Day 1 of Connected Marketing Week in San Francisco starts with BlogWorkz including a session called: Inspiring an Army of Bloggers. Here users will learn What it takes to inspire an army of corporate bloggers under the banner of one brand. And how businesses are reaching out to customers and enthusiasts as blogging brand ambassadors. I had a chance to catch up with one of the panelists, Lee Sherman Editor-in-Chief, Personal Finance Group (Intuit) to get his insight on the session…

One session definitely worth attending at next month’s SES in San Francisco is Real-Time Storytelling where panelists will discuss how mainstream media must embrace social media and take on the critical role of curator of the conversation in order to survive. I was able to catch up with Dermot Waters, Senior Director of Product Development, CNN.com, who will be participating on the panel. Read our chat below:[Manoj]: What is CNN’s approach to real time and how important is it as foundational strategy of spreading the news?[Dermot Waters]: At its core, CNN was founded on the concept of real-time storytelling…

Loved the latest YouMoz post on SEOmoz by Oli Gardner (Co-Founder of Unbounce.com) who combines 2 of our favorite topics together: Infographics and Landing Pages. Oli provides a 12 step infographic detailing how to rehab your landing pages. Landing page tips and infographic below:

1. One Page Per Source
2. A/B Testing
3. Ad Message Match
4. Context of Use
5. Videos Increase Conversion
6. Direction Cues
7. Data vs…

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Search Engine Strategies is less then a month away and this year it’s taking place at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Earlier this week I had the opportunity to catch up with Andrew Chang, Marketing Manager at LinkedIn, to get some insight into his session on PPC and SEO best practices—specific to B2B. Read our conversation below:[Manoj]: Your session at SES is related to SEO/PPC strategies with regards to B2B, how does LinkedIn become part of equation?[Andrew Chang]: Millions of people visit LinkedIn each day to connect and re-connect with colleagues and business associates…

Guest Post: Marat Galperin – Co-Founder, www.ucubd.com As bloggers we are constantly looking for ways to make our blogs more interesting. It goes without saying that it’s important to write well and to know our audience and focus on topics relevant to it. However, these days it may not be enough to simply write good blog posts and assume that our readers will be sufficiently entertained. So what more can we do? I have found that creating new multimedia experiences for our readers by mashing together various social media content is an effective way to increase audience engagement and drive more traffic…

Recently I was in the market for web-form automation widgets/software, basically a service that would allow me to create a custom web-form, collect data and have it hosted. After a little bit of research I was quickly able to find 6 solutions which all fit my need. Here is a summary of th 6 Webform automation services:

• Form Experts – Full service website form services which include dozens of features including: Free Templates, Submission to Email/Excel/Database, Email Auto-Responder, Usage Statistics and much more starting at $7/month…

By Larry Freed

So you may have seen by now that the big ACSI (hashtag #ACSI) report on e-business was released today with a bang.

On any given year, there is big news in one of the measured categories, but this year, we have big news in all three!

• Social Media: This is the first year the ACSI has measured social media sites, and the results are surprisingly terrible…

Companies like Time, Wired, and BMW have invested in publishing magazines on the iPad ever since it came out but now with help of HP’s Magcloud, literally anyone can begin publishing magazines of their own. Magcloud suggests that using their 7 step process (and about 2 weeks in time, you can setup and begin selling online magazines. Below is an out line of their 7 step process:

1. Create: The publisher creates a magazine in a design program
2. Upload: The publisher uploads the PDF to MagCloud, fills out the description, and orders a proof
3. Proof: MagCloud prints, binds, and mails the proof to the publisher
4. Publish: The publisher reviews the proof…

Justin Timberlake posted a trailer to the new Facebook movie (The Social Network) on his blog in which he plays Napster’s founder Sean Parker. In the “Social Network” Parker gives advice to the young entrepreneur, Mark Zuckerberg – played by Jesse Eisenberg. The release movie is set for October 1, 2010.

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ReadWriteWeb reports that BAO for iPhone pinpoints the user’s location and shows key demographic data about that area. According to the application, within a mile of your house are just over 15,000 people, with an average age of 35 and an average income of over $100,000. The app also tells you what percent have a college education, are homeless, are home owners, and how much is spent on retail shopping in my area…

comScore: Google Sites led the U.S. core search market in June with 62.6 percent of the searches conducted, followed by Yahoo! (up 0.6 percentage points to 18.9 percent), and Microsoft (up 0.6 percentage points to 12.7 percent). Both Yahoo! and Microsoft have experienced gains due in part to contextual search approaches that tie content and related search results together.comScore Core Search Report*June 2010 vs…

With the introduction of Google Analytics’ intelligence engine came the ability to setup alerts for a variety of different metrics. Google extends alerts by allowing you to create them on top of custom segmentations – see video below for an example.

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According to the NY Times, Google has released a “Do-it-yourself” platform for Android, called App Inventor, whereby anyone can create an Android app without knowing how to program.

The free software, called Google App Inventor for Android (http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/about/), has been under development for a year. User testing has been done mainly inschools with groups that included sixth graders, high school girls, nursing students and university undergraduates who are not computer science majors…

Hitwise announced today that Google accounted for 71.65 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending June 26, 2010. Yahoo! Search, Bing and Ask received 14.37 percent, 9.85 percent and 2.19 percent, respectively. The remaining 70 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.94 percent of U.S. searches.

Percentage of U.S. searches among leading search engine providers

Domain

May 2010

June 2010

Month-over-month percentage change

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It’s been a while since we looked at the growth of some of the largest social media players, so I plugged their sites into Compete.com to see what the traffic looked like over the last year. At a high level it appears Facebook, Twitter and Stumbleupon all appear to be growing quite nicely, whereas MySpace, Bebo and Digg have noticed significant declines.

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The video below was developed by Ian Lurie of the Conversation Marketing blog. The video gives an overview of four basic SEO metrics, what they mean, and how to track them in Google Analytics.

SEO analytics 101 from ian lurie on Vimeo.

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Facebook pages are popping up as quickly as websites and blogs, in fact I am often seeing organizations push users to their Facebook page due to the built-in social interactivity of Facebook pages. With the majority of our online experiences still starting with search, whether it be on Google, Bing or Facebook, there are many factors that will help boost a given Facebook page to the top of the results…

With Facebook growing to well over 400 million users, their rise is happening all around the world. For instance, outside of China, Iran, Japan and Russia, Facebook has reached the top 20 ranked sites across many of the top online nations. Google is basically #1 across the board with Twitter climbing on many fronts as well.

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comScore recently released their monthly numbers in regards to online video usage and rankings for the month of May. Below are some highlights from the release:

• Google Sites attracted 144.6 million unique viewers during the month (101.2 videos per viewer), followed by Yahoo! Sites with 46.0 million viewers (7.3 videos per viewer), and Vevo with 45.6 million viewers (9.4 videos per viewer).
• The top video ad networks in terms of their actual reach delivered were: Joost Video Network (by Adconion Media Group) with 35…

Yesterday AWeber Communications announced the results from a survey of more than 2,500 small businesses regarding email marketing and social media marketing efforts. Highlights can be found below:

• Email marketing continues to bring significant value to businesses with more than 82 percent of respondents planning to increase their email marketing efforts over the next year.
• The more social media grows in popularity among consumers, the more attention it will receive from marketers…

Yesterday Unicast released its “What Women Want From the Web Report” Summer 2010 revealing the preferences, intentions and activities of women online this summer. The report discusses Unicast’s recent national online survey of 516 women, and provides detailed analysis and demographic breakdowns.

• The most popular online activities for women this summer: 76% plan to connect withfriends and family, 67% will keep up with the news, 64% plan to shop for sales/compare prices, 59% intend to entertain themselves (play games, listen to music or watch TV/movies), and 48% will research travel/vacations…

Twitter has refined the way of communication where even the limited characters reflect the absolute expression of the people. The real time exchange of information and the potential substance in the ever counting Twitter stream, Twitter has emerged out as the Google of the social media world. As the Twitter fever hits the globe hard, it becomes very important to discover the simplest way of managing your twitter profile and growth in the Twitter ecosystem and a gamut of twitter apps slot in just perfectly to feed your need…

Sysomos released a new social media report today which looks deeper into followers on Twitter and they try to explain how influence is not always measured by the number of people who follow you. Here is a summary of the study:

• They found that while celebrities have a large number of followers, most of them are low authority users.
• Social media heavyweights, like @chrisbrogan, @jowyang and @jasonfalls seem to attract fewer but very engaged Twitter users with high authority rankings…

Lyris and TwitterCon recently released the results from a study in which they surveyed over 160 small businesses about their success with managing online marketing strategies across multiple channels including Twitter. Below are some highlights from the results:

• 77 percent of marketers said they have had some success at managing an online marketing strategy across departments, including SEO, e-mail, social, mobile and analytics…

Guest Post by Jennifer HoganI just finished reading “The Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics” by Donna Wong. I think it is an essential read for anyone tasked with communicating information and data.The book is straightforward and reads like a style guide, primarily using visual examples over text. Using side by side comparisons of what to do and what not to do, Wong covers everything from collecting data to visual design…