As of December 09 online social activity of consumers around the world was at an 82% increase in time spent on social networking from the year prior. On average, users spent more than five and a half hours a day on networks such as Facebook and Twitter. So what does that mean for businesses today? What does it mean when customers continue to adopt social technologies at a blinding speed – yet organizations big and small aren’t able to keep up.
Since rapid adoption of social networking enables users to connect …

Source: Brian Solis
10 Steps for Optimizing Your Brand for Social Search
1. Modernize and socialize your site to complement the experience visitors expect in 2010
2. Optimize the site and all social objects for traditional, social, and real-time search
3. Create meaningful and personable social profiles where consumers are active today (pay attention to where they will be tomorrow as well)
4. Establish an editorial calendar to produce and distribute relevant content for every network with cadence
5. Add social connectivity to the home site to facilitate maximum engagement (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Google, …

 
 Guest Post by Ivana Taylor, Third Force
How do you feel about new software applications or new ways of doing business? Are you eager to try something new or do you prefer the tried and true? Sometimes I feel like I’m the only person in the world who hasn’t complained about Vista or the new user interface of Office 2007. I love to see how art and engineering come together to make computing fun and easy.
This is why I’ve decided to examine 5 up-and-coming applications – and how to turn them …

Guest post by: By Chris Garrett
Social media has many uses—from making contacts to performing customer service—but driving quality traffic to your site is Twitter’s secret weapon. The big question is this: How can we get more of that lovely attention we crave?
As my recent poll shows, generating incoming traffic is the number-one need that people have right now, and for good reason. Traffic translates into:
■Attention, engagement, conversation and recognition
■Spreading your message far and wide
■Prospects and subscriber opt-ins
■Customers, increased sales and leads
■Media and interviews, which lead to more attention
… and last …

Posted by Shannon Sweetser
So, what kind of leverage does Inbound Marketing get you in comparison with Outbound Marketing? Well, let’s go back to those simple machines we were learning about in Physics.
Let’s say you had to raise a heavy box 3 feet. To do this, you have two choices. You can lift the box straight up in the air 3 feet. Or you could push it up an inclined plane 5 feet.  Though it would seem that inclined plane makes you do more work because it increases distance, really it’s …