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Strapped for time and cash, small local businesses are increasingly turning to free and low-cost social media tools for their marketing efforts. Not surprisingly, the world's biggest social networking site tops of the list of preferred tools. Seventy percent of local businesses use Facebook for marketing, according to a new report from Merchant Circle, a network of U.S. local business owners. This represents a 20% increase over the previous year. The report notes that for the first time, Facebook is being used more than Google by local businesses for online marketing.

In a sure sign that social media is becoming an entrenched pillar of the marketing mix, social media marketing freelance jobs have grown by 67% in the last year. This according to a quarterly report from DoNanza, an Isreali-based search engine which researches work-from-home projects. The search engine aggregates information from freelance sites such as elance, odesk and others on related online projects.

Social media provides companies with new opportunities for customer service, research and marketing (within reason of course), but most respondents to a survey of C-level executive conducted by Harris Interactive for Capgemini aren't yet sure how to harness social media. The results are part of Capgemini's Executive Outsourcing Survey, and follows the firm's launch of its social media management service. Harris surveyed 302 senior executives at Fortune 1000 companies. More than half say that social media is a part of their company's customer care operations, but 64% of those said that the marketing department is solely responsible for social media marketing. Most (74%) executives in the study were simply unsure how many employees are dedicated to customer care via the social Web.

Thanks to super-fast reactions, at least three brands were able to "newsjack" the power outage that hit the Super Bowl early in the third quarter of today's game. With the Ravens up by a score of 28-6, and a 49ers third-down play just about to begin, the lights inside the stadium went out, causing a somewhat lengthy delay that's still ongoing as I type this. Several brands saw the power outage as a chance to market themselves in clever ways on Twitter, which is no doubt experiencing new, all-time usage levels for a sporting event.

what does "social" really mean? It's become a phonetic clue that whatever follows in speech is now connected, via the Internet, to a collaborative application. If that's even close to accurate, then as marketers we're way past "social media" as a thing to do. Instead, "social media" is firmly part of markets, customer tastes, and business innovation cycles. What's more, entire organizations are governed more by consensus than individual dictum.

Mindtouch Executive Vice President of Sales Mark Fidelman, writing for Cloudave, identifies Apple Senior Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing Phillip W. Schiller as the top social Chief Marketing Officer of the Fortune 100.

Most marketing departments work hard to establish a flawless reputation for their product or service. But new research from Tel Aviv University is showing that perfection is not all it's cracked up to be.

"This year, the Girl Scouts also has a program that encourages girls to collect donations for the "I Care" program, which sends Girl Scout Cookies to troops overseas. In the past, girls in Girl Scout troops have typically sold cookies and exchange currency face-to-face. Now, with the mainstream adoption of social media and technology, girls like 11-year-old Emma Vermaak have turned to social media and PayPal to help market and sell cookies, as well as collect these donations. When the Girl Scouts discovered Emma was using PayPal to collect donations for the "I Care" program, the organization initially tweeted her support for doing what "Girl Scouts is all about!" Shortly afterwards, Emma's mom, Kimberly Reynolds, was contacted by Emma's troop's leader, who was told Emma could only take cash. The Girl Scouts then tweeted at Emma the next day (while she was at school), clarifying that they didn't mean to cause confusion by supporting her efforts, explaining "But girls cannot transact the sale (take payment) online. That must happen in person to build oh-so-important people skills.""

The 10 most critical job skills to parlay in your job search for 2013: Critical thinking, Complex problem solving, Judgment and decision-making, Active listening, Computers and electronics, Mathematics, Operations and systems analysis, Monitoring, Programming, Sales and Marketing

Brands and marketers have different levels of participation in the social media space, but many have similar goals and strategies. The "2010 Social Media Benchmarking Study" from Ketchum and FedEx fou

Many businesses have invested in multi-channel campaign management systems, giving them the ability to execute campaigns across e-mail, direct mail, and the Web seamlessly. We classify our campaigns as transactional, promotional, and experiential, among others. When we look at reports, we often compare campaign performance against previous campaigns or similar programs running in parallel. While this focus on campaign management has made e-mail one of the most profitable direct channels in the marketer's arsenal, it has clouded our view of something more important: relationship management. If e-mail marketers are focusing on campaign-level strategy and execution, who is left to focus on the broader relationship between the brand and consumer and how content, cadence, and channel preference all come together to create a relationship of trust between the brand and the consumer? Let's look at some examples of how a focus on the relationship changes the way we look at the programs we run and inevitably makes e-mail campaigns more effective.

Over the past day, Al Jazeera has pushed the issue with its promoted trend and tweets like this, which reads "Like our coverage from #Egypt? Think we should be shown on US TV? It's time to #DemandAlJazeera http://aje.me/demandAJ." Yesterday, clothing outlet Kenneth Cole tried to leverage the popularity of Egypt-related hashtags in a similar manner, tweeting "Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is now available online at http://bit.ly/KCairo." Immediately, the company caught a lot of flack for the tweet and shortly after publicly apologized and pulled the tweet. The difference in the two situations, we would think, is that Al Jazeera is trying to leverage the popularity of a specific event to gain entry into a market that has essentially shut it out. The end result might be similar to Kenneth Coles' desired outcome - increased sales - but it would come with the increased spread of information.

"Here is the latest in the very useful series of longitudinal studies on social media use by The Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth led by Nora Barnes. This one covered Social Media Usage in the Inc. 500. In contrast here is their most recent one on Blogging and Twitter by the Fortune 500. In this case, there was a nationwide telephone survey of those companies named by Inc. Magazine to the Inc. 500 list. All interviews took place in October and November of 2010 and obtained 34% participation. "

It's critical to distinguish a consumer's increased ability to amplify a brand's successes and failures from his or her actual control over the story a brand tells. In the purest sense, consumers have always wielded immense influence with their wallet. That their votes are now cast on public websites long before the ballots are counted on confidential P&Ls only makes it easier for marketers to react more quickly. If brands were in "control" back when their only option was to launch expensive print, TV and out-of-home campaigns -- and then wait several months to see the sales data -- then, by comparison, modern media has made them practically omnipotent.

One could feel a tiny bit bad for the person at Microsoft's British PR team who tweeted "Remember Amy Winehouse by downloading the ground-breaking Back to Black over at Zune." He or she must be having a terrible day. On one hand, it may have seemed like a sensible marketing move: The person was probably correct in thinking that people might want to remember the singer, who was found dead in London on Saturday, by listening to her music. On the other hand, it reads as an insensitive way for Microsoft to cash in on the tragedy surrounding the 27-year-old performer.

Much of the TV, video, film and sport we watch is sponsored by a brand, a product, a corporation. But … why? With humor and persistence, filmmaker Morgan Spurlock dives into the hidden but influential world of brand marketing, on his quest to make a completely sponsored film about sponsorship. And yes, the onstage naming rights for talk were sponsored too. By whom and for how much? He'll tell you. 

"In their newest study, they show that independent of the content of an article about a new technological development, the tone of comments posted by other readers can make a significant difference in the way new readers feel about the article's subject. The less civil the accompanying comments, the more risk readers attributed to the research described in the news story. "The day of reading a story and then turning the page to read another is over," Scheufele says. "Now each story is surrounded by numbers of Facebook likes and tweets and comments that color the way readers interpret even truly unbiased information. This will produce more and more unintended effects on readers, and unless we understand what those are and even capitalize on them, they will just cause more and more problems." If even some the for-profit media world and advocacy organizations are approaching the digital landscape from a marketing perspective, Brossard and Scheufele argue, scientists need to turn to more empirical communications research and engage in active discussions across disciplines of how to most effectively reach large audiences."

"Why the increasing business use of social media by business? Social media offers immense potential for marketing, image-making, advertising, public relations efforts, customer relations, investor relations and a variety of other positive, beneficial activities.  But it also carries potential risks, a caveat perfectly illustrated by the Hastings case. The risks of social media are in some, but not all respects, similar to those of print media.  But not all libel laws apply-issues of malice and negligence have not been definitively decided in the courts. Insider trading issues, however, are clear.  The transmission via social media of insider information about a publicly traded company is illegal. Using Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or private blogs to transmit insider information to large numbers of people is a violation of law."

Despite a shaky economy, many web companies are in hypergrowth.  This is reminiscent of the five-year period over a decade ago when companies like Amazon, Netscape, eBay, Yahoo, Google and PayPal were built. One challenge, which isn't new, is the battle for consumer attention.  If you're looking to grow your user base, is there a best way to cost-effectively attract valuable users?  I'm increasingly convinced the best way is by harnessing a concept called social proof, a relatively untapped gold mine in the age of the social web. What is social proof?  Put simply, it's the positive influence created when someone finds out that others are doing something.  It's also known as informational social influence.

Sweden has surrendered its official Twitter account, @sweden, to the hoi polloi. The project, Curators of Sweden, signs up Swedes to tweet a week at a time. It started December 10 with Jack Wermer, a writer and marketing specialist. The second tweeter was Hasan Ramic, a Bosnian immigrant Currently, the position is filled by the moose-hunting, oral tobacco product enthusiast Anders Dalenius.