1. What We Know

First, let’s review what we know. I’m going to break the rules of blogging and recommend that you stop and read this level-headed Penguin post by Danny Sullivan. It covers some of the basics and is the most speculation-free post I’ve read on the subject so far. Glenn Gabe also had a good post on potential Penguin factors.  There’s still a lot of speculation, but likely culprits include:

• Aggressive exact-match anchor text
• Overuse of exact-match domains
• Low-quality article marketing & blog spam
• Keyword stuffing in internal/outbound links

Many people have suggested low-quality link profiles in general, but analysis of Panda has been complicated by Google’s recent attack on link networks, which seems to have been manual and has probably been going on for weeks. The overlap has made analysis difficult, so let’s take a quick look at the timeline.

What’s the Timeline?

The official roll-out date for Penguin was April 24th, and it seems to have rolled out, for the most part, in a single day. Unfortunately, it came on the heels of other events. On April 19th, Panda 3.5 rolled out (most likely a data update). On April 16th, a data glitch caused a number of sites to be mistakenly tagged as parked domains. Throughout April (and weeks before Penguin), Google started sending out a large number of unnatural link notices via Google Webmaster Tools. Sadly, it seems that April really was the cruelest month.

How Bad Was It?

Google officially claimed that Penguin impacted about 3.1% of English queries, compared to Panda 1.0’s 12%. Since rankings change daily – even hourly – even with no updates, these numbers are nearly impossible to confirm, but it does appear that the impact of Penguin was immediate and substantial. This is an internal SEOmoz graph of Top 10 ranking changes around April 24th (please note that the Y-axis is scaled to accentuate changes):

Graph of Top 10 changes (Penguin vs. Panda 3.5)

Pardon the slightly cryptic nature of this graph – it’s for an upcoming project – but the core point is that the impact of Penguin dwarfed either Panda 3.5 or Google’s 4/16 glitch.

Is It Going Away?

In a word: no. Penguin wasn’t accidental, and Google is clearly serious about combatting spam tactics that have been lingering for too long. As you can see from the graph, it doesn’t appear that there were any major reversals in the few days since Penguin rolled out. Does that mean Google won’t make ANY adjustments? Of course not – it’s entirely likely that they’ll continue to tweak Penguin.

For comparison’s sake, remember that Panda 3.5 came 14 months after the initial launch of Panda 1.0. We’ve come a long way since the monthly “Google Dances” of 2003. Keep in mind, though, that Panda was somewhat unique – we believe that it feeds multiple variables into a single ranking factor that gets updated outside of the real-time index. There’s currently no compelling evidence to suggest that Penguin works in the same way. The Penguin update appears to be integrated directly into the main algorithm, like a more traditional Google update.

2. What to Do

Given the overlapping timelines, this advice applies to any Google update, and not just Penguin. The algorithm is changing constantly (Google reported 516 changes in 2010, and that rate seems to be accelerating), and I want to give you the tools to survive not just Penguin, but Zebra, Skunk, Orca, and any other black-and-white animals Google can ruin…

DO Take a Deep Breath

I’m not trying to be condescending or to minimize any losses you may have suffered. Over 17 years of working with clients, I’ve learned that panic almost never makes things better. No matter how hard Penguin hit you, you need to stop, take a breath, and assess the damage. Dig into your analytics and find out exactly where you sustained losses. Segment your data (by channel, engine, keyword, and page) as much as possible. It’s not enough to know that you lost traffic – you need to be an expert on exactly which traffic you lost.

DO Check the Timeline

Even though the overlapping timelines make analyzing the core Penguin factors difficult, the actual timeline when Penguin rolled out is clear. If you saw major traffic losses between Tuesday, April 24th and Wednesday, April 25th, odds are good that Penguin is at least part of the problem.

DO Double-check IT Issues

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been involved in a Q&A or consulting situation where a website owner was 100% sure they had been hit by an algorithm update, only to have their 17th message to me go something like this:

Oh, by the way, our site was down for 3 days a couple of weeks ago, right before our rankings dropped. I’m sure this wasn’t the problem, but I just thought I’d let you know.

Um, erp, what?! I’ve died a little inside so many times from messages like this that I’m not sure that I’m technically still human. Especially if your losses weren’t sudden or don’t match the algorithm timeline precisely, make absolutely sure that nothing happened to your site or changed that could impact Google’s crawlers. One of the worst things you can do in SEO is to spend a small fortune solving the wrong problem.

DO Quickly Audit Your SEO

Likewise, make sure that you know exactly what SEO efforts are underway, not just within your own team but across any 3rd-party contractors. I’ve had clients swear up and down that everything they did was completely white-hat only to find out weeks later that they hired an outside link-building firm and let them loose with no accountability. Make absolutely sure you know what every agent under your control did in the weeks leading up to the algorithm update.

3. What Not to Do

Panic leads to drastic action, and while I don’t think you should sit on your hands, bad choices made under uninformed hysteria can make a bad situation much, much worse. I’m not speaking hypothetically – I’ve seen businesses destroyed by overreacting to an algorithm change. Here are a few words of advice, once you’ve taken that deep breath (don’t forget to start breathing again)…

DON’T Take a Hatchet to Your Links

It’s unclear how Penguin may have penalized links, or if recent reports of link-related issues are tied to other April changes, but regardless of the cause, the worst thing you can do is to start simply hacking at your back-links. Even low-quality back-links can, in theory, help you, and if you start cutting links that aren’t causing you problems, you could see your rankings drop even farther.

I highly recommend this recent interview with Jim Boykin, because Jim has freely admitted to dabbling in the gray arts and he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to risky link-building. Tackling your problem links is incredibly tough, but start with the worst culprits:

• Known, obvious paid links
• Links in networks Google has recently delisted
• Footer links with exact-match anchor text
• Other site-wide links with exact-match anchors

Whenever possible, deal with low-authority links first. If a link is passing very little authority AND it’s suspicious, it’s a no-brainer. Cutting links is tough (see my tips on removing bad links) – if you don’t have control over a link, you may have to let it go and focus on positive link-building going forward.

DON’T “De-optimize” Without a Plan

One complaint I hear a lot in Q&A is that the “wrong” page is ranking for a term. So, to get the “right” page to rank, the well-meaning SEO starts de-optimizing the page that’s currently ranking. This usually means turning a decent TITLE tag into a mess and cutting out keywords to leave behind Swiss-cheese copy. Sometimes, the “right” page starts ranking again. Other times, they lose both pages and their traffic.

“Over-optimize” is a terrible phrase, and that alone has people in a panic. There’s nothing “optimal” about jamming a keyword 87 times into 500 words of copy and linking it to the same affiliate site. “Over-gaming” would be a better word. You think you figured out the rules of the game, so you pounded on them until there was nothing but a pile of dust on the board.

If you think you’ve played the game too aggressively, step back and look at the big picture. Does your content serve a purpose? Does your anchor text match the intent of the target? Do your pages exist because they need to or only to target one more long-tail variations of a term? Don’t de-optimize your on-page SEO – re-optimize it into something better.

DON’T Submit a Reconsideration Request

While I don’t think reconsideration will doom you, Penguin is an algorithmic change, not a manual penalty, and reconsideration is not an appropriate avenue. If you think you were impacted by the recent crackdown on link networks, IF you have removed those links, and IF you aren’t engaged in other suspicious link-building, you might consider requesting reconsideration. Just make sure your house is in order first.

Google has created a form for sites unfairly hit by Penguin, but it’s unclear at this point whether that form will result in manual action, or if Google is just collecting broad quality data. If you sincerely believe that you’re an accidental victim, then feel free to fill the form out, but don’t base your entire recovery strategy on clicking [Submit].

Fix What You Can Fix

Recently, I had a long debate with a client about whether or not they had been hit by a specific algorithm update. In the end, it was a pointless debate (for both of us), because we had two clear facts: (1) organic traffic had fallen precipitously, and (2) there were clear, solvable problems with the site. From a diagnostic standpoint, it definitely helps to know whether you were hit by Penguin or another update, but after that, you have to fix what’s in your power to fix. Don’t spend weeks trying to prove to management that this was all Google’s fault. Isolate the damage, find the problems you can fix, and get to work fixing them.

Marketing on Facebook has a viral effect – information spreads through networks exponentially. So, the primary goal of creating a Facebook page, or any other social networking profile, is to develop a community through interaction with current customers as well as prospective customers. And, building your fan base is the first step. You can start by connecting with friends, family and current clients or business associates and inviting them to be fans of your company’s Facebook page. When a Facebook user becomes a fan of your business, their friends on Facebook (some of which are likely potential customers) will see a message in their home page and have the opportunity to become a fan of your page as well. Here are a few tips:

a. Encourage visitors to “Like” your page
b. Partner with other brands or organizations to spread the word
c. Expand the reach of your brands through ads
d. Use social plug-ins on your website
e. Encourage physical check-ins at your business location

1. Create a Dialogue. Creating compelling content and interactions on your Facebook page is the best way to entice Facebook users to become a fan of your page. The goal should be to turn away from the typical monologue of mainstream marketing and turn towards creating a dialogue with customers. Once your Facebook page begins to develop a following, it is crucial to continually update it with new events and news to continue to build your fan base and keep current fans interested and engaged. In fact, consider creating a content calendar that strategically schedules messages and allows you to regularly updates your fans with information about product launches, upcoming events, seasonal specials and more. Find the right rhythm for the content updates and consider special weekly features found only on Facebook. Here are a few best practices:

a. Keep it human
b. Be timely and relevant
c. Share new and exclusive content
d. Encourage fan participation
e. Reward your fans
f. Schedule time for Facebook daily

2. Offer Special Deals. Another way to encourage participation is to offer special promotions available only to fans of your Facebook page. You can send a message to all of the fans of your page with a special promo code for a freebie or invitation to an exclusive event. Then, use the Wall or Notes section to publicize the winner of the promotion. Consider posting daily deals – that are available only on Facebook – in your store. Or post special, exclusive offers on Facebook that have to be redeemed by visiting your store location.

3. Acquire New Fans. Once you’ve built your baseline network on Facebook, consider investing in Facebook ads. Remember, Facebook has the global scale of television, the precision of direct marketing and the intimacy of word of mouth marketing. So, consider using ads to help spread the word about your business to the friends of your current fans. There are four basic ad formats – basic ads, application ads, Like ads, and event ads. The last three include a social context allowing you to track and measure all the friends that have connected to your business.

The most successful business pages (if you measure success by the number of fans and level of interaction) are those that foster and encourage customer comments and reply to those comments sincerely whether they are positive or negative. So, don’t be afraid to go out and join the community, interact with your customers, and most importantly, listen to what they are saying about you, your organization, and your competitors.

Unfortunately, many of those efforts are entirely tactical, methodical and without a true understanding of the “social” aspect of social media marketing. B2B marketers that are early in their social media marketing maturity level tend to focus on message distribution such as Tweeting or posting Facebook links mostly to their own content vs. engaging with customers on a human level. That one-way communication profile doesn’t engender discussions and sharing, so social traffic level increases tend to plateau pretty early.

In order to grow and scale the return on social media marketing investments, B2B marketers need to think more about the “social” than the marketing. Here are a few thoughts on that:

Decide What You Stand for Topically

The social SEO benefits of being intentional about language that reflects your key business areas of focus as well as the conversations happening within your target community are essential. Topically fragmented blog and social networking content dilutes a company’s ability to “stand out” to customers amongst the sea of noise in social conversations as well as to search engines.

Practically, that means a strategy that identifies goals, customer personas, content & editorial plans and search/social keyword glossaries. A content marketing strategy is the plan that executes what your company and brand stand for as well as how it will communicate those key messages. A social SEO keyword or topic plan filters into all relevant web and social content creation. It can also flavor social network topic engagement and conversations. That means a guide for which blogs to comment on, which influentials to network with, word choices for Tweets, blog posts and tags.

Do: Create and participate where your customers and influentials spend their time and with a content plan that supports your key topics of focus. Be useful and share social content that’s worth sharing (whether it’s your content or others’).

Don’t: Overly self promote and publish social content that is not directly or indirectly in alignment with your key topics of focus. That doesn’t mean everything you create is keyword optimized. It means everything you create and promote is thoughtful about where it fits in your social & content marketing plan.

The outcome and benefit is that your own content creation and promotion efforts are aligned to inspire discussion, sharing and links according to topics and keywords that are important to brand, business and marketing goals. An ideal manifestation is that your target audience sees your brand in a positive way everywhere they look for topics XYZ and 123 on social channels, when they search and even offline (inspired by online) word of mouth.

Plan to Win

If you enter a competition half-assed, guess what? No matter what your talent is, the chances of a win are pretty slim. Unfortunately a lot of B2B companies approach social media participation with an attitude of using the least amount of resources possible. Oftentimes this means following structured best practices list from some self-professed social media guru. Checklist marketing works to make redundant tasks more efficient, but it’s no way to engage a community.

For example, one of the most common “plan to be mediocre” mistakes I see with B2B marketers is predictable social profile creation and publishing focused solely on LinkedIn, Twitter and a blog without researching those channels. Such a plan also involves a focus on promoting company content and superficial (at best) engagement with the community.

Planning to win means having a plan for networking into influentials’ sphere of influence and knowing what to do once you get on their radar. It means creating social content that will inspire engagement and outcomes to further your business goals. It also means providing training within your organization to distribute and grow the role of social participation within your brand.

Practically, this means forecasting resources (people, process and technology) for social media marketing as significant marketing channel, not just an experiment or a checked box on a list. It means an integrated plan to dominate your category through growing social influence & networking, content, search, word of mouth and media plus the resources to execute and measure.

Do: Hypothesize, forecast and commit resources to test, develop processes and scale social media engagement within your business. What starts as social media marketing can turn into social business as the impact of social media engagement propagates from marketing to other departments and throughout the organization. Winning the social media game for B2B marketing doesn’t just mean increased sales, it means dominating your category.

Don’t: Think that social media content promotion as part of a Search Engine Optimization program is the same thing as social media marketing or social business. It is not.

The outcome and benefit of planning to win in B2B social media is that you have enough resources to provide value to customers throughout the B2B buying and customer lifecycle. Additional benefits include facilitating awareness, trust, confidence, word of mouth, sales and referrals. On top of that you will have built/facilitated a community in alignment with your company’s goals.

We asked several “masters” about their number one B2B social media tip and included them below.

1. Jason Falls, Social Media Explorer

“B2B is more P2P – people to people. The buyer still wants to buy from a trusted friend, not a logo or a company. Making your business more human, putting a name, face and relationship on the relationship goes a long way. United Linens isn’t a company. It’s Scott, the marketing director. I can trust him. Some random linen company? Not so much. That brings B2B down to a level we can all relate to.”

2. Chris Brogan, ChrisBrogan.com

“Content is my best B2B social media lesson. I’ve seen many companies learn that providing interesting content (like video testimonials or how-to information) is a great way to encourage prospects, warm up leads, and convert to sales opportunities.”

3. Anita Campbell, Small Business Trends

“My best B2B social media lesson was … learning to quickly get clear on what I wanted to accomplish with social media, so that I didn’t spin my wheels.

In the B2B world especially, it’s crucial to step back and look at your business and who your target customer is. A B2B target audience is usually narrower in scope than a B2C audience. So your use of social media needs to be narrower and more focused. Ask “who am I trying to reach with social media and why?” That’s a clarifying question. If you are very very specific in answering that question, you’ll pretty quickly get to a roadmap of which social sites you need a presence on; which you should monitor; and most importantly, how to use the social media sites you decide on.

Here’s why. There’s no one right way to use a site like Twitter (Twitter). A business insurance broker might use Twitter to establish expertise and credibility and awareness – and the business broker’s target audience will be highly specific. A gift basket business, on the other hand, would see Twitter in a different light. It might use Twitter to develop ongoing loyalty with retail customers; publicize discounts and special offers; and monitor for customer service issues. Another example: for most B2B businesses, MySpace (MySpace) or other youth-oriented social sites are probably not worth the investment of time. So, understanding which sites and when to use them will save you many hours of time and possibly wasted staff resources and money.”

4. David Armano, Logic+Emotion

“B2B professionals often only look within their niche and sometimes fail to borrow from the consumer world. For example, I worked [with] Grainger a huge B2B company and we made their commerce site best in class by looking to Amazon as opposed to direct competitors. Also, I think what AMEX is doing with OPEN Forum for small business owners is brilliant and it’s essentially a community strategy. B2B is a niche for sure, but at the end of the day, people are people.”

5. Rohit Bhargava, Influential Online Marketing

“People buy expertise. If I had to choose a core difference between how most B2B business operate versus B2C companies, this would be it. While you might buy a box of cookies or even a digital camera because of features or taste, most B2B sales are based on demonstrating some type of expertise either in a type of service or in the category of a product that you are providing. Once you realize this fact, the lesson for using social media effectively is clear: if you can demonstrate your expertise through social media, you can have a measurable impact on your sales efforts.

Fortunately, one of the things that social media can be great for is making expertise visible to the world. White papers can be largely replaced by blogs, long winded demos by online video. When you consider social media as a way to extend and prove expertise, the possibilities are vast. In a world like B2B marketing where reputation and credibility go a long way to helping seal deals, social media is nearly becoming a necessity.”

6. Seth Godin, Seth Godin’s Blog

“Social media isn’t about you, it’s about them.”

7. John Jatsch, Duct Tape Marketing

“I guess I would say that it’s to find ways to fuse social media tools with offline engagement. When you meet someone at a Chamber event, connect with them on LinkedIn (LinkedIn) or Facebook (Facebook) to make it more natural to communicate with them until it’s time to propose some business. Bring your client’s social media profile information into your CRM system to help your sales folks learn more about your client’s day to day life for the next sale contact cycle.”

8. Valeria Maltoni, Conversation Agent

“My B2B advice is “learn to be human again.” Many marketers in B2B companies tend to forget that each customer they’d like to attract and retain is a person. From using jargon in marketing literature, to creating blogs that are mere places to republish press releases — then tweeted as links — a B2B marketer can learn to be more spontaneous and make deeper/better connections with customers.”

9 Jessica Faye Carter, Technicultr

“B2B companies benefit most from social media when they don’t try to emulate the engagement strategies of their B2C counterparts. Certainly they should engage clients using social media, but the degree and style of engagement will likely differ, depending on the products or services offered by the company. B2B companies can also leverage the improvements in company-client interactions brought about by social media, including those related to user experience, real-time client service discussions, and the integration of social media with existing business practices to create new product or service offerings.”

10. Todd Defren, PR Squared

“Have a goal: When it comes to corporate engagement in Social Media (social media), what doesn’t have a tangible goal will often fall apart; it is too easily axed (and the client might ask his PR team: “what did we get from spending all that time on Twitter?”). Often, they want Social Media engagement to bring in leads — and that isn’t happening as reliably for B2B.

Get buy-in and put the right people in place: just because the CEO or CTO has a great name in their industry doesn’t mean they are the right person to blog or tweet. People that WANT to do it and have something to say are more likely to be successful.

Move beyond broadcasting: Even clients that are actively doing several projects (Twitter, blog, Facebook page) seem to get a “B” on their efforts because engagement is still lacking. Marketing folks seem intent on broadcasting mode. B2B marketers in Social Media need to be doing more “@’s and RT’s” and industry dialogue vs. “look at us!”

Create and distribute a set of Social Media Guidelines to employees: Even if the company hasn’t begun engaging with social networks from a corporate perspective, that doesn’t mean that the employees might not, and you want them doing so in a transparent and positive spirit.”

11. Brian Solis, BrianSolis.com

“Many people may not realize this, but B2B is the leading source of social media lessons for me. Whether it’s horizontal, vertical, mainstream, or long tail, social media begins with not only listening, but research and analysis. Every experience in B2B is revealing and educational when research serves as the catalyst for strategy, media programming, engagement, and metrics.

Recently, I was asked to help a major B2B company make the case to engage on Twitter. I worked with the team to compile a list of keywords related to the brand, market, competitors, and partners. After combing through a 30 day window of conversations tied to these keywords, I could only attribute a total of 80′ish conversations for the entire month, including all terms. I presented the findings to the team along with the associated themes that each individual advocated. The response was surprising. According to the company, my research was flawed. They just couldn’t believe that only 80 conversations related to their industry transpired on Twitter in one month. Thus, I was presented with an expanded list of keywords and my research continued. After further investigation, the number jumped to 117. This time however, I decided to search other networks on my own. Obviously, these keywords were too important to not represent any online dialogue whatsoever. Low and behold, forums and discussion boards were alive and active, representing tens of thousands of active questions, answers, and conversations within the same timeframe.

Lesson learned. Go to where people are interacting now. Creating and investing in a presence where a minority of your community shares, discovers, and creates content is buying futures in a market where the present is far more lucrative.”

12. Mitch Joel, Twist Image

“True story: the CEO of a major organization and I are having breakfast and he’s asking me about the implications of Social Media from a B2B perspective. As I go through how important those natural voices and conversations are [to] the decision makers, he starts laughing and cuts me off. Here’s why: about a month prior to our meeting, his CTO came to him with a fairly advanced technical upgrade that needed to take place along with the pricing and deliverables. Without having much knowledge of the potential new supplier, the CEO found himself doing some online searches for what others have thought. Beyond the jargony-corporate website, the CEO was much more taken by the Podcasts, YouTube (YouTube) testimonials, Blog (blog) posts and Twitter chatter about the product.

Without knowing realizing it, the CEO was entirely reliant on Social Media for their final decision. While it’s easy to think that this is an isolated incident, do [your] own online search for “social media b2b” and you’ll quickly realize that Social Media is probably easier to link to true ROI in the B2B space than it is for B2C.”

13. Tara Hunt, HorsePigCow

“It’s less about the tools and more about the attitude emerging from the social web. Learn to cooperate with your competitors and collaborate with others in your industry towards better customer experiences. For instance, take a page from the social networking notebook and see that projects like OpenSocial (Google (Google)), Facebook Connect (Facebook) and Twitter’s extensive APIs are what makes them powerful players in the space. By allowing their users to move their data around to other networks (or keep it on multiple networks), they end up getting more activity. I’ve been advocating for a passport system where we aren’t locked into loyalty programs with a singular brand. Win with putting the customers needs first.”

We’ve raided our own toolkits to come up with some of the best tools and services for B2B marketers that want to get the most out of social media.

1. Salesforce.com

The mac daddy of web-based CRM products hasn’t been afraid to embrace social media. In the last six months, Salesforce.com has introduced a number of different solutions via its Service Cloud 2 platform for helping integrate social media with the Salesforce.com ecosystem.

One of the best applications for B2B marketers who use Salesforce.com is Salesforce for Twitter. Don’t confuse this with Chatter, Salesforce.com’s Facebook for Business, Salesforce for Twitter will let you pull in and monitor Twitter feeds and accounts within the Salesforce.com CRM.

What makes this fantastic is that you can assign cases or leads based on a tweet directly in the CRM that can then be followed up on and monitored along with the other aspects of your work flow. What makes social media more difficult for B2B marketers isn’t that the tools can’t translate from B2C to B2B — they can — it’s that many times those tools don’t integrate well with existing platforms and solutions that a B2B business might have in place.

2. HootSuite

HootSuite is a great tool not only for managing multiple Twitter accounts (or allowing multiple users access to an account), but also for managing multiple social networks. In November, HootSuite introduced support for LinkedIn and Facebook. HootSuite also now supports WordPress blogs, which works great if you want to have a way to schedule posts and messages to multiple networks. HootSuite also supports alerts and stats tracking. HootSuite is free.

3. CoTweet

Billing itself as a Twitter CRM tool, CoTweet has been used by a number of big brands, including Ford and JetBlue, and it offers an easy way to manage multiple accounts and also allow multiple users to access a single account. CoTweet also lets you monitor keywords and trends and assign updates to colleagues for follow-up, which can be great for lead-generation. CoTweet was acquired by ExactTarget last month. While the service is available for free, an enterprise option is available for large brands or organizations, starting at a pricey $1,500 a month.

4. SocialTALK

SocialTALK from Syncapse is a social media workflow tool that is designed to help companies control their presence on different platforms and monitor feedback. We covered SocialTALK when it launched in February and it remains one of a handful of services really aimed at helping businesses manage multiple social media accounts from a single dashboard. You can create and schedule video and photo posts for Facebook, have multiple user-access levels, access multiple pages from the same dashboard and monitor incoming traffic and analytical information.

5. Radian6

Social media is one of the best tools that B2B marketers can use for lead generation. By monitoring Twitter, forums and online communities, you can seek out not only what people are saying about your client, but you can find people in need of a solution that your client or company can offer.

Radian6 is a really comprehensive monitoring tool that can scan blogs, comments, public Facebook Pages, Twitter and other sources that you feed it. You can then get real-time updates pushed to your dashboard so that you can follow-up or reach out to a potential customer. Radian6 can integrate with Salesforce.com, meaning you can create new contacts or leads in Salesforce directly from the Radian6 dashboard.

6. Spredfast

Spredfast is a tool that can monitor, manage and measure various social media solutions. You can use it to manage multiple accounts or to schedule content. Spredfast can also be used to do real-time monitoring of persistent keyword searches in search engines, RSS feeds and Twitter and Facebook streams. It can also index relevant and competitive sites. Spredfast also offers metric reporting and tracking so that you can better understand what methods are working best and what methods might need some tweaking. Spredfast starts at $50 a month.

7. Social Radar

Social Radar is another tool that can do a real deep dive of social monitoring and analysis. The SR Alerts package can monitor conversation fluctuations, important topics from designated influencers and sentiment analysis.

The Social Radar tool isn’t cheap (SR Alerts starts at $200 a month), but for businesses that want to monitor a lot of ground, it’s worth investigating.

8. truPULSE

truPULSE from Visible Technologies can monitor and listen to conversations surrounding certain topics or keywords from Twitter, Facebook, RSS feeds, video sites and blogs. What’s nice about truPULSE is marketers can track the tone and perceptions of a brand amongst your brand, your product or competitors.

truPULSE can also highlight crisis and customer service issues — which is an area that B2B marketers can excel at by either fixing the situation before it gets out of hand, or use as a way to get a lead or pitch their own service or product.

9. Viralheat

Viralheat is a social media monitoring and analytics service. It can monitor Twitter, Google Buzz, Facebook Fan Pages, the real-time web and even viral video statistics. One area in which Viralheat differs from some other options is that it can both restrict profiles by location (which can be huge if your B2B is local or is trying to target a certain sector or location) and it has its own API. Having its API means that you can make Viralheat extensible and potentially integrate it into other existing business solutions.

10. Sentiment Metrics

Sentiment analysis tools can be really helpful for B2B marketers because without context, just having a number of Twitter mentions surrounding a certain topic or brand is pretty meaningless. Sentiment Metrics is a tool aimed at larger businesses and the enterprise but it can be useful for B2B marketers because it can monitor not only sites like Twitter, but also online forums and blogs.

While people might inquire about products or services on Twitter or Facebook, the in-depth conversations often take place in forums or on blogs. Monitoring these areas for not only mentions but sentiment analysis can be pretty powerful.
Your Picks

B2B marketers, we want to hear from you! Let us know what tools and services you use with social media in the comments!

Business-to-business (B2B) social media is a different animal. B2B and enterprise companies aren’t trying to convert millions of individual consumers into customers — they’re trying to convince a smaller group of companies with bigger budgets to buy their products or services.

Social media’s power to spread a message across the web isn’t as relevant.

That doesn’t mean social media doesn’t have a place in the B2B world, though. On the contrary, a lot of these companies have found social media to be extremely useful in generating leads, performing market research and establishing themselves as thought leaders.

We’ve already written about ways to use social media for the enterprise, but now we want to explore a different topic: how B2B companies will use social media in the future. To do that though, we need to explore the current state of social media in the enterprise. What B2B Marketers Use Social Media For While you might assume that B2B companies are less engaged in social media than their B2C counterparts, you’d actually be wrong. In a study of social media use conducted by Business.com last year, it was revealed that North American B2B companies are more likely to be using social media tools when compared to B2C companies.

Here are some examples:

* 81% of B2B companies were likely to maintain company-related profiles on social networks, compared to 67% of B2C companies.

* That gap stayed true for a wide range of social media activities; 75% of B2B companies participated in Twitter (compared to 49% for B2C), 74% hosted a blog (compared to 55% for B2C), and 66% engaged in online discussions (compared to 43% of B2C companies).

* B2C and B2B companies were just as likely to be monitoring user reviews (B2B: 49%, B2C: 51%) and manage a community dedicated to customers (B2B: 49%, B2C: 51%).

* One of the only areas where B2C was more active than B2B in social media was advertising on social networks (B2B: 42%, B2C: 54%).

* In terms of the tools B2B companies use, 77% used Facebook (compared to 83% for B2C) and 73% utilized Twitter (compared to a shockingly smaller 45% for B2C companies).

Why are so many B2B marketers using social media, though? According to a study analyzed by eMarketer, the majority of B2B marketers (60%) said they use social media to provide “thought leadership” for their brand. Another 49% said they used social networks to generate leads, 46% for customer feedback, 35% for advertising and 29% for market research. The inescapable conclusion is that the use of social media in a B2B setting is more popular than most people would expect. Businesses are mostly using it to develop thought leadership and customer service. Because of that, we’re not surprised to find that Twitter is often their tool of choice.

Still, as social media strategist of the PayPal X Platform Sudha Jamthe told me in an interview, thought leadership and customer service are “low-hanging fruit” for B2B marketers. Social media is capable of so much more.

What Tools Will B2B Marketers Use?

B2B social media marketing is still very much in its infancy. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube (YouTube) and most of the social tools we use today are just a few years old. Companies are just starting to really discover the power of social and what it can do for a company’s bottom line.

In other words, there’s a lot of room for growth. So what’s next for B2B social media marketing? To find out, I consulted some of the best minds in the B2B social marketing space.

Autumn Truong, manager of social media and corporate communications at Cisco, says that she sees social as one of the key channels to reaching influencers and building awareness about B2B initiatives. She specifically pointed to the social media efforts of Cisco’s executives (a big example: CTO Padmasree Warrior, who has nearly 1.4 million followers).

Really though, it boils down to one thing Truong said during our interview: “How can we mobilize a captivated audience to do something on our behalf?” Truong believes the future of B2B social media marketing will focus on three key areas: video, mobile and engagement. She seemed especially excited by video’s potential to tell a story and spur new engagement. We wouldn’t expect anything less from her, though; Cisco is the owner of the Flip camcorder, after all.

PayPal’s Sudha Jamthe believes we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg when it comes to B2B social media. While social media may be used for thought leadership and customer service today, she thinks its real power is in real-time feedback.

PayPal is utilized by millions of consumers worldwide, but it also has countless merchants as customers and developers and small businesses as partners, all of which it wants to reach via social media. Sudha believes that a lot of B2B marketers are using it simply as a broadcast platform, when its real value is in making customers your partner.

Her example was the PayPal Developer platform. She says that PayPal simply can’t know all of the potential APIs and feature requests its developer community wants and needs in order for them to build applications and products on its platform. The company has two primary options for getting feedback from them: market research or social media. The problem with market research though is its drastically high costs.

Social media, on the other hand, can be a direct channel for customers to express what they really want. PayPal has used its social media accounts to communicate with developers, which has resulted in innovations such as PayPal Apps and its Micropayments for Digital Goods product.

Jamthe believes that the future of B2B social media marketing is in companies’ ability to use social feedback to adapt their products based off criticism and comments. She also stresses though that social is going to become more integrated in not only B2B marketing campaigns, but in actual products. This will provide an even more direct way to solicit feedback and innovate based off of that.

“In B2C, there are a lot of tools that measure the conversation,” she said. “How many conversations, what was the reach of my campaign? It doesn’t mean anything in a B2B setting. Talking to vendors, so what? It should be different for B2B, and it needs to be about real ROI. It translates to cost saving.”

The ROI of B2B social media depends not only on tracking engagement, but on figuring out where it saves a company money. Jamthe argues that social media’s cost savings come in its ability to get market feedback and even new product ideas at a fraction of the cost.

Three Takeaways

There’s a lot to be excited about if you’re a B2B social media marketer, because we’re just starting to realize how powerful social media can really be for enterprise organizations. While today it may be about the social tools we use to spread our message, tomorrow it will be about the platforms utilized to engage in constructive and effective conversations.

With that said, here are my three key points to remember about the future of social media for B2B companies:

* B2B social media will be less about marketing and more about thought leadership and crowdsourced feedback.
* Twitter and Facebook may be huge now, but video and mobile are the new frontiers.
* The true ROI of social media in B2B doesn’t come from broadcasting your message, but the engagement companies get in return.

How do you think B2B social media will evolve? What tools will we be using? Where is the true ROI in social media? It’s your turn to chime in.

Facebook advertising, however, is still relatively new, and advertisers are only beginning to experiment with Facebook ads. Even digital marketing experts, familiar with advanced targeting techniques in paid search and display advertising, are just now figuring out how to effectively run advertising programs on Facebook.

To get your ads noticed by Facebook users, you’ll need to tailor your ads to work within the Facebook experience. Facebook users spend an inordinate amount of time –- more than any other website — on the social network. They interact with friends, share information and connect with their favorite causes; however, despite all their actions, people aren’t searching for products or services. That’s why carefully selecting images, modifying calls-to-action and subtly changing messaging to reach Facebook users is important for success in this channel.

Here are a few insider tricks you can use to take your Facebook targeting and ad performance to the next level.

1. Remember the User Experience

Many marketers dive right into Facebook ads expecting to drive traffic from Facebook directly to their site, just as in paid search. While this may work for some, tailoring the experience to Facebook users typically delivers better results. Using Custom Pages or Applications on Facebook to capture traffic allows you to keep users within Facebook for a consistent browsing experience, resulting in lower bounce rates. Custom Pages, as part of your Facebook Page, make it easy for consumers to “Like” your product or brand. For every user who Likes your page, you can remarket to them over time with status updates about deals or upcoming events.

Facebook Apps, on the other hand, provide the marketer with more control over the user experience, as well as the ability to gather detailed demographic data from user profiles. If converting traffic outside of Facebook is a requirement for you, consider tailoring your landing pages to social users. This could include writing different ad copy, the inclusion of Like and sharing buttons on your site and presenting user-generated content such as videos or reviews, as opposed to product information, for Facebook users arriving at your landing page.

2. Use Root Analysis to Expand Targeting

Facebook users can list any terms they want to define their likes and interests, so in order to target a full audience of potential customers, you may have to do some investigating for those terms and phrases that go beyond your general keyword search. For example, using the targeting parameter “camping,” your ad will not reach users who have listed “camping in the mountains” or “tent camping” on their profile.

Root analysis is a useful way to discover people’s likes and interests on Facebook to expand your audience and drive more conversions. Simply start with a root word and expand your targeting to include related interests. You can do this by typing the root word into Facebook’s “Likes & Interests” targeting settings and then typing a single letter to find related terms. Using the camping example, entering “camping i” results in a list that includes “camping in California” and “I love camping.” Adding these unique terms to your targeting criteria expands your audience, helping to discover additional valuable consumers and improve ROI.

3. Segment Your Ads

With 500 million users on Facebook, there are probably plenty of consumers that you want to reach with your ads. However, not all Facebook users are created equal. Breaking out your audiences to understand the value of each segment, and then adjusting your bids accordingly, will help you optimize your Facebook budget.

Dividing audiences by age, location, and gender should help you find the segments most likely to convert, making each segment more valuable to you. As you measure the performance variance between your segmented advertisements, you can adjust your bids to improve the overall ROI for your Facebook ad campaigns.

4. Prevent Ad Blindness

People use Facebook to interact with friends, share their photos and play games, not to look for products and services. Your ads need to grab their attention. Facebook users are inundated with content and typically scan images and text quickly, but there are tricks to modify creative to minimize ad blindness and increase click-through rates. The most successful ads include colorful, engaging images — and of course, a compelling and relevant offer.

Adding borders to your photos in colors like orange or yellow, which contrast with the blue and white Facebook interface, is a simple way to pull the user’s eyes in your ad’s direction.

Make sure to test early and often here, as the results will surprise you. The most-clicked ads are not necessarily the most aesthetically pleasing; they are often the ones that stand out on the page. Also, because ads can be served to the same users multiple times, it doesn’t take long for users to completely tune out repeat ads, so you have to keep your approach creative and fresh. Rotating images and headline copy as performance drops over time can help boost click-through rates.

Conclusion

By using the tips above to target and optimize your advertisements, you should have a head start in Facebook marketing. More importantly, by building competencies in this new channel, you can build sustainable advantage over the competition through superior targeting and optimization.

Taking a wait-and-see approach may be the safe route, but now is the time to begin. The Facebook advertiser base is still relatively small in comparison to the Facebook audience. As a result, costs-per-click rates remain lower than paid search and other channels. As advertisers continue to shift dollars to Facebook, costs will rise, and advertisers that have managed to build a fan base early will be better positioned to reap dividends from their investment.

What tips can you offer? What has worked with your own advertising experience on Facebook? Do you also zone out uninspired ads? Let us know in the comments below.

Each section of AIDA represents a section of your sales and marketing process and can help you set your expectations, decide what to monitor, and visualize the relationships between each part. Understanding the flow of the tools and tactics will also help you get your measurements and analytics in line with your goals.

Here’s a closer look at the breakdown of this marketing funnel, some tips on how to apply it to your social media strategy, and a look at how the model is evolving in the social media age.

Awareness

Awareness is social media’s bread and butter. Twitter (Twitter), LinkedIn (LinkedIn), Facebook (Facebook), YouTube (YouTube) and other networks are built for this. You can’t easily display your inventory via Twitter, set up a shopping cart on LinkedIn, or fill orders through YouTube. These networks are not going to be your point of sale. Instead, they are your communication and outreach tools — the spokes that lead back to your hub (sales page, blog, site, etc.) where you will be making your conversions.

Awareness can take many forms, but its main goal is getting people to know you exist and that you can solve a problem they might have. At this level, conversations, interaction and content are king. A few metrics you might want to measure around your brand are conversation frequency, increased mentions and sentiment.

Interest

Now that you have their attention, you need to get customers interested in your product. You can bolster interest with offers and compelling reasons why you’re better than the competition, and how you can solve customers’ problems. Features and benefits weigh heavily in this level, and social media can help you kick their interest into high gear.

If you’re running a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign and have some targeted landing pages set up for your products or services, those are what you want to link to — not your homepage. Even if you’re not utilizing paid ads, the same strategy of linking to targeted pages through social media is applicable. A few of the metrics you will want to look at here are CTR (click through rate), retweets (of deals and links), and conversations about specific products.

Desire

Social media can help bolster desire through communication and engagement, but to fully satisfy someone’s desire to buy, you need to have a site that is streamlined and optimized. Recently, I tried using a popular car rental site to make a reservation, but it was so difficult to navigate that I gave up, despite having a great discount code. The unmanageable user interface killed my desire in two minutes flat, and my business went straight to the competition. Your site makes a huge impression, and people will judge your company by it.

Take the time to go through your site and optimize the presentation and the shopping cart experience. Testimonials gathered from linkable social profiles are a great asset.

Take the customer from interest to desire with a clean, easy to navigate, info rich, and functional site. Some of the metrics that matter at this level are bounce rate, time on site, pages viewed and incoming links.

Action

Now that your customers are itching to buy your product, and their money is burning a hole in their PayPal pocket, you need to seal the deal. At this point, your site is your number one tool, and while social media can influence the action through the previous levels, it’s not going to have the same influence here. You need to make it easy and obvious for your customer to complete your desired action (purchase, sign up, lead form, etc.).

The action is also where you can finally calculate some of your end metrics, like conversion rate and ROI. This is where you can see how everything is performing and the final impact your work is having. Often, these are the metrics that your boss (and your boss’s boss) are looking for.

New Additions to the Marketing Funnel

Over the years, the traditional AIDA has evolved and added two extra levels. These levels represent not only a shift in the technology and methods that are used to market, but the people behind it.

Loyalty

How are you getting your customers to buy from you again? One very simple way to stave off any buyer’s remorse is to follow up via the same social media you used to get customers in the first place. If you know they purchased via a link on Facebook, send them a Facebook message saying “thanks,” and provide them with your customer service contact info.

Perform customer service on Twitter. Monitor the online conversations around people who are already using your product and see if they have any questions or problems that you can resolve quickly. You can build social loyalty programs and use the communities you create to keep customers coming back. This is where CRM (Customer Relationship Management) can play a leading role, and many social CRM solutions are emerging to fill that need. A few things you might want to monitor here are repeat buyers, the use of loyalty codes, sentiment of mentions post-purchase and sentiment of specific products.

Advocacy

Advocacy is the dream of any marketer. It’s the “sweet spot,” where your customers do your marketing for you. It’s when customers love your products, brand, services and people so much that they can’t help but talk about you. This is why you want to make it easy for people to share your brand. Any hindrance to this — be it a bad website interface or an anti-social company ethic — will really discourage this extremely valuable source of traffic and interest.

If it’s an option, I’m far more inclined to click on a “Tweet This” or “Like” button than I am to take the link, shorten it in bit.ly, and post it to my various social networks. Remove any barriers to advocacy and then both encourage and reward it. Some metrics to look at here are mentions, conversations and referrals.

The problem with AIDA

As you can see, the levels of our old friend AIDA can get a bit muddy, especially when it comes to the areas of awareness and interest. This has given birth to dozens, probably even hundreds, of fresh interpretations. The main thing to remember is how the funnels flow and to set your measurement and expectations accordingly.

You also don’t need to live and die by this funnel. People can easily skip a level or go through multiple levels at r the Boxee (Boxee) platform, with a big focus on video.

We think video recommendation services show a lot of promise and by partnering with big content providers like Hulu, StumbleUpon is doing a lot to further its development.

Constrainted by Old Technologies

Unfortunately, email marketing is still constrained by the older HTML technology being used in email readers such as Thunderbird and Outlook. This technology also constrains ISP email software such as Yahoo Mail, Gmail and Windows Live Mail (formerly Hotmail) and especially corporate solutions like Lotus Notes. So, while it is possible to attach files to emails as embedded media, video is not functional in this way (read below). Until the technology in email clients is brought up-to-date with the latest W3C (HTML 5) standards, sending video directly in an email isn’t easily possible.

Linking To Video

However, there is a way to link to videos from remote sites that will give you something close to the feel of sending the video in the email message. Of course, opening a link to a video will require an active Internet connection. For high definition videos, the recipient will require a higher bandwidth connection like DSL or Cable.

Basically, the only real way to accomplish linking of video in email is to create an image of the video that you want to show and make the image a link to your YouTube video page. When the user clicks the still image in your email, it will take the user directly to the video on YouTube.

You would think using the embed code, which YouTube supplies, would work. It doesn’t. The reason is that the email clients are standalone programs and have no direct linkage to a browser or its plugins (such as Flash). The only exception to this is Mozilla’s Seamonkey. However, Thunderbird and Outlook do not have access to Flash (required by YouTube). Therefore, the embed code that YouTube supplies will not show when viewing the email in an email client. The option that works is to create an image (jpeg or gif) and host it with your ESP. Then, use that image as a link that takes the reader directly to the YouTube video page.

You will need to do this for each video that you wish to place in your email marketing message.

Embed Codes and Web Pages

Note, most email service providers offer your email hosted as a web page. This allows the user to click a link in the email to ’see’ something that might be missing in the email itself. On such a hosted page and because a browser is involved, the user can see embedded Flash objects. Therefore, a hosted page version of the email can have embedded versions of the YouTube videos. On these pages, the embedded version will play as soon as the users click the video. No need to go directly to YouTube. This solution requires you to have a hosted version of your email and it requires your recipients to read the email in a web browser by clicking on a link in the email.

In this way, you could use the hosted email page to create a second version with embedded YouTube videos rather than simple placeholders (like in the email itself). Or, you could create a page on your Blog and have the hosted version of the email lead directly to your blog that has the embedded videos on the blog page.

Videos Embedded Directly In Emails

Unfortunately, this is not possible.  The closest you can get is by using an animated GIF.  You could use an animated GIF in the above linking example as your placeholder to the video. But, remember that animated GIF files have no sound and should remain as small as possible. The longer the animation, the bigger the GIF becomes and the longer it will take to download this image when the user opens the email. So, you will want to keep this in mind if you want to create animated GIFs as placeholders for YouTube videos. Also, it takes a little time to create animated GIFs. Still images are far easier to create.

As far as directly embedded videos within email, this not possible. Since neither Flash nor HTML 5 is available in email clients, embedding videos is out of the question. But, even with the old technology in email clients, you can still use old-school methods (i.e., image links).

Attachments Not Recommended

Yes, while you can attach flash files to an email message as an attachment, this is not recommended. Flash files can be very large and, at the same time, are not supported directly in the email client or most operating systems. Therefore, the user will have to save the file somewhere onto their computer’s hard drive and attempt to open the file. Since most operating systems don’t support running .FLV (flash video) files, the user will need to have a program installed that will let them open this type of file (such as VLC media player). Note that attaching .FLV files doesn’t solve the embedding problem as the user must still save the file and then open it outside of the mail client.

Again, the most compatible way to use video within email marketing is to create an image placeholder and make that image link to your YouTube video page. Using this technique will allow nearly all of your recipients to view your videos without major issues and give you the look in the email that you need.

The Logic of A/B Testing
A/B split testing is a testing method you can use in order to narrow down your choices for your email marketing messages. You have a lot of options in creating your message – from language options to layout options, and everything in between. The more you create a connection between your target market’s needs and your email messages, the more likely they’ll be to open your messages and take action. You can make educated guesses about your market, but you really don’t know until you test.

A/B split testing puts two different versions of a message up against one another. Half of your email list will receive one version of the email (version A) and the other half will receive the other version (version B).

Get the Most out of Testing
It’s not enough to create two versions of your message. You also need to be able to analyze the results correctly. It’s only through clear analysis that you’ll be able to gather the results and determine what works best for your list. Here are a few ways that you can be sure that testing works best for you.

1. Don’t test too many changes at once.

If you try to test two completely different versions of email messages against one another, you won’t be sure what is making the biggest difference for your audience. Test one element against another, one at a time, to get a better sense of what is working for your market.

2. Don’t base your actions on just one test.

The results of one test aren’t enough to give you conclusive proof. For example, do at least three tests between a question subject line and a sentence subject line before you decide that questions work better for your list. There can always be flukes, so base your results off of more than one test.

3. Give your test enough time to complete.

Along similar lines as the last tip, you need to be sure that your test has enough time to work before you declare a winner. If you send out an email at 10 am, don’t declare a winner at noon. Give everyone on your list enough time to either open it or ignore it. Not everyone checks their mail consistently throughout the day.

4. Make testing a regular part of your email marketing usage.

You’ll get a lot more out of the process if you make testing a part of your email marketing. Each message is a new opportunity to test something new. The more you test, the more you’ll get used to the process and the more you’ll get out of it.

Find a stable niche. While transient trends are good for a quick buck—they’re just that: Transient. They’re fads. So don’t overload your inventory with campaigns that, while scorching hot presently, could cool off in seconds and turn into a dud. Look for enduring angles. Bet on clear skies, maybe a little rain, but rarely on rainbows.

Your affiliates are smart people. They can sense insincerity. Usually that comes with the need to speed through or completely forgo formalities. So the next time you call them up to pitch a campaign, first ask them, “How are you?” and you might be surprised at how much they’ll warm up to you after those three words. These people may very well end up being those who come through in a pinch, when you need to fill some extra cap. Being chatty will also help you to weed out the odd fraudster.

Patience is a virtue. If you’re still figuring things out (and it’s a rapidly-evolving industry, so who among us isn’t?), you can’t force the process to work any faster than it already is. It’s a lot like gardening: After you plant the seeds and water them, you can’t risk overwatering them—they won’t grow. Likewise, a high frequency of emails to your affiliates won’t necessarily translate to higher commissions. The only thing you can do is learn to back off when it’s clear your affiliate’s ready to go deep alone. Then, later, you can return to see how they fared.

Stop selling for a second. So, this one is a catch-22. An affiliate marketer is a de facto salesperson. But sometimes the most successful exchanges won’t involve pushing new campaigns, but rather checking up on the ones your affiliate already has running. This goes hand in hand with the previous point. Slowing down, but checking in means that you’re respecting the time and labor your affiliate has put into creating his email drop or landing page.

Positive reinforcement always wins. Over the past few years, we’ve all become a little too jaded. Blame it on the recession if you want. But nothing encourages an affiliate to keep doing what they’ve been doing best than an AM just checking in to say, “Way to go!”—without the motive of trying to push more campaigns. Ideally, AMs and affiliates would be able to high-five each other after every successful commission, but until that’s made possible, a congratulatory email goes a long, long way.

In the private phase, many users kept saying that Wave would take off once it went public. The collaboration features were amazing, but the lack of users was the limiting factor. Once Wave opened up, many in this small group that actually knew what it was for did end up using it on the regular. Other users were still expecting a Facebook/Twitter/Email killer and were sorely disappointed. Rather than realizing they had got it wrong, they blamed Wave for not delivering. After that, the advanced real-time collaboration system pretty much became a running joke.

Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects. — Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Operations & Google Fellow

There are a few key take-aways here, though. Many will tout the failure of Wave as a social media powerhouse, email killer or what have you, but that’s not the whole story. I’m sure Google would have loved for Wave to attract a bunch of users and go mainstream, but it’s simple existence did push developers to try for more.

The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began.

Was this simply another failed project by Google, or was it an experiment to push the envelope? I think because of Wave’s existence, we saw much more advanced web applications than we otherwise would have because Google showed what was possible using Wave. This is the same situation we saw with Google Chrome. Did Google really want to take over the browser market, or were they just looking to light a fire under the browser market?

Wave has taught us a lot, and we are proud of the team for the ways in which they have pushed the boundaries of computer science. We are excited about what they will develop next as we continue to create innovations with the potential to advance technology and the wider web.

If you’ve been a hardcore Wave user, Google plans to make it simple for you to liberate your data. The site should be available through the end of the year, so you have more than enough time to do so.

Are you sad to see Wave go?

It’s biased: If you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. In other words, the SEO consultant believes that natural search is the key to your growth, while the social media guru says Facebook is the goose that lays the golden eggs.

It’s unprioritized: It’s easy to be overwhelmed by a mega-list of recommendations. I’m a fan of top 10 (or top whatever) lists, but they do have a tendency to produce unprioritzed advice that can easily swamp the small business owner.

With plethora of marketing options (e.g. email, SEO, PPC, social media)  competing for your attention, how do you decide how to allocate resources? Here’s some guiding principles: (that are prioritized, of course)

Strategy before Tactics: You need to know where you’re going before you choose the vehicle to get there. Some marketing vehicles are better than others depending on what you’re doing, and who you’re trying to reach. If you’re shooting for a 55+ audience, twitter probably isn’t the best place to start. If a consultant says you should be doing such and such, first stop to consider whether their recommendations gel with your strategy.

Leverage what’s already working: Is 50% of your business coming from natural search? There’s a good chance there’s still some low-hanging fruit ripe for the picking. A 10% improvement on your top performing marketing tactic is more effective than a 50% improvement on your worst performing one. Study and live by the 80/20 rule.

Budget for the future: While the point above may imply only sticking with what’s safe, such would be a short-sighted plan. It’s easy to get too comfortable with what you already know, and ignore what’s up and coming. It’s the classic innovator’s dilemma: why seek something new and improved when what you already have is working fine? Because you never know how long it’s going to work. Plan for obsolescence.

Imitate the Innovators: If the competition is already engaging in a certain tactic, there’s a good chance you could be missing the boat. You don’t always have to be the first in order to be the best. Stay on top of what your competitors are doing.

Fail Quickly, Fail Inexpensively: There’s no harm in trying something new that doesn’t work, just cut your losses early. Don’t invest too heavily, despite what any of your peers say, until you see promising results.

Demand Tangible Results: While the benefit of every marketing activity is not as easily quantified, you should be seeing results in some way. Don’t accept “branding” as an excuse for poorly performing banner ads, or “higher link-popularity” for ineffective search engine optimization. Insist on bottom line results.

The good news for internet business owners is there’s 1,000 things they can be doing right now to improve their business, the bad news is that not all 1,000 are equally important. Choose wisely, because the order in which you execute is critical for success.

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Two of the features that will be coming out shortly are “enhancing results with Facebook Likes” and “Facebook Profile search”. For the former, the way Bing sees it users are more likely to trust the opinions of their friends, family and colleagues than just random reviewers out there in the interweb. With the new feature, when you perform certain queries, results will appear at the top of the page that tell you which of your friends “liked” that particular response. The hope there is that since you are receiving a more “personal” result, you will return to Bing for your search needs.

During the press event it was stated that 4% of all search queries are “related to finding people”. With the second feature, Bing and Facebook are making it easier for users to find exactly who they are looking for. With the inclusion of your current social graph, the intended result is that when you search for someone you will find the correct person’s Facebook profile by the utilization of shared networks and friends. Also with the new Facebook Profile Results you have the option to view mutual friends, add the person as a friend or message them – all without having to leave the results page.

Users, obviously, have the option to NOT participate in the enhanced Bing results and “disable” it or learn more about it before proceeding. In addition to that privacy measure, users will only see information of people already in their network, information that is already public, and everything you search for will remain private. The goal with all of this is to bring some of Facebook’s hundreds of millions of users over to Bing and for Facebook users to become more involved in their profiles so that search results will become more personalized over time.

What do you think of all these new enhancements and of the Bing-Facebook partnership in general? Do you agree with the continued socialization of search? Will the integration help push Bing to the search engine forefront?

Unfortunately, in some niches or with some very narrowly-targeted searches, the amount of new content being posted may be one or two items per week, which wouldn’t exactly fill the link builder’s schedule. It’s important to start your social media link building with a thorough review of the amassed social content that already exists. So here are a few tips to find bloggers faster with highly-targeted, relevant searches.

1. Get Your Search Phrases Right

Think about your ultimate audience and the language that bloggers writing for that audience will tend to use. Let’s say you’re building links to an apartment hunting site for a linkable asset of interest to landlords. You would create a set of phrases that are likely to appear in posts speaking to landlords.

For example, bloggers writing for a landlord audience would tend to use phrases such as “my tenants,” “your tenants,” or “resident satisfaction.” Because these phrases are so specific and identify with their audience, the chance of these searches returning junk posts is greatly reduced. Of course, with searches this narrow, you’ll find precious little new content published on a daily basis, which leads to the next tip.

2. Start with a Google Blog Search

Now with that super-targeted list of can’t-miss search terms, head over to Google Blog Search and start reviewing the archives. Use Google’s time-based searches to restrict your results to posts within the past month or year. Use this step to build a list of good prospective blogs.

3. Search Google News Archive

OK, this is a little bit of cheating, but a search of newspaper archives is an excellent supplement to a blog search. As the line between blogger and traditional journalist fades, any journalist who has recently written for your audience is likely to also blog on similar topics.

The main challenge is tracking down their blog. One way to do this is to search Google for their name in quotes and remove their newspaper from the search results — e.g., ["david pogue" -site:nytimes.com].

4. Blog Directory + Google Custom Search = A Wee Bit o’ Awesome

Whereas the last two tips focus on finding blogs by searching blog and news archives, this tip involves using blog directories to find a broad list of blogs, then dumping them into a Google Custom Search, and searching it with your narrow keyword searches.

To do this, first browse AllTop, PostRank, and Scribnia to find blogs that are generally-related to your topic. For example, to target bloggers writing for landlords, you should include all blogs categorized as real estate.

It’s OK to include more general blogs at this step because you’ll be narrowing it down later with your searches. Once you have the list, create a Google Custom Search engine by entering each blog in this format:

*.site.com/*

Once your custom search engine is populated, you can start running searches for your target keywords. You’ll discover some high quality, highly relevant content this way, which can help you find relevant influencers.

5. Save Time by Combining Monitoring with Influence Metrics

There are many quality paid social media monitoring tools that will automatically look up a blog’s influence for you, allowing you to sort your results by mozRank, PageRank, etc. But there is also a free method to do this. Create Google Alerts or Social Mention searches, grab the RSS feeds (if there are multiple feeds, you can merge and filter them with FeedRinse), and add them to Google Reader.

But the key tool that will really save you time though is the PostRank Extension for Google Reader, which is available for both Chrome and Firefox. This extension automatically scores the importance of your monitoring results as you view them in Google Reader. You’ll save time each day by filtering out the lower authority blogs and spam, enabling you to spend more time on the higher quality publications.

So there are five tips to help you quickly ramp up link building via social media monitoring. Before you go, here’s one bonus tip: track your blog prospects in a link management tool, a spreadsheet, or a social bookmarking tool.

Ideally, you should record relevant metrics and your own scoring criteria (such as those discussed in “6 Metrics You Need to Manage Link Building”). However, if you don’t have tool or filling out a spreadsheet is too time-consuming, then you can manage your findings with a private social bookmarking tool like Diigo, which enables everyone on your team to track and tag bookmarks (don’t overlook the power of tags — you can capture a lot of metrics with them).

With your new list of relevant bloggers, it’s time to start building relationships, which is a great way to use your time while you wait for your daily social media monitoring searches to start sending new stuff your way.

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