This year 81% of companies’ chief marketing officers plan to link annual revenues to social media marketing investment, according to a study by CMO Club and Bazaarvoice. With that in mind, SEO co. 97th Floor (Twitter: @chrisbennett) created this chart for CMO.com. It’s a good introduction to what social sites can do for exposing your [...]

If you were trying to make a career in music, would you participate in a popularity contest that forced you to stop using your own personal Facebook, Twitter and MySpace accounts? Seems a bit defeating, doesn’t it?
Evidently, this season’s round of American Idol contestants have been forced to give up their use of social media, [...]

Recent developments with the mobile app Foursquare are making it look more and more like the next big thing experts predicted it might become.
Whereas the playing field for Facebook and Twitter is the Internet, Foursquare takes place online via the real world of brick-and-mortar businesses. For those unfamiliar, Foursquare is one of several location-based social [...]

If you’d told me 15 years ago that come the turn of this decade, I’d be talking to Taco Bueno, I’d have gone straight into medical school.
But yesterday, I did have an exchange with the Texas-based fast Mexican food chain — or, at least, with the brand’s social media manager(s). Which is close enough. [...]

Billing itself as “A Compendium of the World’s Wonders, Curiosities and Esoterica,” the Atlas Obscura is an online travel guide to the globe’s most unusual, out-of-the-way places.
You’ll find out about crazy places like the Pyramid of North Dakota and the Blood Falls of Antarctica.
And if you know of a weird attraction that’s missing, there’s an [...]

The social web is always changing. Platforms such as Friendster and MySpace rise and fall, and others like Facebook, Twitter and now Buzz take their places. As social networking sites become more and more intrinsic to the way we consume media and interact with our peers and customers, it can be tempting to just pick [...]

The New York Times this morning features an interesting case study about a small company faced with the choice between a traditional advertising strategy and a social-media/web-based plan for marketing its new line of products.
Those products: hand-rolled cigars from the Dominican Republic.
Pretty tradicional, no? Turns out, that’s not where the company’s mindset is.

Though the EPC [...]

Damian Kulash has really taken it to the mattresses with EMI.
You may remember about a month ago, the frontman of virally famous OK Go posted an open letter to the band’s forum complaining about how its label, EMI, had quashed their recent attempts to get the word out about their new album and tour via [...]

Is mobile the future of the social web? A recent study would indicate that it is.
PR firm Ruder Finn’s Mobile Intent Index survey showed that 91% of people use their mobile phones to socialize online, compared with 79% of traditional computer users.
That’s not all. The study also showed that 62% of mobile users manage finances [...]

If you thought old brands couldn’t learn new tricks, then WD-40 has something to show you.
The highly multi-purpose product was originally developed by aerospace scientists during the Cold War as a means of protecting missiles from corrosion. The name stands for “Water Displacement, formula 40.” Since then, it’s become the epitome of the household brand.
You [...]