As a business in the latter stages of 2011, have you jumped on the social media train or have you been left behind at the station? For many businesses, the integration to using social media to help generate leads has been slow and futile at best, leaving their return on investment )ROI( less than what .

A Recent infographic from Nielsen that focuses on Social Local and Mobile )SoLoMo( had a few interesting sound bites. One of that jumped out at me is that of smartphone users two-thirds of these users time is spent in apps. It doesn't say how much of this is spent on Angry Birds, but it does .

I got a sneak peek at the new Research Central tools in Raven. Still in beta, but the info available is already outstanding. Research Central offers data from MajesticSEO, SEMRush and SEOmoz, all via API access. What is really nice is that a lot of data I need is all in one spot. I can .

SEO can no longer afford to ignore social. Search engines are increasingly investing in trying to map a business' online social presence; as Duane Forrester from Bing explained at PubCon last week, consistent social engagement sends a clear signal that a website is a legitimate ongoing business, not just another fly-by-night content spinner. We all .

This coming Wednesday afternoon, after over a year of negotiations with multiple record labels, Google is set to launch its music store. Google is hopeful that the music store, which will offer a licensed cloud music service and sell digital downloads, will be able to quickly capture market share from Apple Inc.'s iTunes, Amazon, and .

Voltier Digital created an infographic that gives some amazing stats on a new generation of workers they call Digital Nomads - those that work virtually. One statistic that doesn't surprise me, due to knowing so many in this industry, is that 30% of the job market consists of independent workers. Are you a Digital Nomad? .

Taking advantage of trending topics is a tremendous opportunity to net more links and more traffic for your site while using a relatively small amount of resources. The beauty of promoting trending content is that you can ride the wave to additional free links beyond your initial promotional push. Who can argue with letting the .

Today Google announced that they have released some big improvements and BigQuery will now be available to "more companies of all sizes". A service preview was previously offered to a limited number of enterprises and developers. Google's BigQuery Service is a web service that allows companies to do interactive analysis of massively large datasets. BigQuery .

Holiday Shopping Is Going To Happen - Are You Ready? Will You Benefit? To get things started, let's take a look at some stats: Cyber Monday sales at online retail websites were 19.4% higher in 2010, compared to the online sales of Cyber Monday in 2009 - Coremetrics $1.028 billion was spent online on Cyber .

On Friday afternoon, ComScore released the October 2011 search engine market share data, which indicates that Google is continuing to gain market share and establish further dominance in the search market. The October report, which lists Google capturing 65.6% of the search market share, also indicated that Yahoo )Bing powered( fell to 15.2% and Bing grew slightly to 14.8%. However, since Bing powers both the Microsoft web properties and Yahoo, the net impact was a 0.

When I search for "SEO software," Google comes back with 40,000,000 results. Even if only 1% of those results are unique SEO software product pages, that leaves me with 400,000 SEO software options to choose from! Some of those options can be downright expensive too. A while back, I had been considering giving an SEO software like SEOMoz or Link-Assistant a try, but I always found myself unable to pull the trigger and actually make the final purchase.

Veracode.com made a really interesting infographic called "Google Vs Facebook on Privacy and Security". There are some Facebook things that concern me. Tell me what you think.

The recap this week is going to be a small one because I created a massive one for #pubcon . However, I did see the following articles and they had some great information. Pubcon Massive List Miss #Pubcon?

For a site owner, a blog can be an extremely useful tool for attracting and retaining customers. E-commerce bloggers have a harder job than most, in that they must fuse two very different worlds together seamlessly. The world and culture of blogging tends to be very casual, personal, social, and interactive. E-commerce, on the other hand, is professional and streamlined,

Many wanted to attend Pubcon, but couldn't and keeping up with the recaps of sessions is not easy. I have been keeping a record of all links I could find via social media, news and blog searches. If you missed Pubcon you can read the articles below and learn all weekend.

Koozai held nominations to help find the best facial hair in marketing which led to fifty nominations covering everything from bears to goatees. This infographic shows you who "made the cut" and you can vote for your favorite marketer. Movember inspired this competition. You can vote at Koozai or by clicking on the infographic.

Hey #pubconners it's snacktime again so that means I'm doing what everybody else is - rushing to the conference room so I can snag a seat next to a power outlet. A snack sounds good though, so if you're coming to salon F I'm at the last row of tables and I've saved a seat )and a power outlet( for whoever brings me a tasty treat. If you bring me 2 treats I might even give you link "> here.

Aaron Shear, of Boost Search Marketing , just finished speaking at a PubCon session on linkbuilding. His session focused on the challenges ecommerce sites experience while trying to build links and offered ideas for building links. He started off by saying that it is easy to tell someone to think big and try to build links for quantity over quality. However, while that worked well five years ago, it is very difficult to do today.

Planning a start-up? You may need to think about SEO and exact match domains before picking a brand name. If you're about to begin an internet business then you'll probably be planning an online marketing campaign that involves SEO. After all, most website visits begin with a search engine and exact match domains )EMDs( will often dominate the Google SERPs for a given result. The importance of EMDs is a frequently discussed topic,

Loren Baker, the VP of marketing at BlueGlass Interactive and founder of Search Engine Journal, spoke on a panel this morning that focused on how to build links that have maximum benefit and minimal risk. His presentation focused specifically on how to build links socially and virally. Early Linking: Baker first started building links in 2000 )before links mattered to search engines!( when links were primarily used to drive traffic to a site.