“Oh I know,” I told my client this afternoon. “Many of the big brands really have no idea, and the reality is SEO strategy depends on who’s doing it, their knowledge or lack thereof of what’s most effective, and newest strategies. Yes, longtail is where to put the majority of your eggs (if this were your basket =). Do you recall when we were discussing the long and short without calling it that, and you were saying ‘.. but very specific/niche audiences are going to be searching for that’, and …

 
The Blog – SEO Equation
 
It goes without saying that search engine optimization is just as important for blogs as it is for websites. However, fortunately, blogs integrate software that pings search engines to inform them of new content, and consequently, blogs are usually crawled a lot more often than a static site.
In this section, we’ll discuss some of the important considerations you must make when choosing a blog platform for SEO and tools that will make SEO much easier. You’ll also learn a little more about how to create content …

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 …

Guest post from Todd @SHIFT Communications
While the RFP process for PR agencies was relatively straightforward for the past 50 years, in the next 3 – 5 years agencies like will need to suss out their proper role on a client-by-client basis:
Some clients will want a traditional Media Relations firm … Some will want a Social Media specialty shop … Some will want Content Creation (video, microsites, iPhone and Facebook apps) … And smart clients will desire a hybrid model that incorporates all of the above – yet which could also …

“Advertising is shifting from being the foundation of a corporate marketing strategy to a catalyst that feeds owned media and creates earned media.” – Sean Corcoran, Forrester Research
 
Advertising now comes after the corporation has created an ecosystem for its owned media channels (e.g., a blog, a Twitter handle, a Facebook Fan Page).
Advertising now comes after the corporation has an established rapport with its fan base, bloggers, and traditional media contacts.
Advertising now comes after relationships.
 
Tellingly, the “Challenges” that Sean Corcoran points out regarding paid media — “clutter, declining response rates and poor …

 
Ask anybody why they use Facebook, and most people will respond with reasons like staying in touch with friends, or being able to share pictures. Rarely does one’s professional life ever get mentioned when describing the social network. When it comes to business networking, LinkedIn tends to take all the thunder, and Facebook is generally written off as a place just for fun. Yet, perhaps that’s a mistake.
Facebook, after all, has 250 million active users compared to about 44 million for LinkedIn, and even though the atmosphere is clearly not as …