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Dan Zarrella is an award-winning social media and viral marketing scientist, writer, and speaker. His new book is The Social Media Marketing Book. In this interview I try to pin him down and tell me when to use specific social media platforms, services and practices to run a business.

Great rundown of social media and new media success in 2008

2008 was a newsworthy - albeit, topsy-turvy - year for marketers and researchers. Importantly, social media evolved from experimental sideline to a mainstream attraction. Twitter saw huge growth rates, Barack Obama rewrote the rules of digital marketing, and user-engagement, and "service is marketing" Zappos.com re-wrote new rules for building brands and rewiring e-commerce. Facebook trended upward, MySpace held steady, and reputation-broker Wikipedia continued marching to the top of Google search results.

Situation: You run a social media program at a corporation, and you need to measure to improve your program, but more importantly to show to your bosses that this 'new media' program is worth it's weight. Challenges: You see the immediate value of a community program but your management is unconvinced. Furthermore, the brand police and the traditional hard-liners don't like your 'open-thinking' type of revolt. There may be other challenges too: lots of activity but few people, or you simply don't know where to start. Goals Deliver a report that demonstrates the value of a social media program as well as helps you improve the program over time.

Great overview on how to measure the social media aspect of your business's web strategy...

Guidelines for marketing with social media aren't all that new. In 2006 five members of the digital marketing community collaborated on 16 rules for "social media optimization". Fast forward to nearly 2010 and social media has begun to take a more significant role in the marketing mix.

Good intro into SEO for New Media

Some great insights into SEO for New Media... Excellent thoughts and best practices from some gurus in the space...

What does this say about SMB's and social media? This piece says, that SMB's are: "Still feeling their way into social media..." Interesting. What's your take?

This is probably a good reason why everyone displaced from a marketing or PR job is now a social media expert :) because they're trying to help SMB's learn how to make this work for themselves. We're seeing great results with businesses we work with but those all take a "long term approach" and realize that seeing results takes a "cultural shift" not a new set of tools.

Let's say you're a butcher, a baker or a candlestick maker. You want to get up to speed on the social media activity in your market, as fast as you can. Or perhaps you want to sell things to candlestick makers online, or you're a journalist writing a story about blogging butchers, or maybe you've got some kind of weird baking fetish or academic interest. Is there any way to ramp up your knowledge of these fields, fast, other than the "Google and wander" method? We think there is. Below you'll find step-by-step instructions, with screen shots, for the process we use when we want to get smart about a new field in a hurry.

This is an AMAZING digest of internet marketing posts from 2008 covering SEO, Social Media tools and strategy, twitter, facebook, friendfeed, blogging etc. This is a must read for any internet marketer from beginner to advanced.

Here's how this works: In the Internet Marketing Best Posts "series," I take posts that are typically timeless - they're not confined to a specific event or news occurrence - they're valuable for the long haul in terms of Internet Marketing and creative strategy. Hopefully, you'll see that these posts are still relevant in a few years down the road. These posts range from beginner to advanced with a greater emphasis on the more intermediate posts. I'd argue that if you're starting your Internet Marketing business with not much know-how, you should check out the 2007 posts; in fact, most may still find them relevant regardless of the skill level.

When considering the tools of social media and how they relate to your business communications needs, it's important to think about two parts of the equation: possibility + function. These tools open up new ways to communicate, which is great. It also means that you have to consider what the functional goal of that communication means to your need.

A couple insights to future Google additions to their ranking algorithm: brands as noise filters and relationship awareness. Exciting stuff....

If you ask Matt Cutts what big SEO changes are coming up he will tell you "make great content" and so on...never wanting to reveal the weaknesses of their search algorithms. Eric Schmidt, on the other hand, is frequently talking to media and investors with intent of pushing Google's agendas and all the exciting stuff that is coming out. In the last 6 months Mr. Schmidt has made a couple quotes that smart SEOs should incorporate into their optimization strategies - one on brands [15], and another on word relationships [16

Now, a new breed of companies is trying to tackle all of those options and determine what ad works for a specific audience. They are creating hundreds of versions of clients' online ads, changing elements like color, type font, message, and image to see what combination draws clicks on a particular site or from a specific audience.

What a great resource! These folks have done simple training videos on many of the most popular and functional solutions around for Twitter, Wordpress, etc. This is a GREAT starting point to build a base of knowledge.

These are some great basic vids to give you an immediate boost of knowledge to start using some of these tools.

great link!