Kristen: I’m very excited to join the Hodgson/Meyers team and I can’t wait to get started!

Andrew: This weekend I’ll be sporting the shorts and flip-flops as Seattle finally gets above 75ºF for the first time this year!

Rachel: I may be one of the few people around here who likes country music, but this song, Honey Bee by Blake Shelton is my current favorite. It is the perfect summer song.

Charlie: The good ol’ days of packaging are back (for a limited time).

Sharan: This kitten video is quite adorable.

Chris: The new mobile marketing gold rush is under way in the form of branded mobile codes. Instead of securing the latest website address, you can get your very own mobile vanity code that allows your customers to more easily interact with you on their mobile devices. Have you reserved your code yet? If not, you better hurry…they’re going fast. Find out if your company’s name is available at http://www.zoove.com/ But be prepared to open up your wallet.

Gina: This is hilarious. I see a bright future for this kid. Maybe politics? Motivational speaker?

Willem: Delicious HD eye candy at Vimeo.

While Facebook and Twitter are the main social media outlets for both B2C and B2B companies, LinkedIn, the professional social network, is quickly moving forward as a popular social network among B2B audiences.  Recently, LinkedIn has made updates to their platform, including an opportunity for companies to build out a profile separate from individual profiles.  In doing this, companies can promote their business, advertise specials and make announcements from one place.

What do these new profiles offer?  The opportunity to get information about your company out to the public.  For B2B companies, a LinkedIn profile is as important to keep updated as your website.  From this platform, everything is in one place: products and services, social media, news, employee contact information and more.

One of the most important new features is the ability to promote your company’s products and services.  These new pages give you the opportunity (in 2,000 characters or less) to describe your product or services.  Additionally, there is an area for a bulleted list of your key services, as well as a link to the related page on your website, making LinkedIn a true portal for business contact.

Want to help direct people to the appropriate point of contact for one of your products or services?  LinkedIn now helps you do that as well.  Any employee who is linked to your company page can be featured as a representative for your company.

Once products and services pages are developed, your customers can leave recommendations about your offerings.  These recommendations are similar to the recommendations on individual user profiles, and allow anyone who considers your company’s services to hear directly from your customers.

Have you already added product and services tabs on your company’s LinkedIn profile?  We would love to see how your B2B company is using this new feature.  Need some ideas to get you started?  Take a look at Spike’s services page.

Link building is an important part of the SEO process. However, when you outsource your link building you are putting your online reputation in the hands of others. Your links are an online representation of your business. If you outsource, make sure you trust them or you might end up with links like this one someone tried to post here on Spike Speak.

Why This is a Bad Link:

- It’s generic and clearly template driven. It just looks spammy.
- Fake email address. Only blog admins see your email address on a comment, so why give a fake one?
- It was blocked by Cookies For Comments (CFC) as spam. If it looks spammy to CFC, you can rest assured that it looks spammy to Google and the other search engines.

If you have ever heard someone complaining that they got “Google Slapped” and were knocked out of the search results, odds are good that it is because they were participating in link building such as this.

We deleted this comment right off the bat. And I now assume that this company is probably not legit since they (or their vendor) used spammy SEO practices.

There is more to link building than just links and this type of link building does NOT generate the kind of results that most are looking for, however it is typical of what often happens when you outsource this important element of SEO.

A large part of SEO and Social Media overlap, posting to blogs is one of those areas. Make sure you are actively participating in a positive way with the audience and your link building efforts will be much more effective because of that.

Good social leads to good SEO.

Robert Coats
Senior Search Strategist

Measuring the performance of a marketing campaign has always been critical.

Social media is no different.

While social interactions may not match up directly to sales (though this is possible with the right tools and diligent tracking), you can determine which social interactions led to different important actions. If you know the value of these actions, you can determine the ROI from your social interactions that lead to these actions.

Be sure to add web analytics tracking code from Google Analytics (or your preferred web analytics tool) so you can measure this down to the individual post level.

7 Ways to Measure Social Media ROI

1. Newsletter sign-up – especially if you have topic or product specific newsletters.
2. Contact form – pretty obvious
3. Phone call – can implement phone number tracking, or try adding unique 1-800 numbers to your social profiles.
4. Twitter Retweet – promotes you as a thought leader in your industry. It’s essentially a mini endorsement.
5. Twitter Follower or Facebook Fan – essentially a mailing list add, only with more legs since friends can see see these as well while only that individual will see your emails.
6. Liking or commenting on a Facebook Page post – Again, this is interaction with your company, a clear sign of their interest in you.
7. Endorsement or Thank You on any network – helps position you as a helpful thought leader in your industry, which has huge value.

Be sure to assign a dollar value to each of these conversion points. Is a phone call worth more to you than a newsletter sign-up? In which of these mediums does your sales team work best? What is the cost of your social media program (usually this is personnel time)?

Finally, there is no ROI if you don’t set Goals in advance. Know what you want to achieve with social media before you dive in.

Got more ways to measure? Chime in!

GroupM Search and comScore, Inc., a leader in digital marketing intelligence, recently released a study demonstrating the strong correlation between a brand’s social media exposure and users’ engagement with their paid search ads.

Essentially, the two key findings are:

1. Users exposed to both distributed social marketing content AND paid search are nearly three times more likely to search for that brand’s products compared to users who only saw paid search.

2. In organic search, consumers searching on brand product terms who were exposed to their social media marketing are 2.4 times more likely to click on organic links than the average user who only saw that brand’s paid search ad.
Read more…