Facebook develops new features and alters its layout and settings (and privacy policies) frequently, and the social giant recently introduced two new additions in its continued mission to take over the word. Facebook’s new Send button allows users to share items with select people rather than everyone in their friend network.

Maybe you found a great bar in which to throw your friend’s surprise party – but you certainly don’t want the birthday girl to find out. With the Send button, you can quickly and easily share and send the URL to specific friends, groups, and email addresses. Cynthia Boris at Marketing Pilgrim has a clever idea about how the Send button could be implemented as a marketing strategy: "As a marketer, I’d take this one step further and u... > Read more

In Google’s continuing efforts to get more social, Google’s Map Maker tool made its introduction into the United States yesterday. Map Maker allows users to add and update maps with their own insights. This can mean a number of different things, such as moving place markers to more appropriate spots, pointing out certain parks and playgrounds, building a more detailed map of a college campus, or even marking the bike lanes in your town.

Essentially, it makes Google Maps into a Wiki.Google’s Lat Long blog notes that since the release of Map Maker, the percentage of the world’s population that has detailed online maps of their neighborhoods has jumped from 15% to 30%. Users have mapped road networks, bike lanes, schools, and even entire cities that were not documented ... > Read more

If anyone asked, I’m sure you could spout off a hundred reasons your company should be involved in social media. But do you still need to get started? Which social network would be the best fit? What are some good first steps? Yes, I believe in social media. How else can you scale talking to people and learning more about them? Building relationships is a two-way street that can benefit you far more than just turning on a faucet of traditional advertising media.

But to have conversations, you need to be where your customers are. B2B? Yes, you have customers, too! Slow and steady wins the race – so setting up one account that you spend an hour on each day is going to be worth more than setting up five accounts and forgetting about them all. But you want to pick the right account... > Read more

This is a guest post by Daniel Cawrey, a freelance writer. In addition to discussing topics such as consumers and their credit cards, he also has a blog about Google Chrome and Chrome OS. Recently, the question and answer site Quora has been getting a lot of exposure in the technology space. If you have not heard of it yet, here's how it works: Users post questions that they cannot find answers to anywhere else on the web, and people answer them.

Unlike sites like Yahoo Answers, however, the site seems to attract those who have a lot of authority on subject matter. Recent examples of this would be Netflix’s CEO Reed Hastings using Quora as a platform to talk to customers of the company’s service. Seems like a really smart idea! Other authorities and companies use Quora to engage users... > Read more

  On Wednesday, Bing and Facebook announced a partnership to make search more social by integrating Facebook "likes" into search results. According to the Facebook blog: When you search for something on Bing or in web results on Facebook (powered by Bing), you'll be able to see your friends' faces next to web pages they've liked.

So, you can lean on friends to figure out the best websites for your search. In theory, if you search for "The Social Network" in Bing, you might see links to reviews or stories about the movie that your Facebook friends have given the thumbs-up. Or if you're searching for a hotel in Santa Monica, you might see that a friend liked a certain hotel's Facebook page. In addition, people in your FB network will be more likely to show up in searches for names. M... > Read more

This is a guest post by Terry Van Horne. Terry is the founder of SeoPros and a 15-year veteran of Web development, currently working out of his consulting and development firm International Website Builders. Terry's interests are primarily the socialization of search and analysis of social Web traffic and applications like Twitter.

Search Meet Social ... Now Play Nice! In the last SEO Training Dojo Friday Chat, I discussed using the Tumblr micro-blogging tools as a content distribution strategy. A few SOSG warriors wanted me to expand on it, so I decided to share this case study here on the WordStream blog. The temporal nature of universal search, which I had kinda stumbled upon before I embarked on this campaign, is partly why this strategy worked as well as it did. This particular campai... > Read more

Foursquare, launched in 2009, is a hot mobile social media platform self-described as a “friend-finder, a social city-guide and a game that rewards you for doing interesting things.”  So far Foursquare has been very successful with Individual users Media outlets, such as The New York Times and The History Channel B2C companies, like Starbucks and McDonald’s But B2B companies have yet to embrace Foursquare.

Many see it as having limited utility and aren’t quite sure how to leverage it, so they don’t see it as a viable business application. So are there ways B2B companies can use Foursquare to reach new customers or promote their brand? Let’s get creative and look at some of the ways B2B companies can follow the lead of other Foursquare adopters to ... > Read more

This is a guest post by Kaila Strong. Kaila is an Internet Marketing Specialist and Social Media Architect at Vertical Measures, a leading online Internet marketing and link building services company based in Phoenix. She’s also an avid tweeter (@cliquekaila), and guest blogger. When one thinks of social networking they don't often associate it with keywords.

Usually, businesses or individuals look to use social networking as a means to brand themselves, connect with friends/customers, sell a product, or share experiences with people they’ve never met IRL (in real life). But what many brands and individuals miss out on is the opportunity to integrate keywords into the public messages they post on Twitter or other social networking sites for the purposes of research as well as search en... > Read more

Rebecca Kelley is a blogger and writer with expertise in SEO and social media. She has held positions at SEOmoz (as a copywriter and SEO consultant) and 10e20 (as Director of Social Media) and is currently involved with a new marketing startup. Follow her on Twitter.     Can you tell me a little about your current role? I recently transitioned from consulting to an in-house marketing position for a startup that’s working on a few different projects.

I can’t disclose a whole lot more until we launch our first endeavor later this spring, but essentially my role is the Director of Marketing and Community Relations. I’m very excited to apply the skill set I’ve built from years of consulting towards these new projects. What factors make a piece of content good linkbait? If it�... > Read more

Keyword research isn't just for search marketing. It's also a highly effective method for social media marketing. Whether your target audience is on YouTube or Twitter, your social media marketing efforts should start with determining which keywords they're using. That way you can match your message to their interests.

With that, I've put together The Experts' Guide to Keyword Research for Social Media. In this comprehensive guide, I give detailed instructions on how (and why) to conduct keyword research for social media, and I break it down with tips and techniques for research keywords on four of the most popular social media platforms: Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and Facebook. Enjoy! READ: The Experts' Guide to Keyword Research for Social Media ... > Read more

Chris Brogan is President of New Marketing Labs, a new media marketing agency, and home of the Inbound Marketing Summit conferences and Inbound Marketing Bootcamp educational events. He works with large and mid-sized companies to improve online business communications like marketing and PR through the use of social software, community platforms, and other emerging web and mobile technologies.

Chris is also co-author of the book Trust Agents, with Julien Smith. For more information, read his blog or follow him on Twitter. What are the first three things someone should do if they have little to no social presence and want to change that? Start by listening. Use social media listening tools (google "Grow Bigger Ears" for starter advice), and start seeing what people are saying. Where are they... > Read more

Tamar Weinberg is a freelance writer, blogger, and social media strategist. Her specialties are blogger outreach, content promotion, community management, and viral strategy. In July 2009, Tamar published “The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web,” which covers the gamut of social media marketing topics in an easy-to-understand format.

Tamar is also the community and marketing manager for Mashable, the top ranked blog on all things social media. She maintains her own blog on social media marketing strategy at Techipedia.com. Follow her on Twitter at http://twitter.com/tamar/. You're active on "many social communities," according to your website. Which one do you find to be the most valuable for business? What about for personal stuff? It really depends on the content.&... > Read more

Regardless of which candidate you supported in the January 19 special election to fill the seat vacated by Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy, there is one thing that should make Internet marketers proud: The first poll to correctly predict the election outcome was a social media poll published on Thursday, January 14.

Traditional polls were showing a close race, and before the Suffolk News 7 Poll, the Blue Mass Group/R2000 poll, the PPP Poll, PMJ/CrossTarget poll, or even the Rasmussen Poll – which all later showed Scott Brown pulling ahead – a social media poll published on our very own blog showed that Scott Brown held a significant edge over Martha Coakley in social media engagement metrics, including: A 10:1 advantage in Web traffic A 10:1 advantage in YouTube video vie... > Read more

After the popularity of last week's social media poll on Scott Brown vs. Martha Coakley (Larry's prediction actually turned out to be right!), we thought it would be fun to see who's winning in the "race" between erstwhile Tonight Show host Jay Leno and his successor Conan O'Brien, who, it's all but certain, will leave NBC after the network proposed giving his show back to Leno and pushing him back to a later, less coveted slot.

A lot of very vocal Conan fans aren't too happy about the change, but ratings are what really matter to NBC, presumably, so there must be a lot of Leno fans out there too, right? We looked at some social media metrics to see who has the most supporters in the online sphere. The results? Well, it's complicated. We couldn't use the exact same methodology that we used... > Read more

Alexander B. Howard is the Government 2.0 Washington, D.C. Correspondent for O'Reilly Media. Previously, he was the associate editor of SearchCompliance.com at TechTarget. His work there focused on how regulations affect IT operations, including issues of data protection, privacy, security and enterprise IT strategy.

Before moving his focus to security and compliance, he was the associate editor of WhatIs.com, an online IT encyclopedia. In that role, he researched and wrote about nearly every aspect of enterprise IT. Alexander graduated from Colby College in 1998 with a bachelor's degree in biology and sociology. In his spare time, he enjoys running with his greyhound, reading, microblogging, fishing, cycling, gardening, cooking and hiking. Learn more at his blog or follow him on Twitter: ... > Read more

In an interview with Michael Arrington last week, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told the world that Facebook is changing to keep up with it—and what the world wants, apparently, is less privacy. Naturally, this caused a big hubbub (at least in the online marketing corner of the world), with many claiming Facebook is acting against its users' best interests, trying to trick them into doing what will increase Facebook revenue—or, rather, into not doing what won't help its revenue.

By not changing the now-default settings, users will (perhaps unintentionally) make their data more public and searchable. Others leapt to Facebook's defense. This is the way society is moving, they said; get over it. Falling in the former camp, Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote a two-part think piece of s... > Read more

Are you new to Twitter and unsure who to follow? Not so new to Twitter but still don't know who to follow? Or maybe you just want to make more connections, find new resources and learn from the best? Twitter lists are a great way to keep up with the search marketing industry. You can follow a whole swath of thought leaders, hand-picked and pre-approved by those in the know, with one quick click.

These 16 Twitter lists were curated by (and include) some of our favorite voices in search and online marketing. (And while you're at it, follow the WordStream list to keep up with our whole team.) Selective Search Marketing Twitter Lists These picky-choosy lists include fewer than 60 people or brands each. Aaron Bradley of SEOSkeptic.com's Internet Marketing Musts. Christine Churchill's Must Read... > Read more

In 2009, the scientific community treated search and social media marketers to what seemed like a never-ending supply of meaty and game-changing research projects, covering everything from information retrieval, to personalized search, to integrated SERP analysis, to studying user behavior on social networks.

I decided to compile and share a list of my favorite Search and Social Media Marketing Research Projects of 2009. Hopefully, these research papers will inform and inspire your marketing efforts going into 2010.By the way, if after reading all the papers on this list you find that you're jonesing for more, here are two great resources for marketers to find research papers on social media marketing and search engine marketing:Google ScholarYahoo ResearchVideo LecturesSo fire up your neu... > Read more

I hope you're not feeling antisocial out there, because today's roundup is all about social search. There were several big announcements this week in the world of social and real-time search. Microsoft and Google both announced agreements with Twitter. Bing's Twitter search is live, but it doesn't seem to work all that well – when I searched for my username, instead of getting a string of my tweets and @replies, I got this: Um, OK, but why? Why doesn't it just search for my username and return all the results? I can see why the "top links shared in tweets about" thing would be interesting/useful, but why is that the default search behavior? What if that's not what you're looking for? For its part, Google soft-launched social search in labs.

Danny Sullivan goes into some de... > Read more

I see a lot written about Twitter tips and how Twitter is great for public relations, like branding, building relationships and trust, awareness, etc. And the fact of the matter is it's true: Twitter is a great platform for external communications efforts. But I’ve also discovered that Twitter is a great tool for internal PR, and can be used to communicate and promote positive, in-house relations.

And given the tough economic climate we’re in, I bet everyone at your office could use a morale boost. Internal Public Relations is Often Ignored Before I talk about using Twitter for internal messaging, I first want to take a quick look at internal PR in general, and at what I see as a lack of attention on internal communications. Internal PR often fails to match the intensity of external ef... > Read more