Given the enormous interest in using social media for business purposes, I've been astounded to hear comments like these at recent conferences: "That's all really interesting, but I can't access any of the websites you just talked about. My company blocks all access to social media sites." "We're only allowed to use Facebook and LinkedIn for one hour each day, from noon to 1:00, and we're not supposed to say anything about the company." "Our network blocks access to any website with 'blog' in the URL." "The only place our profiles can appear is on our corporate website. We can have a personal Facebook page for sharing family pictures and things like that, but if we say anything about the company we're asked to take it down immediately." My initial reaction was that these people must work in incredibly retrograde, out-of-touch enterprises. I advised one woman to buy a copy of The Cluetrain Manifesto: The ...

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The emergence of social media has dramatically changed the role of public relations. While traditional journalists still have significant authority, influence is now more diffused among writers, analysts, bloggers, customers, and other internal and external subject matter experts. As the landscape has shifted from being dominated by one-to-many mass media to many-to-many participatory social media, the skillsets required of PR professionals have changed. Technical ability —not all that long ago, PR pros' primary tools were email and the phone. Now they need to know how to properly use (from both a technical and etiquette standpoint) all the major tools on the social media landscape , how to produce thought-leadership content, how to put together social media releases , at least a passing knowledge of online video production and sharing, and more. Conversational style —PR people used to interact primarily with industry journalists. "Pitching" and "spinning" w...

Once you've optimized the list of keywords in your search engine marketing campaign, tweaked the bids and crafted stellar ad text to bring visitors to your site, landing page design is critical to converting those visitors into sales or leads. Here are a few of the best posts about SEM landing page design from last year. Good and bad landing page examples by CDF Networks Chad Frederiksen gets right to the point with this brief but helpful post on what separates bad landing page design (e.g., clutter) from good (a clear call to action among other attributes). Lead Generation Form Optimization Tips and Tricks - Google Analytics by VKI Studios Darcy Foster explains how to use Google Analytics and Omniture for conversion rate measurement, then provides tips for testing different approaches to improving conversions. 12 PPC landing page tips by Econsultancy Graham Charlton presents a helpful set of tips for improving landing page conversions such as writing relevant, ...

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