Blogging

On the occasion of the 300th post on the WebMarketCentral blog, and to see how things have changed since the first 100 posts, here are the 10 most popular posts of all time so far.

#10: The 8 Layers of a B2B Web Marketing Plan, October 8, 2008

The most recent post to make this list presents B2B marketing as a series of concentric layers, with SEO at the core then moving outward from highly measurable online direct response tactics to broader brand advertising.

#9: Best of 2007: Articles and Blog Posts on SEO (Part 1), January 28, 2008

Summaries of and links to a dozen outstanding articles on SEO from some of the top pros like Lee Odden, Jon Rognerud and Danny Sullivan. Also, I think, the first time on this blog I made the case that SEO is far from dead.

#8: Web 2.0 Social Tagging Sites, Part 7: The Best, June 26, 2007

“Based on two months of testing across a half-dozen B2B websites and blogs, these Web 2.0 social bookmarking sites produced the best results, in terms of driving direct traffic and having active, engaged discussion communities.” Of mostly historical interest now, from the early days of social bookmarking, before Mixx, Sphinn, Propeller and Twitter took off.

#7: Web 2.0 Social Tagging Sites, Part 4: B2B Traffic Building, May 15, 2007

The first post where I showed, quantitatively, how social media can accelerate traffic growth for both blogs and commercial websites.

#6: Selecting an Advertising Agency, June 7, 2005

The second post ever written on this blog and the only post common to both this list and the top 10 after first 100 posts.

#5: Best of 2007: Website Design, February 4, 2008

Eleven outstanding articles on blog posts on website design tips, tactics and tools from experts like Stoney deGeyter, Ralph Wilson, Mark Jackson, Jay Lipe and Kalena Jordan.

#4: How to Write a Strategic Marketing Plan, December 6, 2007

My recommended outline for crafting a strategic marketing plan, from high-level business objectives and strategies through marketing and PR tactics and tools.

#3: The Social Media Email Signature, September 18, 2008

A look at how traditional email signatures have evolved into their Web 2.0 version, now incorporating elements such as LinkedIn profiles, blog links, Twitter pages, Facebook, StumbleUpon, even Second Life IDs. Includes notable examples from social media pros like Jon Rognerud, Viewzi evangelist Giovanni Gallucci, and Guy Kawasaki.

#2: Google AdWords Average CTR and Best Practices, September 20, 2007

Various estimates for average click-through rates (CT) from Google AdWords along with 14 best practices to make search engine marketing programs more successful.

#1: Email Campaign, Newsletter and Banner Ad Click-Through Rates (CTR), August 14, 2007

And the most popular post thus far on the WebMarketCentral blog covers…industry data to help set goals and benchmark the performance of email marketing, newslettor sponsorship and banner advertising programs.

That will do it for me this (short) week. Happy Thanksgiving!

*****

Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentralDOTcom

The rest is here:
Looking Back at 300: Top 10 Posts

LinkedIn yesterday announced a new service that enables market researchers and investors to conduct market intelligence research using LinkedIn’s network of over 30 million professionals worldwide, approximately half of whom are IT and business decision makers.The news was quickly picked up by numerous bloggers including Doug Caverly, Bill Holmes and Layne Salter (an indication of how adept the PR folks at LinkedIn are with interactive PR).

Essentially, companys that want to conduct market research among difficult-to-reach B2B and IT decision makers will now be able to slice and dice profiles of LinkedIn’s large member base to reach groups with very specific attributes. From the participant side, “LinkedIn members who participate in a survey can choose from a variety of rewards including gift cards from Amazon, Starbucks, Best Buy, or make a donation to charities.”

This is all good—vendors can get valuable feedback from the right sample groups based on accurate LinkedIn profiles, LinkedIn gets another revenue stream, and participants get token rewards. But it seems to me there may be an opportunity missed here.

People join social networks for lots of reasons, but I’ve never of anyone joining for the purpose of collecting $10 gift cards or Starbucks coffee coupons. Among the top reasons people join are to get recognition and to form new relationships. Bloggers often join, for example, in order to both drive more traffic to their blogs and to connect with like-minded readers and other bloggers.

So…any company can spend some money on gift cards and use the new LinkedIn offering to collect market research data. But the really smart ones will find a way to tap the motivations of LinkedIn members and create a mutually benefical social experience that provides not just data, but understanding.

*****

Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentralDOTcom

The rest is here:
LinkedIn B2B Surveys - Will They be Social?

Water & Stone, a web development company specializing in Open Source technologies, released a popularity survey of open source content management systems. In the analysis of 19 of the most prominent open source content management systems, Water and Stone evaluated CMS’s on the basis of Rate of Adoption and Brand Strength, as well as a variety of other viability indicators and trends.

More here:
Survey: Most Popular Open Source CMS

Perhaps it’s a sign of an economy on the brink: I’m getting pitches for sites about crime. This week I heard from reps of both CrimeReports.com and CriminalSearches.com. Together, their services will help you find crime and criminals, let you look for police records on anyone, and illustrate how pervasive crime is in every community in the U.S.

All these crime reporting services take their data from public sources. It’s tax dollars, after all, that fund police departments and the courts. The trick is in the packaging. CrimeReports does a nice job of placing criminal activity icons on a Google Map. The main business of the company that makes it, Public Engines, is the repackaging of information for municipalities themselves, which can then use it internally to look for patterns, or put the maps on their own Web sites. The CrimeReports.com site lets users get the data directly, and it’s nicely laid out and easy to use. I found the data on the site up-to-date as well.

There is the neighborhood (CrimeReports.com).

Another good source for crime maps, in a limited selection of cities: Everyblock (review).

CriminalSearches, a product from PeopleFinders, lets you find criminals to go with your crimes. Enter in a name, and it will tell you if the person has a criminal record. That’s potentially useful if you’re hiring people for a business or for domestic services like child care. The details you get back from a search hit are sparse, though. Like PeopleFinders, CriminalSearches makes its money by selling you the full report. Or, if there’s someone you want to keep an eye out for, you can sign up for a free alert service that will tell you all the criminal activity of a person in the public databases. Be aware that the site does return traffic violations from some states (I found a family member’s record for driving without a seatbelt), so a positive hit in the database certainly does not indicate criminality.

We recommend careful consideration before hiring this person for a retail job (CriminalSearches.com).

The site will also show you a map of registered sex offenders in your neighborhood. If you want the full details on one, again, you’ll have to pay the service for the full report. But the free results will probably give more information than you wanted.

The real question these sites raise for me is this: What do you do with this data? Now that I can see that my neighborhood is a magnet for car break-ins and that burglaries are not uncommon, will I change my behavior? Not much. Living in the city means being careful no matter how safe a street appears on the surface. Likewise, I see that there are registered sex offenders within a few blocks. Should I avoid walking down that block with my son? I don’t think so. If I were moving, or hiring a babysitter I would, of course, find these services more useful–although even in combination they don’t tell what’s going to happen with people or places in the future.

But it is sure entertaining to see if your boss, friends, and co-workers have records.

Read the rest here:
New sites find crime and criminals

One of the key concerns for any fledgling start-up is overload. Too many users trying to get at your data is one thing, but dealing with the onslaught of notifications and data pings from connecting services can be quite another.

A new start-up called Gnip is trying to solve this problem by acting as the middleman. Got a service like Twitter that’s getting attacked in a thousand different directions by services trying to get at that data? Sending any new bits of information to Gnip will keep that attack coming on their end instead of yours, which will hopefully keep your service running a lot smoother, no matter how many folks are using it. ReadWriteWeb is calling it a “Grand Central Station for the social Web.”

In a perfect world, services that used this system could open up their APIs a little to encompass more activity, leading to faster third-party tools that take advantage of that data. Users would also be getting faster notifications and conceivably less downtime due to overload.

Sounds great for everyone, right?

Unfortunately, all of this will not be available from the get-go. Gnip is starting out by offering a notification service only, with polling, transformation, and identification coming later. Notifications are one of the main overloaders though, especially for services like Twitter that have had to throttle the amount of times any external service can ping it for data. There are also concerns about what happens if everyone starts relying on Gnip to pipe data to third-party tools, and the tool goes down–leading to something similar to when Amazon’s S3 has had blips, taking out entire businesses for hours at a time.

Gnip was founded by Eric Marcoullier, one of the co-founders of the now Yahoo-owned MyBlogLog.

Gnip bridges the data divide by offloading all the pings off your servers and onto theirs.

(Credit: Gnip)

Read more here:
Gnip to bridge the data divide for noisy Web services