StumbleUpon is one of the most popular sites when it comes to getting your page to go viral. For everyday websites, it is more popular than Digg or any of the other social sites. One feature that StumbleUpon has that most other sites do not have is the ability to 'buy' traffic - yes - 'buy' traffic. You do not have to fight for keywords nor do you have to pay a premium for popular keywords. The traffic you buy can be targeted to your niche.

Social marketing is all about getting yourself, your site and your products/services out there in the public domain. To this end, should your social content be natural or should you manufacture your content to suit the social environment? Critics would argue that once your social content strays from what is natural for your site, you will start to look contrived. Of course, if the masses start to feel that your input is contrived,

Social Marketing is no different to marketing in general. If look at some of the principles from Intro to Marketing 101 you will see that they can be applied to social marketing with good results. Talk - and listen - to the people you are trying to reach. Go to where the people are and talk to them. Segment your audience - it can be difficult to totally segment your audience. You can however segment your audience into general age groupings and genre interests.

Social marketing is gaining interest in the commercial world at rapid rate and it is not surprising that niche micro social networks are now becoming popular. Peter Bowman's article on micro social networks published on Internet Evolution provides a good insight into the direction the new networks are heading. As social marketing becomes popular it becomes harder and harder to get noticed. With millions using these networks and the categories moving into the hundreds,

Reputation management is not always about what you do with your site. It is not always what you don't do either. Sometimes it is a good idea to sit back and watch what your competitors are doing. Often you can learn much either from their successes or, more importantly, their failures. I shouldn't just limit that statement to your competitors either. Just watching others from within your genre can be interesting.

For every positive there is an equal and opposite negative. At least, thats what I was taught at school - well something like that anyway. It runs true to social bookmarking sites as well. Often, no matter how many places your submit your site too, it may just take time to see any results. I said there were positives and negatives. For many sites, social bookmarking can bring very good results very quickly. For other sites,

I was reminded today of what a double edged sword forum communities can be. On the one hand, niche related forums can be a great place to hang out and build a reputation. However, as we mentioned in a previous post, push to hard or work to fast and you will find your reputation management strategies have been totally wasted. Forum communities have been around much longer than any of the current social bookmarking sites, some are older than the world wide web )www( itself.

When it comes to Web 2.0. social networking is not only all the rage, it is the rage. If you haven't got into the swing of things yet, it's not too late - you may just have to get into some speed dating to catch up. How quickly can you become involved in the social networking game, it's totally up to you. Here are my six P's that may help you catch the field. Popularity - join sites that are already popular. These are the mainstream sites that have a lot of traffic.

We have business plans, marketing plans and financial plans. Do we need a social marketing plan? There are so many quality social marketing sites now that it would make sense to develop a plan similar to your business or marketing plan. Having such a broad range of social marketing web sites available to choose from, you need to decide which sites take priority, which sites need a lot of interaction and which sites can be utilized with a minimum of interaction.

"And everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go." - from the nursery rhyme, "Mary Had a Little Lamb" If Mary = online technology, then the Lamb = Mashable . If you want to be in on everything in Web 2.0 from the beginning, subscribe to the Mashable feed. You'll get a bite of information about everything happening in the tech world. You can skim 98% of it quickly, and you can click on a link for the other 2% that really applies to you. Very useful tool.

"As always with WordPress, we don't claim any of these features to be perfect, or to be better than everyone else in the world, but they are done by and for the people and the one thing we do promise is that with every release we listen and do our best to improve." - Matt Mullenwegg, founding developer of WordPress WordPress 2.5 gives you many new options in your social blogging. Here is a partial list of the upgrades: Cleaner, faster, better organized,

Social networking is all about value and respect. If you provide good value, you will get respect ' and traffic. If you provide questionable - or negative - value, then the members of social networking websites will conclude that you have a lack of respect for them. They'll either ignore you or ride you out of town on a rail. So what is "questionable or negative value"? Simple: affiliate links or any other kind of self-promotion.

Features of YouTube Insight - a free new social marketing tool from YouTube - gives YouTubers detailed stats about the videos they upload: How often their videos are viewed by geographic area A popularity comparison to all videos in that market in a certain timeframe How long it takes for a video to become popular what happens to video views as popularity peaks How does this help you?

You often hear that each social bookmarking site is different, and it's best to focus your content on the social bookmarking platform that values that type of content most. Good plan. But how do the different sites value content? SocialMediaTrader did an analysis of 500 front-page articles from February, 2008, for several different popular social bookmarking sites. The sample size isn't huge,

Yahoo announced yesterday a deeper commitment to social networking. Yahoo has joined Google's OpenSocial initiative, whose purpose is to have developers come up with innovative new applications for the most popular social networking websites. To make the web more relevant for users, OpenSocial is encouraging apps that not only work on many different social networking sites, but also connect them.

Is it worth your time to get into podcasting? Instat.com says that 182 million MP3 players were shipped in 2006, up 42% from 2005. Probably the main reason is that so much cheap, legitimate music is available online ' but it also means your own market is probably buying more and more of the exact social networking media you can use to communicate to them. Projection for 2011: 275 million players shipped! If you have a business, or a blog, or any sort of web presence,

You've no doubt heard the complaints that advertising on the social networking websites doesn't get the return expected by online marketers. High pageviews, low click-thru rates. However, there's another way of looking at this: social networking websites can deliver a demographically focused audience that is not widely available online. Even offline, only TV can deliver this type of audience. In February,

Social marketing is all about merging content and marketing. In a recent interview, Jamie Kantrowitz, Myspace senior V-P for marketing & content, made the following points: Just like you have a home address, we're closing in on the point where everyone will have an internet address, which will be their social profile of choice. The web will get even more portable & more responsive. Users will be able to get the content they want, no matter when or where they want it.

People get confused about where to start or what to focus on when they begin social bookmarking or any other aspect of social networking. Just remember the basic: it's a relationship game. And the key to building relationships with people is to share your story. Which means you've got to have a story. Start with the short version. You can build on it later. The short version is ALWAYS useful, in any situation, online or offline. In sales,

The idea of the social marketing team was probably invented in a coffee shop. Isn't it ironic that Starbucks is now looking to social marketing to save its coffee shops? Not long ago, Starbucks was the golden child of business, with meteoric growth. Times have changed. Starbucks will close about 100 stores in 2008. So Starbucks has come up with "MyStarbucksIdea" ,