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Real estate is one industry that seems to be dipping their toes into social media, but has yet to dive in. Some real estate companies are making an effort at social media , but it’s a bit halfhearted and nothing done halfway will be successful.[read more]

As the search engines cracked down on paid links that are considered "unnatural," webmasters came to believe that paid links are bad. The truth is, they aren’t all bad. You just need to know where to draw the line.[read more]

Image courtesy of 401(K) 2013, Flickr.

The biggest companies with the deepest marketing budgets ruled the advertising space across all mediums. Because that space — television, radio, print — was controlled by so few, Main Street just couldn't possibly compete with Wall Street. But today businesses have far more tools at their disposal. Not only do these tools give smaller businesses more access to a broader audience, but the methods are infinitely more affordable, as well.[read more]

As more businesses continue to enter the blogosphere, they run the risk of publishing clichéd, outdated articles in the hopes of attracting a wider audience. As I’ve worked to grow my own company blog, I’ve seen plenty of other business blogs that continue to publish material that is either uninteresting or unprofessional and, to stem the flow of poorly written postings, here are five topics I earnestly believe business blogs should avoid.[read more]

As much as you need to actively listen, at the end of the day you’re still the expert. Don’t be afraid to own that role when you need to. What else do you think we can do to help foster productive relationships between communicators and cause-related groups?[read more]

LinkedIn reveals key design changes aimed at streamlining the LinkedIn experience and helping us to more easily discover and discuss the content that matters most.[read more]

smarketing/shutterstock

If you’re in marketing you’ve probably encountered multiple conversations with your sales team about what a qualified lead is, or simply put, defining the handoff process. When should the sales team take over a lead? If you implement Smarketing, it can solve those issues.[read more]

Most bloggers, students, or freelancers who writes do not have their own professional editors. Any time you write content that you want people to read, it is important for you to edit your work and to also check it to see if there are any portions that were copied. Here are a few tips to help you edit your own content before you post it online.[read more]

This posts highlights what's necessary to become an exceptional marketer and gives specific examples around the role of a social media manager. The perfect age for my Social Media Manager in my opinion is 23-28. Even from a standing start, providing the attitude and desire, combined with the working environment is provided, that 23-28 year old will accomplish mastery.[read more]

A digital deluge is coming. What does this mean for you? It could very well mean network slow downs and higher subscription costs. In the future, it’s likely that our networks will need 1000x more bandwidth.[read more]

People come to your blog to read your content, and you know what? If they like it, they want to know who this great writer or wise marketing expert is. I never ever had an "About Me" section in the old days. You know why? Because I'm no writer! There, I said it![read more]

Photo credit: Alan Cleaver cc

Everybody and everything keeps coming back to your websites when the magic of “quality content” happens. It’s called “stickability.” It’s what we all want. And, it builds trust and reputation. Yeah, Google loves that, too, now more than ever.[read more]

In order to help your content spread, you have to reduce the friction of sharing. In other words, make it very easy to share via Facebook, LinkedIn Twitter, Pinterest and via email. And no, don’t hide it at the bottom as a tiny button that needs to be expanded to show the real sharing buttons.[read more]

One of the most under-leveraged resources for many brands, within social media, comes from within: their employees. Research has continuously shown that people trust word of mouth or recommendations anonymously or via personal networks. So then this raises the question – why don’t more companies leverage the support of their employees?[read more]

The number of “likes” on your Facebook page and the amount of followers on your Twitter account are not the only determiners of the efficacy of your social media marketing campaign. In fact, it may not be a true marker of the success of your strategies.[read more]

To be effective on Twitter you need to setup a good workflow and learn how to schedule your Tweets to get the best impact with your audience. Scheduling your Tweets will save you time and help you be more productive with your social media. It is all too easy on social media to get distracted, lose valuable time and not achieve your objectives.[read more]

lanier67, Flickr

This isn’t hard to respond to comments on some platforms like Facebook where most comments can be visibly seen on the post itself. However, mentions of your brand can be harder to track on forums you’re not a part of or on social networks like Twitter where you get a steady stream of content on your feed. To help you monitor mentions of your brand, you can use a tool like Mentions to track your name and get real-time alerts.[read more]

It seems that Target may have finally found its way into the next frontier of digital retail. Within the last week, Target has launched Cartwheel, a responsive website which will eventually become an application that allows users to earn and redeem in-store savings via Facebook and their smartphones.[read more]

A brand is essentially the sum of what people say about it. We’re connected and social now. And that’s not all. We’re hypercritical, hyperactive and so hyper-online, we’re barely offline when we sleep. Scheduling our content to publish while we’re snoring is easy. There are apps for that.[read more]

Semantic search is changing everything. From the way traditional marketing is done to the way social media connections are now forged, the web is forcing us to create more transparent, honest connections than ever before.[read more]

You can go “off grid.” You can turn off your email. In unplugging yourself from your social media networks and the online world, I posit what you’re really doing is unplugging your robot friends till you want to deal with them again. Friends have become objects of convenience.[read more]

Certain individuals have always wielded outsize influence on the decision-making of others in their social groups, but not until the age of the social web have there been systems to easily quantify and measure social influence - rather, it was subject to perceptions about credibility and personal brand. But now gut feelings are being...[read more]

Flickr’s redesign propelled it in the direction of looking exactly like Facebook would look if images were the only content. I am not denying that Marissa Mayer has brought an incredible amount of fresh ideas and new strategies to reinvigorate Yahoo, but the Flickr property, ignored since its 2005 acquisition, seems to be rebounding in the direction of other platforms.[read more]

Google+ is following its competition with a design change that has everyone up in arms. As usual, some like the changes made while more disapprove. The new design is going to take some getting used to, but the worlds biggest search engine had the best intentions in mind for both businesses and individuals when it came to the very photo-friendly redesign.[read more]

After weeks and months at the same desk, it’s easy to feel out of ideas. In a job that requires fresh-thinking, creativity and inspiration, a new setting can spark productivity better than any program or time-management technique. Work outside, work in the lobby, (or if you’re lucky) work from home. A new environment can reinvigorate your work life and tap into unreached potential.[read more]

I don’t think I’m being too controversial to say that women drive the majority of e-commerce and social sharing. Yet this infographic asserts that men are driving eCommerce and social sharing, and that a Google Plus share is worth five times what a Facebook share is and nine times what a Pinterest share is worth.[read more]

Eighty percent of companies plan to use social media for customer service and brands must respond quickly to customer queries on social channels. There is also an opportunity to use social customer service to increase brand loyalty.[read more]

In a welcome move, Twitter offers advertisers the ability to target users based on key words used in their previous tweets. This holds the promise of getting news of your accounting firm and its services directly to the people who have expressed an interest in them through their own tweets.[read more]

Your company may not even be taken seriously without a presence on the big four social networks: Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn. However, simply maintaining social media accounts for your business is not sufficient.[read more]

penguin/shutterstock

As expected and announced by Matt Cutts for upcoming penguin updates on Twitter, this is the first major update which is being called as Penguin 2.0 (officially) rolled out yesterday on May 22, 2013 has impacted 2.3% of queries that a regular user might notice.[read more]