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As the seasons change, we all like to give our lives an overall. Change decor  update our closets, take care of the yard, and the list just keeps going. Why not take some of that inspiration, and give your LinkedIn a fleshing up for the new season? If you up to the challenge, below are some easy steps to make your LinkedIn profile as clean as drinking water.   Get the perfect Picture for Your Profile Spicy Up Your Description Use Links in Your Profile Fill up ALL fields i...

 Use alerts to notify you whenever your business is mentioned on a review Local Web Listings are the new Yellow Page – Use it to your benefit Responding to all reviews are a good way to show your customers that you care about their opnion. Never write false reviews to puff your business nor to trash your competition   Read More  

Social media is the cool kid on the inbound marketing block right now. Most members of the marketing community are obsessed with the toipc and are moving fast to develop new social media strategies. The problem with many social media strategies though, is that they are bloated and overstuffed with "social media junk." The problem is that, as marketers, we have limited staff time and budgets. Social media strategies overloaded with junk that doesn't help drive business objectives use up pr...

With the Behind The Social Media Campaign Series, supported by Oneupweb, Mashable took an in-depth look at the makings of eight innovative social media campaigns from Ford, Mattel, Internships.com, Old Spice, Toy Story 3, Edge Shaving Gel, The Voice and Buffalo Wild Wings. Using Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Foursquare and SCVNGR, among other social tools, these brands executed successful and engaging social media campaigns worth applauding. This roundup is dedicated to outlining each campai...

In Silicon Valley, much is made of the fabled “A team” — the crack coven of gurus who can turn even the most suspect of ill-conceived ideas into a plausible web app and who can make a great idea into a wildly profitable company. But as the best engineers, designers and marketers flock to this tech hotbed, the competition for the brightest minds heats up all the more. Last fall, as anti-poaching agreements between top tech companies were dissolved by the U.S. Department of Justice, th...

Finding the right candidate for a job is like finding a new apartment: timing, finances and quality all have to align just right. And somehow, the pool of options always seems to feel both prohibitively large and prohibitively limited at the same time. So, in both types of searches, online tools have become invaluable. But while tweeting out a call for a good real estate agent is fairly straightforward, using social media for recruiting has nuances that, if overlooked, can render the process...

From tweet-ups and other social gatherings to conferences and high-profile events, thousands of events take place every day all over the world. Social media and other inbound marketing tactics can combine into a strategic approach to promoting your event, increasing the hype surrounding it, and attracting the attention of both potential attendees and media. The message you send to your audience a few months in advance should be much different than the message you send a few weeks or days befo...

Last week I had the pleasure of leading a workshop for a group of relatively new bloggers.  This workshop wasn't at a conference - in fact, it was at the quarterly meeting of a company that believes so strongly in the business results of blogging that they've enlisted their entire company to participate - thereby increasing content, search results, traffic and leads in a dramatic way. Interestingly, this company isn't a gen-X led tech company. North Short Pediatric Therapy (NSPT) is a very t...

This is a guest blog post from Michael Stelzner, founder of Social Media Examiner, a leading social media blog and author of Launch: How to Quickly Propel Your Business Beyond the Competition. (If you want to learn how to grow a large and loyal following, be sure to read the first chapter of Michael's new book.) Do you blog? Have you been working hard to build a loyal following for your business, but it's just not happening for you? The good news is you're not alone. Most blogs don't g...

Rewarding Your Facebook Fans A key part of your Facebook marketing strategy is figuring out how to build and engage your fan base — and one of the best ways to do this is by rewarding your Facebook audience for becoming and staying fans. “Fans have signaled a level of passion or connection with a brand, so rewarding that acknowledgement only further endears the brand to those fans,” says Blake Cahill, principal and president of social media agency Banyan Branch. “Giving fans what...

Advertising History: Twitter Twitter was influenced by texting, which — group messaging aside — isn’t a big advertising platform. So it’s not surprising perhaps that despite its strong growth, Twitter still isn’t an advertising powerhouse. Part of the reason is the fear of killing the golden goose: Run too many ads and your users will flee to a competing service. But another reason is that the founders of Twitter want to invent something new. Slapping banner ads on Twitter.com cle...

Successful Brands on Facebook Any brand worth their social media salt has a presence on Facebook. But just because a brand is online, doesn’t necessarily mean that it is doing a good job. While it’s possible to suggest some tips and best practices, there’s no greater teacher than learning from example. Below, find eight brands that have found success on Facebook, including some takeaways on what they did right and how you can emulate their success. 1. The Pampered Chef T...

How to: Social Media Using Social Media During Vacation We all have that one family member that just can’t detach himself from technology. On that hypothetical beach vacation, this chap couldn’t be bothered to peel his eyes off his Twitter feed and heaven forbid if you ask him to turn off his iPhone. Then again, maybe that über-connected social mediaite is you. If you or someone you know tends to spend an entire vacation typing away and staring at backlit screens, it may be time fo...

Social Media Chart Last month, our good friends over a Marketing Pilgrim wrote an interesting post titled "Under 1% of Web Visits Come from Social Media." With that kind of a headline, we had to dig a little deeper. While social media can be hard to measure, we are big believers in it's imact on a good inbound marketing strategy. (If you want to learn more about how to measure social media, check out the Science of Analytics webinar this Thursday.) We took a look at the results of our 4500 c...

Rethinking Social Media Strategy for Brands Social media is widely recognized not only for creating deeper, more connected relationships between people, but for the promise it makes to brands to help them become more human. But just because a brand is humanized doesn’t mean everyone will suddenly want to be its “friend” or naturally decide to “Like” it. A brand that desires to leverage social media to create meaningful, more integrated relationships with consumers is faced with...

Skype News Microsoft Finally Acquires Skype After rumors that first Facebook and then Microsoft were in talks to acquire Skype, the latter announced that it has acquired the VoIP giant for $8.5 billion in cash. Skype will be integrated into Microsoft devices and systems such as Xbox and Kinect, Xbox Live, the Windows Phone, Lync and Outlook, Microsoft said in a statement. The company has pledged to continue supporting and developing Skype clients on non-Microsoft platforms as well. The d...

Best Media Practices Now a top-five referrer to the websites of many a publisher, as well as a valuable feedback tool, Facebook has become an essential part of the content and audience development strategies of most media organizations. To capitalize on the potential of Facebook and other user-heavy social networks, publishers have hired community managers and digital strategists to optimize traffic and engagement on those platforms. Editors, reporters and producers are likewise tapping into...

Smart & Smarter Smart Social Rules Everyone wants to be smart. The opposite of smart is dum. No one wants to be known as dum. Yet smart and dum are transparent because of social media. What you say and do can be labeled as either smart or dum and at the click of a mouse millions will know what millions of other think about what you said or did. The irony of social media is its transparency and each word and action is logged into the world wide library which stores everything, everyone...

Event Marketing With Social Media How to Improve your Event Marketing with Social Media Do you remember life before Evite, Facebook Events, and Eventbrite? Handwritten paper invitations and RSVP phone calls seem like relics of a forgotten age. The web has dramatically changed the way people plan special occasions. Social media is making it easier than ever before to plan, promote, and execute a wide range of events from industry conferences, client events and partner symposiums, to large soc...

Social Media & Marketers Marketers strategy: Increase social media spending An overwhelming number of marketers consider social media to be integral to their strategies this year, and 70% plan to increase their social media budget by more than 10% this year, according to a poll from Effie Worldwide and Mashable. The poll, given to a group of ad agency executives and marketers from firms such as Bank of America, Colgate-Palmolive and Mini USA, among others in February, also found that ...

Social Media Benefit Great results of Social Media Marketing Do you wonder if you have what it takes to compete in the social media marketplace? Who, after all, has the time or the budget to mimic Disney or Starbucks? Certainly not a small business! Well, maybe that’s the wrong set of questions. In fact, the 2011 Social Media Marketing Industry Report has some good news for small business marketers. Small business owners are seeing the greatest results from social media marketing. M...

Social Media Impact How social media affects media agencies Facebook was born in 2004 as a simple directory of profile pages for Ivy League students. Twitter emerged one year later, imploring people to chirp what they’re up to. When these social platforms launched, few people understood the promise they held for marketers and the opportunities they would bring for brands. Five years later, we have Facebook Pages, branded Twitter accounts, pimped out YouTube pages and badges on Foursquare. ...

LinkedIn Optimization: Company Profile for Recruiting How to optimize your LinkedIn LinkedIn offers companies the ability to provide more information about their organization via their company pages. On a company page, you can include information about your products and services along with information about job opportunities. This is a relatively new feature, relaunched back in November 2010. Several Fortune 500 companies were part of the launch of this new feature including Dell, Eastman K...