Harry Hoover at the THINKing blog recently asked his readers this question and posted some of the responses . While clearly not a statistical sampling, LinkedIn and Facebook were mentioned prominently by nearly all respondents. StumbleUpon and del.icio.us were common second choices. I've written previously about which social networking/tagging/bookmarking sites seemed to work well at driving B2B traffic, but have collected significantly more data since then. Here's the detail behind my response to Harry. This is based on the past 12 months worth of traffic data for this blog and for the WebMarketCentral marketing portal site. For WebMarketCentral, note first all referring sites combined accounted for just 10.5% of total site traffic in the last year (search drove 78% of visits; the two are related as SMO can help drive SEO results to an extent). Second, the site drew traffic from nearly 400 different referring sites, and the traffic was highly fragmented. WebMarket...

After being part of a team launching a company this week and four new website design projects, plus my "regular" work of helping clients achieve superior online and offline marketing results, I need a short vacation getaway for some family time. So, the blog will take a brief time out. I'll be back to writing about social networking, interactive PR, SEO and SEM, and the usual stuff as soon as I make sure my clients are well taken care of for the moment. Speaking of that company launch , however—if your role has anything to do with business intelligence, data mining, analytics or database marketing—you're going to be hearing a lot about this company in the coming weeks and months: Back soon. ***** technorati tags: website design projects, social networking, interactive PR, business intelligence, data mining, data analytics, database marketing del.icio.us tags: website design projects, social networking, interactive PR, business intelligence, dat...

Late last week, MediaPost's Cathy Taylor wrote about the shortcomings of marketing agencies (large ones at least) when it comes to really understanding and utilizing social media on their clients' behalf—or even their own—in Blogger's Block - And Other Ways Agencies Aren't Walking The Walk Of Social Media . " As for blogs, the number of agencies that have them is growing, but overall they're still pretty spotty in terms of technical chops and raison d'etre, and there's at times an embarrassing level of "Gee whiz! We're blogging!" to some posts. Haven't you people learned the art of pretending that you know what you're doing? Interpublic Group's Hill, Holliday, which made quite a few headlines a while back when it turned its Web site into a blog, isn't exactly transforming the medium as we know it with its posting prolific-ness. Since October, the agency has posted a dozen times." She also comes down on DDB for the lac...

Sell your soul on eBay. Buy trash at Target. "404 Error" pages that are actually entertaining. A bedtime story about search engines. A rap about link building. What's going on here? It's the final—and best—installment of WebMarketCentral's Best of 2007 series. Here are some of the most humorous, creative, and just plain odd, yet strangely relevant to interactive marketing, blog posts and articles from 2007. I hope you have as much fun reading these as I had writing about them! A Bedtime Story (or The Future of Search) by Alt Search Engines The delightful story of a grandfather and his amazingly-tuned-in-to-search grandson talking about the "future" of search engines, when they will be able to show a virtually unlimited number of results on a single page ( NoFoodHere ), display search results as two-dimensional maps ( KartOO ), search within a tag cloud ( Quintura ), and do other cool things. Hitchhikers Guide to Linkless SEO by SEOish How to improve yo...

I recently had the honor and pleasure of talking with best-selling author Laura Ries about her experiences and advice for marketers today. Between TV appearances and speaking engagements on the west coast, Laura shared a bit about her start in marketing, writing with her dad, blogging , things brand marketers do that drive her nuts, and more. Here's the interview. WebMarketCentral (WMC): Hordes of marketing professionals know you from the books you’ve co-authored with your father, Al Ries, such as The Origin of Brands and The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding . What did you do before you became a bestselling author? What’s your background? Laura Ries (LR): Before I was a bestselling author, I was in diapers. Just kidding, sort of. Growing up the daughter of Al Ries allowed me to get an early start in marketing. Since I was a little girl I was obsessed with advertising, products and commercials. I loved visiting my father’s advertising agency in Manhattan. We used to ride the train i...

From advertising to white paper syndication to voicemail, here are a few of the best marketing-related newsletter articles and blog posts from 2007 that simply didn't fit into any other category. Check out these stories from the penultimate entry in WebMarketCentral's Best of 2007 series. AdBlock Plus Threatens the Online Revenue Model by The International Herald Tribune What could have been the story of the year in interactive marketing turned out instead to be pretty much of a dud. Noam Cohen wrote here about AdBlock Plus, a free Firefox plug-in that "makes all commercial communication disappear. No flashing whack-a-mole banners. No highly targeted Google ads based on the search terms you've entered." It's not clear whether the idea fizzled because the program didn't always work properly or because online advertising simply isn't that all that annoying to people, but the whole short-lived uproar seemed to just disappear. "Right or wrong, do s...

Here's a list of interesting and useful tools to help you convert files, find content, promote your blog, and add content to your website, among other activities. File conversion tools Still running Office 2003, but need to convert the new XML-based formats from Office 2007 so you can read and work with them? Zamzar offers a free online service to convert files with no need to download software. Microsoft also offers its own downloadable conversion utility , which I've found to be the easier option. If you have more extensive file conversion requirements, such as the need to view AutoCad, Corel and other file types in addition to MS Office, Avantstar's Quick View Plus an inexpensive utility to automatically view email attachments and other files from more than 250 formats. A free trial of the software is available here . My Search Engines Blogger David Berkowitz provides an excellent list of specialized search engines to help monitor buzz, find content within blogs, resea...