Can a good search presence improve an offline marketing campaign’s results? You may be surprised to hear … ABSOLUTELY! Offline and search campaigns are actually very symbiotic in nature. See the proof abreviated in graphical form below, but also be sure to check out the full study.

The Proof:

Courtesy iProspect

The Cudos:
The study was commissioned by iProspect and was performed by Jupiter Research. It was titled iProspect Offline Channel Influence on Online Search Behavior Study. Check it out! Our industry needs more of these studies performed. Google, Yahoo, ermmm MSN … please step up!

Professionally, LinkedIn is my main social network. It provides for a more focused business networking environment than most social media sites. It’s a great tool, especially for finding people, references, job postings and business opportunities. Additional benefits I’ve discovered include; the ability to talk about your professional self, link to your other Google-friendly web content and customize your profile URL. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather a potential employer/client find my LinkedIn profile on Google, before any others of me!

This week, I’m taking a look at LinkedIn, by the numbers:

The Beginning:

Hot on the heels of a posting titled ‘Differentiate (Your Avatar) or Die’ by Michael (aka planetc1) over at Sphinn, and following the unique experince had recently by one of the ladies here in our office, I was prompted to create an avatar experiment and then test it. Essentially, she (our female staff member) changed her StumbleUpon avatar, and upon doing so, her friend count increased very quickly with virtually no effort.

Now, I’m sure many of you have theories about this, but it certainly caused many of us at SEP to chat and theorize in the office. After much debate, we hypothesized that:

I’ve had a few friends lately who aren’t sure about the value of social media marketing, so rather than debate the merits of social media verbally, I thought I’d save the time needed to argue it repeatedly, and do my best to compile my thoughts so I could merely direct others to this posting in the future. Below are what I believe to be the 7 benefits to engaging in social media. Keep in mind, different individuals will have different objectives, and therefore will look for different benefits. Here is a summary though:

Its true! The image below is a link to a web site! Its not to be clicked on though … its an offline link that needs to be photographed from a mobile device to be activated. In this case, it may reside on a billboard, a poster on a telephone pole, an ad in a men’s washroom, or a tile on a train station floor. But make no mistake … it is a link to a website!

Or the Next President of the U.S of A…

Social Media is the perfect medium for spreading a really catchy concept virally. Let’s look at Stephen Colbert for example - The man is a top-notch comedian, who is also (sort of) the Greatest Living American (See proof below:)

To elaborate, Colbert recently ranked #1 on Google search results for the term “Greatest Living American”, which speaks volumes for his fan following of webmasters online. In what is essentially called a “Google Bombing” tactic, webmasters linked to ColbertNation.Com with the anchor text of “Greatest Living American” (Read more about that here)

Further to my August 23rd post, “Yellow Pages Goes Social” I talked about how the Yellow Pages Group in Canada had launched their integration of Facebook for users who want to save and share their favorite businesses by using their link function on Facebook.com.

Darby Seiben, Senior Manager - Traffic, Distribution and eProduct Management with YellowPages.ca, posted a great update on his blog letting us know that yellowpages.ca expanded this one step further by integrating the “add to facebook” directly into the search results as well as the business profile page for every business in Canada

It’s safe to say that Digg leads the pack among the popular social news site websites. It’s not my favorite, by I do drop by often, in pursuit of the next best top 10 list.

This week, I’m reviewing Digg, by the numbers:

* Digg started out as an experiment in November 2004 by Kevin Rose, Owen Byrne, Ron Gorodetzky, and Jay Adelson. They wanted a site where “Netizens” could vote on their favorite stories of the day. All currently play an active role in the management of the site.

When I was writing my piece on “Search and the Pareto Principle” (aka the 20/80 Rule) last week, I was playing around with Sphinn (a Digg types news submission and sharing service for those in the SEO/SEM/SMM industry) and found some really interesting information that I thought might be worthwhile sharing.

Here are some of the findings as of yesterday:

1) there were 4371 profiles on Sphinn … that’s a large number of people engaging in seo/sem/smm to one degree or another

“Blogs are far easier to maintain than traditional Web sites, but they still need more effort than most bloggers are willing to supply.

This suggests that blogging is an ephemeral fad, destined to burn itself out in a year or two.”
– “Pyra Labs at the Forefront of Webblogging Phenomenon“, Hiawatha Bray, Boston Globe, March 25, 2002

Today there are hundreds of thousands of blogs — thousands of which are influential in one way or another. Top blogs like TechMeme, Engadget, Lifehacker, TechCrunch, and many others, are widely popular and influential. Other blogs like The Simple Dollar or Everyday Digital Scrapbooking are influential in a niche.