Retailers have experimented with social marketing for their back-to-school campaigns and appear to be liking the results. Mike Sachoff reports on WebProNews that retailers such as J.C. Penny, Sears, Victoria's Secret and Apple all used social media in as a way to market their products to the specific demographics. J.C.

Google adds a friends list, social bookmarking, RSS feed item sharing, comments on blog posts and a blog recommendation engine based on your friends list In Google Reader, you can create your Google profile;you can now add a Google Reader shared items friends list, add individual pages or posts to Google Reader shared items and get this Google Reader now has a blog Recommendation Engine. - You can create a list of friends from Gmail contacts. - You can mass email your friends.

Royal.Pingdom undertook a study of 12 leading social sites to see where they gained the most traffic. The results were quite surprising and for social marketing and social networking purposes, quite revealing. To summarize their results: MySpace: This is the only social site that showed the US as the major source of traffic. Puerto Rico and Australia filled second and third. Facebook: Facebook was the only one to really show a global source of traffic. Turkey,

AOL have acquired the social site, Socialthing. AOL obviously has some plans for the site as the site has been in closed beta since its inception last year. The announcement on the Socialthing blog came as no surprise as it had been rumored for several weeks. What is surprising is that AOL has opened their purse strings to acquire anything given their recent financial history. Perhaps AOL can become a little more user friendly by taking on this site.

For websites that incorporate sales and checkout facilities, one option that you may be able to take advantage of is a simple poll. Ask your customers which social media sites they regularly visit. You may even be able to extend your poll to find out how, when and why they use social media. The results may give you an insight as to which social media sites are most popular amongst your customers. This data can be quite valuable for future social marketing campaigns.

Social media has become somewhat of a powerhouse when it comes to spreading information faster and further than any other media including television. Whilst television may appear in billions of homes around the world, its impact is generally only for the period of a broadcast. The internet is more permanent allowing individuals to return to the same data as often as they wish. Furthermore, they can interact with others from around the world,

The number of small, one or two person operated online businesses is growing at an astonishing rate. There are several reasons for this growth, one of the most common being costs. With an online business there is little in the way of setup costs and running costs can be kept to a minimum. These small businesses are using social marketing far more successfully than their larger counterparts.

One of the biggest problems with social networking, in fact with any online social activity, is anonymity. In reality, you have no idea who it is you are talking too. This is not a new phenomenon. Since we have been able to communicate online, people have misrepresented themselves. Sometimes it is their gender, or their age, at other times it is their profession, or at least their position.

StumbleUpon has had a few problems that over the years have become rather frustrating. The first of these was the limit of 200 friends. We got over that - too many to invite to a party anyway. However, half of them may have left, closed their account even; they still remained on your friends list and counted towards that 200 limit. Finally things are changing and it seems they are changing for the better. The 200 friend limit will go, but then, so will your friends.

One of the distractions of social bookmarking is the 'voting' component. Every bookmarking site has some form of voting, whether it is a thumb, a digg or a sphinn, it all the same. What motivates you to vote? If you were to vote every link to sent to you, you would be there all day reading and voting so my next question is, how many of these requests do you actually read? To be honest, I read very few. I read the title that is sent to me, and,

Social bookmarking can deliver a lot of traffic to any site if it is managed properly. For most site owners, particularly bloggers, they submit their page to StumbleUpon or Digg, nag those in their contact list to support the submission, then sit back and expect record traffic. Generally speaking, social bookmarking it not that easy. Once you have submitted your page, you need to start to market it which means socializing.

WordPress users may be interested to learn that a new adaption of their favorite blog software, called buddypress, will be released later this year. Buddypress, formerly ChickSpeak, is set to turn any WordPress blog into a social networking site. Using WordPress-MU )multi user(, buddypress will enable various users to log in and create their own pages. The original ChickSpeak pages from WordPress.

Viral marketing does not necessarily lead to an increase in sales, it does generate a lot talk and a lot of visitors. However, viral marketing is not always have the positive outcomes you may want to see. If you set out to try and achieve a viral marketing sensation they be sure that everything is in place to support the outcomes. there have been many marketing campaigns that have gone wrong and yet gone viral, all for the wrong reasons. Poor promotion, poor support,

I was invited to join another social networking site recently by a contact on yet another social networking site. I had a look at the site to see if it had anything to offer. I also looked at my contacts profile and list of contacts. Recognize that name, and that name, oh yeah - I recognize them as well. It struck me that half the contacts in that profile where on the other social networking site.

In yesterday's post I wrote on the value of joining forum communities. They are often niche related provide for a real dialogue between individuals on topics related to that niche. Luis Sandoval Jr. from dailyslackr.blogspot.com left a comment that concluded with the question: The real question is what's the next step after forums? Is there even a next step more niche concentrated then a forum? It is an interesting question and rather than just responding to the comment,

Forum communities sound outdated but they alive and well and thriving. Forums by their nature are niche related. Being niche specific is what gives a forum its power. Everyone has come together to form a community based on a particular field. These days you can find forum communities on just about any topic. Whether it is babies, photography or even earth moving equipment, forums are available and great places to undertake a social marketing program.

StumbleUpon recently imposed a site on Darren Rowse, aka ProBlogger, or at least one of his sites. This followed a social link love exercise where everyone was able to connect with liked minded people on the various social bookmarking sites. Once the word had got out, particularly through Twitter, the word on his banning became viral and spread around the blog world extremely quickly. In fact it was one of the fastest viral messages seen in many years.

Many website owners concentrate wholly and solely on search engine marketing and little if any time on social marketing. One reason often stated is that it is too time consuming, difficult to measure and doesn't deliver targeted traffic. It can be argued that search engine marketing fits those three criteria as well - but only if done poorly and the same can be said for social marketing. There are counter arguments for each of those points. Time: it can all be relative.

It appears that social media, particularly in the form of blogs, can now be used by public companies to meet their public disclosure requirements. Neville Hobson has reported the story on WebProNews . Yesterday, the US Securities and Exchange Commission )SEC( approved new guidance for publicly-listed companies in using traditional websites and social media channels like blogs to meet the SEC's public disclosure requirements under Regulation FD.

Social media is always changing or, as some would say, evolving. I am not I sure I approve of the latest changes to the social media landscape. Sphere is my first target today. The content being 'sphun' is often pure spam now, and not very well disguised, if at all. What has, in the past, been a good site for professionals to interact on has now become rather stale and spam ridden. I noticed one conversation complaining of the lack of new,