All about the intersection of search engine & social media marketing, optimization and online public relations.
By now, I’m not sure how many people DON’T have a Pownce account, but in case you do not and are interested, link here, oops :)Â I mean leave your email in a comment below and I’ll send you an invite. I have about 30 or so. After that, the Pownce invite giveaway is closed.
For the uninitiated, Pownce is a microblogging format similar to Twitter where you can also share files.
Do you have an interest in crochet? Extreme ironing? Wearing only green shoes? There is probably a social networking community out there for you so you can connect with like-minded people who share your interests. At SMX Social Media this afternoon Rand Fishkin and Liana Evans both spoke on how to find, use and leverage these smaller social networking communities.
To find these micro communities in your vertical, you can check out the web 2.0 lists of social media lists, search for topic relevance and coverage in a search engine and read the social media discovery blogs. The long tail of social networking sites and micro communities is very, very long. You will be able to find a targeted micro community focused on what your interest is.
When you have all the social media essentials, and you know that you need to be social and active in your social networking communities, how do you effectively leverage that to benefit yourself (and your company)?
The speakers in this session on SMX Social Media Day 2 gave the audience tips and recommendations on how to best use social networking, specifically Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace, to make yourself known in the networking world.
When talking with so many companies of all sizes and types about marketing with social media, many are keen on the idea, but don’t have a clear idea of the best way to incorporate tactics like social bookmarking into their content promotions. Anyone can throw up links to Digg, Del.icio.us and Facebook, but does it actually do anything?
The way I see it, two of the most practical ways to approach promoting content via social media sites such as social bookmarking and news would best be characterized as “active” and “passive”. In fact, there are many situations where both make sense.
I’ve updated my Yahoo mash profile page a bit over the weekend and with the help of a few friends. Note: if you have some mischievous friends, you may want to turn off their ability to edit or “mash” your profile page or it might start sporting another company’s logo as your background image, as was the case on my profile for a few hours on Saturday.
Mash is very easy to use with drag and drop modules ala Facebook but with the unique feature of allowing others to add and/or modify modules or even visual settings, depending on the sharing settings. You get a short URL, mash.yahoo.com/leeodden is mine, for example, but you need to be logged in to Yahoo and have a mash account to see the content.
Facebook recently deployed an applications programs interface allowing users to create widgets or share applications within their network.
One application in particular caught my interest as it allows you to turn your virtual self into a zombie and “infect” other people by biting them (through email invitation of course). Your zombie gains points as you infect more and more people. In the 3 days that I have had the application up and running, I have infected 6 people who have infected others as well.
Some of the best advice I ever received starting out in the business world concerned the value of networking. Online communication tools like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter as well as mainstays like IM and email make it easier than ever (sometimes too easy) to network with other like-minded individuals.
Search marketers tend to be a tech savvy lot so I suspect many Online Marketing Blog readers are likely users of these online communications and networking tools. But which ones? Which are most productive? That leads us to this weeks Reader Poll question:
What is your top online communication and networking tool?
It’s an interesting thing when concepts get defined according to the intentions and goals of a few influential voices. Take social media optimization and marketing (SMO/SMM) for example. What started as a set of tactics unique to their channels (blogs, images, audio, video) became a more closely defined set of tactics ala Rohit’s Rules for Social Media Optimization.
To me, social media is characterized by communities that allow users to do many or all of the following:
MyBlogLog has been taking the blogosphere by storm the past few months, even before the acquisition by Yahoo. However, MyBlogLog is not a recent phenomena, it started out as a blog statistics service by Eric Marcoullier and Todd Sampson in March of 2005.
I’m a fan of MyBlogLog (TopRank Community) and despite some of the infrastructure issues related to their increased popularity, am very optimistic about what the resources brought on by Yahoo will do for the community.
MyBlogLog has been growing leaps and bounds since it’s launch about 6 months ago. Rumors and then confirmation of the acquisition by Yahoo didn’t hurt their visibility either. You don’t have to visit too many blogs not to notice the familiar array of headshots and avatars of people who have recently visited a blog - a widget powered by MyBlogLog.
SoloSEO, a search engine optimization project management software service has released a set of tools called the “The Missing MyBlogLog Tools” to help you get more out of MyBlogLog and to help with building your network. For their efforts and release for use on MyBlogLog, SoloSEO only asks for 1% of the acquisition price or a free trip to Yahoo. 
Here’s a breakdown of the tools:
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