cellphones.org): Now more and more people are using their cell phones and searching on their favorite search engine. My phone is old as heck but even I do it. But if you’re a website creator, have you optimized for mobile search? If not, perhaps you should, since your visitors might end up going elsewhere.
• Local Search Ranking Factors (David Mihm): Just like there are SEO ranking factors, there are also local search ranking factors.  David Mihm gives you an exhaustive list of them for your perusal.
• A Closer Look at the Local Search Data Providers (getListed.org): Any local business presence will want to make sure its information is accurate online.  Take a look at the providers listed to figure out where your information needs to be updated.
• Blocking and Tackling: 10 Fundamentals of Local SEO (Search Engine Land): David Mihm, our resident local expert, provides a basic list of what you should do as a local business to get ranked in search engines.

Personal Branding

• How to Start or Start Over Building Your Personal Brand (Skelliewag): Skellie talks about why a brand is important and how you can do it.
• How to Build Your Personal Brand on YouTube (Mashable): Dan Schawbel is a personal branding expert and shows you how to build a strong YouTube brand. Really, this is a pretty good general YouTube how-to article, but he ties it into the personal branding element, which works for me.
• SEO Tips for Building Your Personal Brand (Search Engine Land): I don’t really consider these “SEO” tips, as they’re more social media centric. But they’re great for building your brand, that’s for sure.
• 7 Ways to Land Great Consulting Work While in Between Jobs (Personal Branding Blog): How to build your brand when finding a job, according to Monica O’Brien!
• What a Personal Brand is NOT (Tom Peters): It is NOT a perk, among other things. You have the privilege of a personal brand. What are you going to make of it?
• 50 Ways to Make Limoncello When You’ve Been Laid Off (Conversation Agent): Valeria Maltoni highlights an incredibly inspirational video and gives you some great ideas to build your brand when you’ve been laid off — and I’ll add when you’re not. You should always be building your personal brand.

Building a Brand/Brand Evangelism

• Checklist: Develop a Successful Advocacy Program (Web Strategist): Jeremiah covers some of the other aspects of a brand ambassador program, detailing the nuances and the like.
• 19 Presence Management Chores You Could Do Every Day (Chris Brogan): Chris Brogan shows how you can be involved in the conversations around you — tangibly.
• What Do You Love? (Cranial Soup): This article is about marketing coming from the perspective of the consumer. Consumers have a duty to market their favorite products or risk losing them from store shelves. Marketers should do this for their favorite products for free. I would. (Call it brand evangelism if you will.)
• How to Create Advocates for Your Business (Logic+Emotion): Brand evangelism. Customer Advocacy. It’s all the same. Now how do you actually get there?

Public Relations

• The State of PR, Marketing, and Communications: You are the Future (Brian Solis): This is the longest “blog post” in the history of the world but it is one of the most brilliant things I have read in all of 2009.
• PR Gone Bad: How to Anger Bloggers and Hose Your Client (Jonathan Fields): This story by Jonathan was so good that I even wrote a story about it which was published to Brian Solis’s blog as well.
• Shift Your PR from Push to Pull (The Future Buzz): Why should you move to a pull PR strategy? Adam Singer gives you the lowdown.
• 3 Steps for Effectively Using Social Media for PR (Online Marketing Blog): Social is everywhere, and you can use it in your public relations efforts. In fact, you really should.
• 25 Questions to Ask Before Hiring a PR Firm (Idea Grove): These questions test competency, prioritization, cost-efficiency, and compatibility.
• How to Use Social Media in Your PR Pitch (Mashable): Interaction is key, according to Susan Payton.
• The Art of the Pitch (Jonathan Volk): Want to pitch a busy blogger? Follow these steps. This is a short read with good insights.
• How to Woo a Blogger (and get coverage) (Outspoken Media): This is an excellent guidebook into what you should to in order to get a blogger to talk about you.  If the proposed content fits the blogger’s audience and you follow these rules, you very well may see more mentions of your clients’ products/services in blog posts.
• How to Write Effective Press Releases in the Age of Twitter (OPEN Forum): It’s not really just the “age of Twitter” – it’s the “age of social.” That said, where’s your multimedia? Is it in your pitch?
• A Poor Man’s Guide to Finding Influencers (The Buzz Bin): If you’re not going to buy a Cision subscription to find the bloggers and people interested in talking about you, try this guide to get you to locating who to reach out to.

Community Management/Engagement

• 5 Myths of Community Management (Altitude Branding): This is a great post on what a community manager REALLY does. Newsflash: it’s not only about walking the halls of social media sites.
• Community Manager Responsibilities and Goals (Connie Bensen): Connie writes a great post about community management (revised from July 2008).
• Social Media Community Manager Job Description (aimClear): Here’s an “official description” for a social media community manager.
• Community Engagement (The Buzz Bin): Geoff Livingston talks about engagement as discussed in his book, Now is Gone, and how it has evolved in the last 1.5 years.
• How to Kick Start a Community: An Ongoing List (Web Strategist): Jeremiah suggests some great ways to build a real online community in your little neck of the woods.
• 10 Rules for Increasing Community Engagement (Mashable): A big point that Leah Betancourt makes here is the emphasis on user generated content (UGC). Other important points are identifying and nurturing power users and welcoming newbies.

General Online Marketing

• Definitive Guide to Word of Mouth Marketing (Samir Balwani): Samir Balwani writes an awesome guide on word of mouth marketing, broken down and categorized into sections (why it’s important, elements of WOMM, web influence, what elements facilitate sharing, campaign tracking, and more!)
• How to Send a Personal Email (Seth Godin): Seth Godin writes about email etiquette. My favorite? #14 (especially due to all the LinkedIn spammers who have been targeting me as of late).
• 6 Powerful Principles of Persuasion for Influential Internet Marketing (Winning the Web): In a post emphasizing the parallels of the book “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” by Robert Cialdini, Gyutae Park applies these principles to Internet Marketing and explains why you need to apply them in any online marketing campaign.
• 6 Buzzworthy Laws All Internet Marketers Should Understand (The Future Buzz): Do you know what the long tail means? Probably. How about Metcalfe’s Law or The Streisand Effect?
• 11 Ways to Influence People Online and Make Them Take Action (Dosh Dosh): If you’re marketing to individuals online, you should target your messaging to the three brains of the human body. Don’t understand what I just said? Read the article.
• 6 Fool-Proof Steps to Make More Money With Your Website (Dosh Dosh): Dosh Dosh wrote another great article on how to monetize your most popular web pages. This is great for anyone, from the affiliate marketer to the SEO to the small online shop.
• “Don’t Put Your Eggs in One Basket” is Bad Advice for Internet Marketers (Winning the Web): While I argue that you must not spread yourself too thin, I actually am going to take Gyutae’s advice on this one.
• 3 Reasons Why it Pays to Go Niche (Literally) (Winning the Web): Gyutae Park explains that some markets are saturated. You’ll be more successful if you focus on niche markets instead. (Good luck starting a brand new social media blog tomorrow!)
• 11 Internet Marketing Skills that Should be Second Nature (Conversation Marketing): Are you well versed in internet marketing? Being knowledgeable in social media doesn’t cut it. You should also know these 11 tips as suggested by Ian Lurie.
• Social Impacts Every Customer Touchpoint (Web Strategist): This article touches upon the different elements of online advertising (and then some) and highlights market maturity and brand impact.
• Internet Marketing Isn’t a Buffet: Why You Need Quality Traffic Over Quantity (Winning the Web): Quality is more important than quantity, and Gyutae explains why this is the case.
• 10 Things You Can Do in the Next 60 Days to Market Your Business and Close More Sales (Small Business Trends): This article was talking about how to end 2009, but since you’re probably reading it for the first time now, how about using these to begin 2010?

Everything Else Under the Sun

• Being Socially Aware: Because a Smile and Fast Talk Don’t Work on the Internet (ob81): For a successful marketing effort, the bottom line, according to Howard O’Berry, is that you need to be socially aware of your surroundings and know who to pitch to. He even refers to a case study that impacted him to drive this point home.
• 12 Steps to Upgrade Your Business (Small Business Trends): Here are some great ideas to upgrade your business, from being more approachable to learning a new web technology to NETWORKING! woo!
• Rage Against the Sales Letter (Jonathan Fields): The long sales letter is a tactic that you may not really appreciate, but some marketers swear by it. Read why Jonathan Fields considers long copy a must-have.
• Business Ethics & Mistakes You Should Avoid! (Tony Adam): Tony Adam explores some business ethics moves that you should avoid. Some include reporting your competitors, burning bridges, and more.
• Your Customers’ Hierarchy of Need (Ignite Social Media): Ignite Social Media writes a great post on how customers relate to brands using Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
• How to Identify and Deal with Different Types of Clients (Smashing Magazine): If you’ve ever had a nitpicker or family friend as a client, what are you to do when issues arise? Smashing Magazine has your answer.
• 9 Reasons Your Online Business Will Fail (Shoemoney): Discipline and focus are two of the nine reasons.

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Closing Notes

The year 2009 was incredibly huge for me. I gave birth to my first child, a little boy, who is my pride and joy. I published a social media marketing book. I’ve made great relationships, big and small, and I’ve worked on some fantastic projects that I could have only dreamed of just a few years ago.

In the past decade, I’ve graduated college, married the love of my life, switched careers to find my passion, and now I live through it every day. Every morning, I wake up excited to see what the day will bring. I’m aiming higher for the next 10 years — let’s see if I can top this. I’m truly excited to see what next year will bring.

May you all have a happy, successful, and wonderful 2010.

[ Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2009 is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Read more about The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, a primer to social media marketing. Or you can subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

Since we’re about to jump into 2010 (that’s “twenty ten,” everyone), I wanted to ring in the new year with something that will hopefully kick start your collaborative efforts. This is a guest post from Shevonne Polastre, who wrote this article on behalf of TopHost.Gr, a Greek web host that offers shared hosting.

Crowdsourcing has become more and more popular with private companies, non-profit organizations, and even government agencies. It’s a model that is based on many people contributing to an idea, product, or service that would have usually been done by one person. Crowdsourcing has become increasingly more widely used because it helps cultivate creativity and innovation. There are three main reasons why this model works:

1. Crowdsourcing builds competition – In an environment where one person is the one having the power to build something, mediocrity is usually the final result. When you have a group of people submitting their work, there is an awareness that it isn’t just one idea that will work, so the result is a higher quality of work. As they saying goes, competition breeds excellence.
2. It becomes a collective effort – Crowdsourcing also makes people feel like this is a team effort that not just one person is the most important piece to the puzzle. This model allows people to feel comfortable enough to reach out to others and work together for the final work.
3. Learning is key – By having many minds contribute to the final goal, people can learn from one another on other ways to do the same type of work. This is great because it helps everyone be the teacher and the student, so there is an increase sense of education that is a plus for everyone involved.

Crowdsourcing is an useful model because it can be used by any group for any reason. Organizations have used it for developing programs, marketing efforts, research, and education. Earlier this month, we saw DARPA release ten balloons and ask people to pinpoint their locations. The results were outstanding and proved that a collective group can solve time-sensitive and critical situations. There have also been doctors that have used social networking tools, like Twitter, during surgery. This is a great use because it allows doctors collaborate together and share their expertise, which can ultimately save a patient’s life and/or help find cures in the future. Another use has been to aid others in fulfilling dreams. Kiva is an organization who allows anyone to contribute money to aid an entrepreneur in a developing country be successful in a business he/she is trying to begin or further develop. Additionally, crowdsourcing has even help bring awareness to charity causes and collecting money for them. One great example this year has been Blame Drew’s Cancer. After finding out he had cancer, Drew Olanoff used this knowledge to do something wonderful about it. He used Twitter to raise money for charity if people tweeted and blamed his cancer.

Here are ten social media tools that can aid you with crowdsourcing:

Twitter

It is already being used for many crowdsourcing efforts. The best way to use it is create a hashtag, explain what you are trying to accomplish, and have your followers tweet away. One of the ways that Twitter has been used (other than listed above) has been by conferences like South by Southwest (SXSW) and Gnomedex. They used Twitter, so that attendees could tweet and discuss the events with their followers.

Facebook

Create a Facebook Page and tell everyone about it. You can use the many applications that Facebook offers, so that others can answer questions on a survey, have discussions on the forums, and/or have notes to bring awareness to a topic. Facebook Page is a great way to use it for building brands, calling people to action, and/or build ideas.

Evernote

Create an area for your team can collaborate on notes, ideas, and information. Evernote allows you to clip anything (e.g. web sites, images, videos, etc.) that you find useful and share it with others.

Google Docs

If you want to share and collaborate in the creation of documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, then Google Docs is the best way to go. You can even chat with your fellow collaborators and see one another’s modifications without having to be in the same room.

GetSatisfaction

The best way to offer your clients the best customer service is by also allowing them the ability to resolve the issues themselves and share their questions and answers with anyone, even if that person is not a client. GetSatisfaction provides a way for companies to do that. JS-Kit Echo uses GetSatisfaction for their customer support. When I was having some issues adding the commenting system to my web site, I was able to quickly get a response from the JS-Kit team and their users. It was great to also be able to share my experience with my Twitter followers and Facebook friends.

Delicious

Social bookmarking is a great way to share interesting links that could aid in the development of an idea, education, and/or marketing efforts. Delicious is my favorite one to use for this. You can have a create a network or a group bookmarking account so that anyone can add new bookmarks, tags to existing, and add comments. It also allows you to share your bookmarks on other social networking sites.

Dropbox

Have a way for your team to upload and share different files with one another. This is great for sharing code, developing a web site, or for storing research findings. Dropbox offers a virtual hard drive that you can drag and drop directly from your computer. It even provides an audit trail, so that you can know what was uploaded, when, and by whom.

Scribd

If there are written works, such as documents, eBooks, and use cases, that you want available to your team or customers, Scribd is the way to go. Scribd allows people to read a piece of writing, share it with others, and provide comments on it. It’s a great way to get the ideas, suggestions, and questions from many people and make a better product.

Ustream and YouTube

Video blogging is becoming increasingly popular, especially now that smartphones have better video cameras, and there are apps to upload them to video services, such as Ustream and YouTube. Ustream gives you a way to host a live show and have your Twitter followers chat with you while you are on the show. Additionally, these can also be tweeted, so that their own followers can also contribute. You can also upload to YouTube, which is great because then you can also receive video responses.

Google Wave still has a few defects, but it can be a strong collaboration tool if Google resolves them. I am currently part of an Augmented Reality (AR) wave where they are trying to find a way to use Google Wave for AR. It is great seeing these innovate minds find creative ways to building augment reality into Google Wave, sharing code, images, and documents. Google Wave can also be used for customer service, web site/blog creation, an idea repository, etc.

What are some methods and tools that you have seen various organizations use for crowdsourcing? What do you think will be seen in 2010?

[ 10 Social Media Tools To Help With Your Crowdsourcing Efforts is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

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