B2B Marketing Blog - TopRank®

B2B Marketing views, news and interviews.

Session: Effectively Leveraging Social Networking

Effectively Leveraging Social Networking panel

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.

Dave McClure of 500Hats spoke first with a fun tutorial on Facebook. Facebook is great for promoting events and for joining groups to share your brands and ideas and products to those interested in your industry. One of the main characteristics of Facebook that Dave focused on was leveraging the news feed in Facebook.


Session: Effectively Leveraging Social Networking

Is Your Social Media Marketing Strategy Passive or Active?

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.

The kind of promotion I mean is on social news or bookmarking service wheres you can submit a URL, describe and tag it, then others in the community can comment and/or vote.


Is Your Social Media Marketing Strategy Passive or Active?

Yahoo Mash Beta – New Social Networking Platform

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.


Yahoo Mash Beta – New Social Networking Platform

Facebook Zombies – Marketing to Gen Y

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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.

After accumulating a certain number of zombie points by infecting others, your virtual self reaches the next level after which you are able upgrade to another type of zombie. In all, nearly 400,000 Facebook users currently subscribe to the zombie application.


Facebook Zombies – Marketing to Gen Y

Reader Poll: Tools for Networking Online

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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?

  • Email (31%, 17 Votes)
  • Social Networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace) (27%, 15 Votes)
  • Blogs (15%, 8 Votes)
  • Instant Messaging (9%, 5 Votes)

Reader Poll: Tools for Networking Online

Social Media Marketing – Get it Straight

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:

  • Create profiles/accounts
  • Grow a network of friends
  • Submit content or collaborate
  • Vote on content
  • Tag content
  • Comment on content

That’s the “social”. The “media” has to do with the platform as well as the content: blog, social network, wiki, news, bookmark, forum, discussion thread and text, image, audio, video for example.


Social Media Marketing – Get it Straight

Interview with MyBlogLog CEO Scott Rafer

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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.

In order to find out more about MyBlogLog, I contacted CEO Scott Rafer through the MyBlogLog messaging tool and he surprised me not only with a quick reply, but a yes to answering a few questions. I was rather impressed and appreciative of this considering how busy he is right now.


Interview with MyBlogLog CEO Scott Rafer

MyBlogLog Tools

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:


MyBlogLog Tools