The Single-Largest Hurdle of Social Media Marketing

I’ve been planning on writing about this in the next couple of weeks, but after reading Bruce Prokopets at Social Caster vent his frustration (Stop Yapping and Show Me The Results) regarding the lack of real performance data showing the value of Social Media Marketing, I decided to get some of it out now. As a self-proclaimed SMM Evangelist, my instinct is to quickly defend social media as a marketing...

Squidoo and Seth Godin Changing the World

Congratulations to Seth Godin on his two 50,000 milestones today: Being able to donate $50,000 earned from high sales of The Big Moo, and Squidoo hitting 50,000 entries. I highly recommend reading his inspiring and grateful post. It’s proof of yet another way that the principles of Social Media can change the...

Social Networking Sites Recover from September Decline

I’m not even going to try to out-do the in-depth analysis that Hitwise has done in their Consumer Generated Media Report. The report also touches on something I was actually thinking about earlier today: The seasonality of social media. It has been reported that there was a decline in visits to sites like MySpace and Facebook in September, which is a typical seasonal occurrence as school-aged users shift their...

MarketingPilgrim’s Search Marketing Scholarship Contest

Well, it turns out that in the final week of the Search Marketing Scholarship Contest, I was able to squeak out a win with my article titled The Five Pillars of Social Media Marketing.  It’s a pretty big honor to win the week that I entered since not only were there the most entries, but it was the strictest competition with some great entries. At this point, the winners of each of the four weeks now go in...

Social Networking Ads: $2 Billion by 2010

Mashable.com notes a report by eMarketer that predicts advertising spends on social networks have been consistently beating estimates and are on track to reach $2 billion by 2010. “U.S. marketers are expected to spend $350 million in 2006, an increase of 25% over previous estimates. Estimates for 2010 are also up 16 percent to $2.2 billion, with social network ad spending projected to account for 8.5% of the...