I’ve been playing alot lately with the concept of using fun and humour (Canadian spelling eh) in social marketing and networking. For example:

1) the post earlier this week The (un)Official Sphinn Awards (in conjunction with my good friend Dave from Trail of the Fire Horse Blog … cool name eh? I’m jealous!).

2) We also ran an SEO Lyrics Contest back in the late spring and early summer

3) and created a series of industry cartoons .

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

Today was a big day!  Well for me anyhow.  Just to give you a little background a big part of my job is to not only to strategize off page SEO campaigns that support all of the onpage SEO efforts for SEP’s clients, but to report on all of these efforts. 
Traffic, engagement, conversion, authority all easy…links oh those blessed one way natural links this is what we are all really after, this is hard! 
In the past the only way I knew to track the inbound links that were created by an off page campaign was using some special syntax in queries that our SEP Wis walks me through every time (I do not pretend to fully understand). 
Along with this I would also try and use AltaVista.  But AltaVista seems to report the highest number of inbound links but as I have found out not all links are visible. (go figure).   Another tool was Technorati; Technorati is good for finding fresh links to a given site very quickly.
But in general, the overall numbers of results are estimated at the very start, and this can become misleading. Not all results are reachable from the search engines, so a false illusion can be given.  Until today!!
SEP’s Wis has found out a simple traceable and free method that will stream line all of this.  Google Alerts.  Yes Google Alerts are not new but here is what is new setup your alert to report on “link: www.acme.com” this will let you know what new one way links are being created! It also works for the crawlers with using “site: www.acme.com”.

As should be apparent from a few of my previous blog postings (Should I use a .ca top level domain (TLD) for my Canadian site?, and Benefits of Being Recognized As a Canadian Site by Search Engines), we believe that most Canadian companies should be more diligent in ensuring that their sites are hosted on Canadian IPs … otherwise without a .ca they lose out on certain advantages. In fact, do yourself a quick favour, and perform a search on Google.ca for your domain name less the www and the suffix (eg. .com), remembering to check the “Pages from Canada” radio button. Does your site appear? If not, using one of the hosting companies listed below will solve the problem very quickly.

Here’s a rather interesting tool (http://www.archive.org/web/web.php) that we use frequently at SEP to see how client competitors have evolved and are evolving. To some extent, we can use it to see when a client first tried optimizing their site. Its called the WayBack Machine. Believe it or not, it’ll show you a snapshot of what many sites looked like at periodic intervals in the past.

The tool is both interesting and useful from the perspective that it often gives a good indication what a company’s product/services were at given points in time, prices for products and services over time, even when a site began its optimisation effort, and if this effort is more content focused or “links” focused.

Money Magazine Online had an interesting article today, “Policing The Online Buzz“.

In short, an innovative and affordable buzz tracking tool about to be launched by Buzzlogic. According to their site…

Influence moves markets. ItÂ’s a basic tenet of marketing. But until now, itÂ’s been impossible to understand influence — and who wields it — within specific conversations taking place in social media.

BuzzLogic changes this dynamic by uniquely defining and measuring influence in social media, and by surfacing the key influencers who are shaping and defining markets, issues and reputations.

….which all sounds good until things go horribly, horribly bad.

There are myriad free tools abounding on the Internet, some more useful than others.

Deserving of a mention, in my estimation, are Yahoo! Search Suggestion Tool (formerly Overture) and the recently unleashed KeywordDiscovery.com Tool.

But there are other equally interesting and informative tools that can provide hours of fun for the whole family. Okay, well maybe not for the whole family. But the hours of fun part, that’s true. Hours. Seriously.

Today, Google Trends, which is one of those tools that should be mentioned a lot but seems to be woefully underused. And it’s free!

By now, we’re all aware of Google Alerts and their use as competitive intelligence tools.

Signing up for a Google Alert is relatively straightforward, and can be done here. However, in choosing your subject of choice, try for an exact match, “in quotes” or you may become the unwitting victim of information overload.

Googling potential job candidates has become, by now, commonplace. And it can be enlightening, not just for the frat party pictures, but in providing additional insight into your potential choice of candidates by revealing specific interests, skillsets or attitudes that can affect that choice, one way or the other. (Bear in mind we’ve all been to a toga party or seven and even Clinton admitted to smoking and Obama, more than that.)