Organizations of all sizes are recognizing the magnetic qualities of content that’s too awesome not to share – content that provides real value in answering our questions and helping us solve real-life problems. Inbound marketing budgets have grown nearly 50 percent, while some 58 percent of surveyed marketers said their organizations do some form of inbound marketing, according to HubSpot’s 2013 State of Inbound Marketing report.

While it’s amazing to witness the growth of inbound, it’s also important to remember the pioneers who helped get us to this point over the past decade. This post will give you a brief history of inbound marketing by examining some of the thought leaders who have paved the way.

Permission marketing

Seth Godin wrote a blog post back in 2008 called “Permission Marketing” that has had profound effects on the way that many of us think about marketing.

“Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them,” Godin wrote in the post. “It recognizes the new power of the best consumers to ignore marketing. It realizes that treating people with respect is the best way to earn their attention.”

Contrast permission marketing with Interruption Marketing, those irritating marketing tactics like display ads that interrupt us when we’re visiting a website, reading a newspaper or watching a television show. So the Godin model offers something of true value to the consumer instead of inundating them with unwanted sales pitches and product offers.

Halligan and Shah

Two executives at the Boston-based marketing software company HubSpot are also pioneers in inbound: CEO and co-founder Brian Halligan and CTO Dharmesh Shah.

Halligan describes the contrast between inbound and outbound marketing – cold calling, seminars, email blasts to purchased lists and outsourced telemarketing – in a 2010 blog post.

“Rather than doing outbound marketing to the masses of people who are trying to block you out,” Halligan wrote, “I advocate doing ‘inbound marketing’ where you help yourself ‘get found’ by people already learning about and shopping in your industry.”

Last year, Halligan told Forbes he expects traditional marketing to get “obliterated” over the next 10 years as the “massive shift” in the relationship between consumers and brands continues to evolve.

Meerman Scott

David Meerman Scott, a marketing executive, public speaker and HubSpot advisor, is another thought leader in the inbound space. Scott wrote an influential book called “The New Rules of Marketing and PR” that’s sold more than 250,000 copies. He also introduced the concept of “newsjacking,” which he defines as “the process by which you inject your ideas or angles into breaking news, in real time, in order to generate media coverage for yourself and your business.”

Newsjacking can work because we live in an age that’s saturated with 24/7 news where people will often search for more information about the latest development. That’s where newsjacked content can reach an interested audience with a fresh take on a timely topic.

Marketing magnets in the Golden Age

As inbound comes of age, we’ll continue to see more announcements like the Moz rebranding. Slingshot SEO has gone through a similar journey with the launch of our sister brand, digitalrelevance™, as we focus on delivering inbound marketing campaigns that market like a magnet.

We’re described this era as the Golden Age of Marketing because inbound marketing leaders are well positioned for the opportunities that come as more and more people tire of outdated outbound tactics. We’ll continue to write about inbound marketing on this blog, but here are a few other resources for learning more about inbound:

Inbound.org: A partnership between Moz and HubSpot, this site serves up hundreds of articles and discussions about trends in inbound.

The Moz blog: This will be a blog to watch as Moz continues to make its presence felt in inbound.

Our Inbound Resources: This section of the digitalrelevance site has The Inbound Marketer’s Guide to Earned Media, The Enterprise Blog Post Optimization Guide and more helpful resources.

The HubSpot blog: Described as “All inbound marketing, all the time,” HubSpot’s blog covers all things inbound.

So, what are your thoughts about the development of inbound marketing? Who do you feel have been the most influential personalities in the movement and what are your expectations for inbound’s future?

Much like Pandora, iTunes Radio will allow us to customize radio stations based on genres, songs or artists. We’ll be able to favorite songs that we like on a particular station, sending additional signals about our unique musical interests.

With iTunes, Apple is the largest music seller in the world – so the company already has tremendous brand recognition in digital music. Nevertheless, Apple will have to be careful not to cannibalize its digital music sales by giving us free listening in the cloud; with iTunes Radio, we’ll see prices to purchase individual tracks as an enticement to buy.

Another challenge for Apple will be the existing and forthcoming competition. Google announced its own streaming music service – Google Play Music All Access – last month at its I/O Developer Conference. So streaming music will represent the latest chapter of Google and Apple trading elbows. And that’s just for starters.

Google vs. Apple … vs. Amazon

Amazon reportedly wants into the scrum as well in what has been described as the next round in the “Google-Amazon Deathmatch.” Amazon sells a ton of music through its Amazon MP3 service and like Google has the infrastructure and relationships to make a serious go in streaming music.

The music biz continues to change as more and more of us head to the cloud for our daily listening. Large companies like Google or Amazon might make better headway in negotiating licensing deals than the smaller existing companies in streaming music. (Artist royalties have certainly been a major obstacle to profitability for Pandora.) And Apple still knows how to create and market products as well as anyone. Game on.

Playing nice: who are partners and who are enemies?

So if Amazon follows Apple’s entry into the fray, it will be interesting to see how things shake out. There are plenty of other online music companies already out there like Rdio and Last.fm, but what could really complicate matters are the loyalties of partner companies. For example, in April Twitter launched its #music service as a way of letting people share and listen to music in real time without leaving Twitter. The social network partnered with Spotify and Rdio and, in fact, if you’re not a member of Spotify or Rdio then all you get is a 60-second preview of each track.

So how will the entry of companies like Twitter alter the cloud music ecosystem in the longer term? And how will the Google-Amazon-Apple musical battle royale play out in the cloud?

In the end, much of the success or failure of these cloud music ventures will come down to consumer choice: Will we pay $10 bucks a month for Google Play Music All Access or suffer the indignity of annoying commercials to listen to Pandora’s free version? Or will Apple lure droves of us to iTunes Radio with features like previews of upcoming songs?

Then there’s the performers themselves: after all, they’re the ones talented enough to create all those songs we want to buy. Which cloud music platforms will be the best at circumnavigating that fragile love triangle between themselves, the fans and the bands? Even Lars Ulrich is now on board with the new internet playbook – so who will get the most marketing mileage out of developing strong relationships with artists and record labels? Save me a front row seat to watch.

Google’s social network has grown considerably since Summer 2011, yet skeptics abound, describing G+ as a ghost town where people aren’t truly active like they are on Facebook or Twitter. But a new G+ redesign could silence the skeptics, if some 41 new features that emphasize context and content discovery generate user engagement as Mountain View hopes.

New G+ features fall into three main categories that we’ll explore individually: Stream, Hangouts and Photos.

Developing a Deeper Stream

We love using our smartphones, tablets, PCs and televisions in tandem, and it’s not just techie people. Some 90 percent of people move across devices to accomplish a goal, with smartphones by far the most common starting point for sequential activity, according to Google research.

Even when we’re watching television in the evenings, many of us use our smartphones as a second screen (although it’s often been Twitter that we use to communicate in real time about the Super Bowl or a political debate).

Recognizing our love for second screens, Google has rolled out a new user experience for G+ that’s designed to be appreciated across mobile and desktop. There’s a multi-column layout where you see one, two or three columns of content depending on your screen size, orientation and the device you’re using. Multiple columns could make content more engaging on both company and individual pages because you’re not scrolling down just a never-ending single column. Another new feature involves enlarged photos and videos that can fill the entire width of a stream – a feature that’s supposed to make our streams more attractive and easier to scan.

Another noteworthy feature is the automatic addition of hashtags, designed to make it easier to explore your personal interests. For example, G+ added an “Indianapolis” hashtag to a post about Indianapolis as an emerging technology hotbed; click on the “Indianapolis” hashtag, and it loads more posts about Indy that you can flip through by clicking an arrow. You can delete an automatic hashtag by with a single click if you don’t want it on your post.

Let’s hang, man

A new standalone version of Hangouts that combines text, photos and live video across devices represents another facet of the redesign. Improved features involve richer messaging, a conversation history that allows you to relive past moments, and better notification options. Hangouts is part of Gmail (click the “Start Hangout” icon and Install the plugin) and can be downloaded from Google Play, the App Store and the Chrome Web Store.

Data Center Darkroom

Other new G+ features involve beautifying our photos, including Auto Backup, Auto Highlight, Auto Enhance and the so-called “Auto Awesome.”

Auto Backup automatically backs up your photos as you taken them. Everyone gets unlimited free at standard photo size (2048px) and 15GB of free storage at full size. The Auto Highlight feature helps you select your favorite photos by emphasizing your family and friends, landmarks and other “positive attributes,” rather than duplicated, blurry or poor exposure shots. Auto Enhance helps you improve brightness, contrast, focus and other factors automatically. And the “Auto Awesome” feature can develop a new image from a set of photos like portraits or panoramas.

Don’t Mess with the Might of the Mountain?

Some 190 million people are now active on G+, but the social initiative has “only just begun,” according to Google’s post announcing the redesign. The growing social network represents Google’s fourth attempt at developing a dominant social presence over the past decade, and Mountain View has put a ton of resources into improving G+ (and integrating it with other products like Gmail).

So the question remains: Is G+ poised to dominate the Social Media Landscape and overtake Facebook as the social kingpin? The jury is still out, but this new redesign probably gives Google a better shot.

Instead of attempting to take Google head on, Dogpile attempts to deliver a better search experience by fetching results from numerous search engines including Google, Yahoo and Yandex, and then delivering the best results for your particular query.

Making a Bet on Metasearch

Dogpile is trying to take advantage of the frustration we can have when we can’t seem to find the right results in Google and we have to conduct multiple searches to find what we want. Dogpile wants to be our one-stop shop where we can quickly find the best results on the web through crowdsourcing search engines that find results based on different algorithms. In making its case, Dogpile released research in 2007 that results on major search engines were diverging with increasingly less overlap.

Dogpile uses a technology it terms “Metasearch” to describe its spin on crowdsourcing. When you search something like “Pacers Game 2,” Dogpile fetches results from multiple search engines, analyzes the respective results, eliminates duplicate results and delivers the results it deems the best. This method supposedly gives you the most complete list of results while saving you time. This Metasearch play is in some ways similar to blekko’s 3 Engine Monte, except it’s Dogpile instead of you that’s choosing which results are best (and blending them as necessary).

Arfie, go fetch!

Arfie the mutt has been Dogpile’s friendly mascot since its early days in 1996. He’s a staple on the website and occasionally sits front and center for holiday logos such as a nod to “Lady and the Tramp” on Valentine’s Day.

Today Dogpile is part of Infospace, a tech company that serves a network of over 100 web publishers and has long-standing supply agreements with Google and Yahoo. Infospace also operates two other branded search sites: MetaCrawler and WebCrawler.

While Google and Bing tend to dominate the headlines, sites like Dogpile have occasionally gotten some digital ink over the years as a way to “go beyond Google” and search the results of several search engines at once.

So what do you think of Metasearch offerings like Dogpile? Are you happy with the results you tend to get with Google (or other major search engine), or are you occasionally looking for alternative means to answer your questions?

So, is Square truly going to change how we pay for things? Will it complement or kill the credit card? Let’s explore the possibilities.

Creating a thinner wallet

Square was founded in 2009 by Jack Dorsey, the creator of Twitter, and Jim McKelvey, a computer science engineer and businessman. In 2010, Square launched as a service that lets businesses accept credit or debit cards on their smartphones or tablet computers. Companies can choose to pay per month or per swipe through the simple pricing model for Square Reader, a small plastic device that plugs into the audio jack of an Android or iOS device. Business owners can get a free reader or download a free app that links to their bank account.

Here’s the coolest part. Square has created several products that appeal not only to merchants but to consumers as well. Square Wallet is a free app that links to your credit or debit card and gives you hands-free checkout – just say your name to pay for something. Wallet also allows you to explore nearby businesses, collect rewards and share information with friends.

Starbucks: The tipping point?

Easily the best known adopter of Square has been Starbucks. The big-name coffee chain allows you to pay with Square at some 7,000 locations nationwide. Why not just use the Starbucks app to pay? Well, the Starbucks app works like a gift card that needs to be reloaded when you run out of money; but with Square, scanning your phone is the exact same as swiping your debit card. And after you’ve bought your venti mocha latte, you can also search for other nearby vendors that accept Square payments.

Reimagining the Register

Everyone is familiar with the traditional cash register. They’ve been around for decades at our local supermarkets, restaurants and hardware stores. Now, however, merchants have a new alternative from Square that’s equally ambitious as Wallet: Square Stand.

Stand functions as a sleek, customizable point-of-sale system that allows merchants to run their business through their iPad – accepting cash, credit and Square Wallet payments and recording real-time sales data. Priced at $299, Stand holds a merchant’s iPad and seamlessly integrates their point-of-sale accessories. Stand will be available on the Square website, at Best Buy and at other yet-to-be-announced retailers.

Challenges for the disruptor

Despite its disruptive technologies, Square still faces a myriad of competitors. PayPal has launched an iPad payments app called PayPal Here that will compete with Square’s iPad register app. Google also has a virtual wallet product called Google Wallet – and it’s always a mistake to overlook the titan of Mountain View. And then there are the established financial institutions: Bank of America has also taken on the startup with a mobile payments service of its own.

Another challenge relates to technology adoption. Buying coffee at Starbucks is one thing, but has Square truly reached a tipping point to take it past the early adopter stage and into the mainstream? Even if a tipping point has been reached, Square will have no shortage of competitors looking to become the leader in mobile payments – an industry that will only continue to grow as we become increasingly connected to (and reliant on) our smartphones and tablets.

So, have you used Square for your mobile payments, or do you prefer to pay in other ways? We’d love to hear your thoughts on the startup or the mobile payments industry.

Image credit: ItsAllTech.com

This is the story of Lycos, another search pioneer that got caught in the crosshairs of Google’s emergence as the industry’s dominant force. The search engine with the dog logo would later reinvent itself as a more diversified entity that includes everything from news to gaming. But this new chapter didn’t come without years of difficulty.

Go fetch me them results, boy!

Lycos began as a research project at Carnegie Mellon University back in 1994 that was propelled with the help of about $2 million in venture capital funding. The company developed one of the first crawler-based search engines that could rapidly fetch results to user search queries.

In 1996, Lycos became the first search engine to go public, ending its first day of trading with a market value of nearly $300 million – sending a signal to investors that Tech was hot; the Lycos IPO came a year after the IPO frenzy of Netscape, the Silicon Valley startup that started the Internet boom.

Yahoo and Excite followed Lycos with IPOs of their own as Wall Street became increasingly excited about Internet stocks. But over time the Dot-com bubble would burst and the Tech casualties would mount. As Google rose to prominence in Search, Lycos had to go another direction entirely just to survive.

From billions to millions

Lycos was sold to the Spanish Internet company Terra Networks at the height of the Internet boom in 2000 for $12.5 billion in stock. Lycos would suffer in the aftermath of the dot-com bubble burst, but still survive. A decade after the Terra purchase, Lycos was sold to an India-based marketing company called Ybrant Digital for just $36 million.

Despite its massive drop in market value, Lycos still estimated the 2010 traffic for its network of sites at 12 to 15 million monthly unique visitors in the United States. That network of sites would continue to grow with products related to Games, Website Tools, Email, Weather and News.

Back to the future

Most recently, Lycos has returned to its roots with a new emphasis on search. CEO Rob Balazy told The Next Web last December that Lycos would focus more on head terms and user experience in 2013, merging “the notion of a search-type activity with a curated content experience.” Today there’s a search box at the top of the Lycos home page – above a dozen topic boxes featuring everything from web publishing to entertainment.

Gaming has also been a major initiative in recent days. Lycos has garnered headlines with the launch of Evincible, a social word guessing game designed for mobile where you sign into Facebook and play with anyone from friends to strangers.

So, what are your memories of the original Lycos search engine? Had you lost sight of Lycos or followed its transformation into a more diversified company? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

Image credit: @Lycos

This is the story of a site that survived a scare from Google by shifting its focus, a site that still gets enough traffic after all these years to be ranked among the top 10 U.S. websites by comScore.

By Jeeves

Ask Jeeves was founded back in 1996 in Berkeley, Calif., as a way for searchers to get answers to their online questions through traditional keyword searching and questions posed in everyday language. Jeeves became a well-known brand that helped distinguish the company its amidst competitors in the early years of search. In 2005, Ask Jeeves was acquired by IAC, a global media and Internet company, and the Jeeves character was later phased out, at least in the United States, with the site becoming known as Ask.com.

Like many other search companies, Ask.com ultimately couldn’t compete with the likes of Google, which came to dominate the market with its proprietary search algorithm and an obsession with relevance and speed. Ask.com shifted its focus in late 2010 from search to Q&A as it faced an uphill battle as a distant third to Google and Microsoft. Ad Age opined “The Long, Sad Story of Ask.com” – predicting further difficulties for the site in Q&A. But the old butler wasn’t ready to hang up his platter just yet.

Adding to the answer frenzy

Somehow Ask.com has done more than just endure as it competes with Q&A sites like Yahoo! Answers, ChaCha and Quora. Today, Ask has more than 100 million users who ask questions ranging from “How long do goldfish live?” to “What do you do for a blistered burn?” You simply type a question into the bar at the top and click “Find Answers.” You can also click on the Q&A Community tab to browse a plethora of Q&A categories (and many visitors are in the mood to browse rather than find a single answer).

Ask.com made a couple of notable acquisitions last year as it strove to emerge as a Q&A notable. First came the acquisition of nRelate, a content discovery platform that provides products like plug-ins for thousands of content publishers. Ask followed that up with the purchase of About.com, a top 20 U.S. web property that had produced several million articles written by subject matter experts.

The moves came in a year when everyone seemed to be talking about the rise of question and answer communities like Quora, where you can not only ask questions, but also share your own knowledge and engage thought leaders. Many would think that the Q&A space might not be much easier to win than search.

But today Ask.com is in a hiring mode as it puts a greater emphasis on content. It is also using social media rock star Instagram in its latest bid to engage users.

So, what are your thoughts on Ask? Are you surprised that the company has experienced a resurgence in its Q&A incarnation? We’d love to hear your thoughts about Ask or Q&A communities in general.

Cubicles have been a corporate mainstay for decades, yet many of us loathe the thought of sitting in a little nook whose very walls separate us from our friends and peers. Cubicles have been lampooned in popular culture by cartoons like Dilbert and movies like Office Space in recent years; however, the original intent of cubicles wasn’t to isolate us with partially enclosed workspaces.

We can always meet at the water cooler, Jimmy

The original cubicle concept dates back to 1967, when Robert Propst designed the “Action Office II” for manufacturer Herman Miller. Over the years, the office cubicle allowed workers to personalize their workspace and offered some degree of privacy. Yet we have found disadvantages aplenty with cubicles.

First, cubicle partitions require us to walk around in order to collaborate. We can’t make eye contact as easily as with more open work concepts, and we can’t have collaborative meetings as easily in smaller enclosed spaces.

Silicon Valley companies like Google challenged the status quo by creating more open concepts that encourage collaboration and innovation. But it’s not just a California thing. Here at digitalrelevance, we have an open workspace that allows us to easily work together across departments and teams. Sometimes our seating arrangements feel like musical chairs, but the point is that we’re in close proximity with no physical cube walls to separate us or clutter our line of sight. We can always roll over a few chairs, cluster around a whiteboard or quickly communicate with gestures and voices from across the room.

Some companies that previously advocated the cube are changing course. Take Yahoo, for example: CEO Marissa Mayer found a much different work environment there than she’d had at Google. Floors of cubicles at Yahoo were nearly empty as many employees had decided to work from home instead of reporting to the office. (To be fair, Mayer had plenty of other problems to address at Yahoo besides just seating arrangements; nevertheless, enclosed workspaces likely contributed to the low morale that was afflicting the company.)

The Cubicle’s Midlife Crisis

It’s been more than 40 years since the first cubicle was introduced to the workplace. And in looking back, things never should have progressed this way. Propst’s original Action Office design didn’t conceal a worker completely but was rather meant to give us a sense of personal space. Many factors played into the cubicle’s runaway popularity, including a mushrooming white collar workforce and rising real estate prices. Cubicles were the way to go if you needed a cheaper alternative to the traditional floorplan.

So, if the cubicle is dying a slow death as tastes in workspace finally change, what other options are on the horizon besides the open space concept championed by tech companies? Designers have been working on plenty of cubicle alternatives that could become the new cubicle someday (minus the six-foot walls). After all these years, Herman Miller is leading the charge toward post-cubicle offices that maximize workstation flexibility.

Cubicles will always have their defenders and for some companies they work just fine; the rest of us envision a day when the walls between us come crashing down.

Image credit: Matthew Crosby

Ford’s assembly line for the Ford Model T came in 1913. As we celebrate that achievement 100 years later, let’s consider how the assembly line concept can apply to something completely different: blogging.

Then mend it, dear Henry

Some undoubtedly find the thought of mass-produced blog posts abhorrent. Posts should be finely sculpted things – caressed with a writer’s loving touch over the course of many hours as the writer determines what his audience really wants him to say. That’s like a newspaper reporter missing a deadline because he can’t let go of a story. Know your audience, think metaphorically and write your posts in two hours or less.

Back to Ford’s assembly line. Ford had to gather all of the raw materials for the Model T and then figure out how to line up his workers in the right sequence so they could each add their parts in the most efficient manner. Let’s consider the raw materials needed for a blog post:

• Ideas: Creativity is a valuable digital currency. Your post starts with an interesting idea.
• Writing ability: You’ve got to locate the writing talent in your organization. Select the best writers and get them fired up about your blog. Find others with writing potential and nurture them with training, encouragement and incentives.
• Subject matter experience: You can’t fake this. If you’re writing about inbound marketing, you need to immerse yourself in the subject by reading other blog posts, talking to your peers and, most importantly, learning from direct experience with client marketing campaigns.
• Promotion: Publishing your blog post isn’t the final step. You need to promote it on your social profiles like Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn. Create that spark of interest by being smart in how you promote (considering factors like the time of day and which social networks might work best for a particular piece of content). Encourage employees to share blog posts and monitor your analytics to see trends in how readers are consuming and interacting with your content.

Some assembly required

Now that we’ve considered the raw materials, let’s look at the assembly line process in terms of efficiency. How can you keep your blog filled with quality posts that are interesting to your audience?

Internal champions: Create a group of internal champions for your company blog. This group of bloggers and would-be bloggers should meet once a week to talk about topic ideas – challenging and encouraging each other to produce relevant posts that readers will want to share. Encourage each other to take risks and then don’t be afraid to do postmortems to see what posts worked, what posts didn’t and why. Get someone from your marketing department to attend these bloggers’ club meetings and add upcoming posts to your company’s content calendar.

Vertical integration: Vertical integration in blogging means having an appropriate degree of control of the entire process from approving the writer’s initial idea to promotion of the post after it’s published. It means having buy-in from as many people in the company as possible to contribute writing ideas, write blog posts, encourage others to write or help promote published posts. It means knowing what’s in your pipeline of blog posts so that you can spice up the mix with guest blog posts from experts outside your company. And it means having the guts to say “No” to an idea or piece of content that doesn’t meet your standards.

Co-authorship: Sometimes writers get energized by working together. Encourage your bloggers to co-author pieces or divide up the work in another way such as one person writing and another providing research and editing. Sometimes people don’t want a byline, but they might still have subject matter knowledge and be willing to work behind the scenes.

Eyes on it: Make sure your company is serious about editing blog posts before they’re published. Most bloggers will edit their own posts before they submit them, but it’s still important to get more sets of eyes on the posts before publication; otherwise, you risk damaging the writer’s (and your company’s) credibility with silly mistakes. Also, errors that slip through can erode a writer’s trust over time and potentially make them less willing to contribute.

Do you agree with these ideas about blogging? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

Image credit:. Wikimedia.org

In recent years, we’ve seen the increasing importance of quality content when it comes to winning in Search. More recently, we’ve seen the emergence of social signals. The algorithms continue to change at a breakneck pace, so how do we keep up with the latest in search? Well, one way is to follow Search Thought Leaders on Twitter so you can see their observations and analysis of new trends. This post will profile some thought leaders that you should follow or add to a Twitter list.

John Battelle (@johnbattelle)

Twitter followers: 223,861

Klout score: 83

Battelle wrote the book on search. Specifically, he wrote a book called The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture; some eight years later, it remains arguably the best book ever written on the search industry. Battelle is an entrepreneur and journalist whose reach has included Wired magazine, The Web 2 Conferences and Federated Media Publishing.

Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan)

Twitter followers: 309,938

Klout score: 86

Danny Sullivan is Founding Editor of Search Engine Land, a prominent blog that covers search. He has been covering the industry since 1995 and is frequently cited as an expert on the field.

Avinash Kaushik (@avinash)

Twitter followers: 99,414

Klout Score: 83

Kaushik is an author and digital marketing evangelist at Google. He is an expert on web analytics and a noted speaker about how to use data to drive decision making.

Matt Cutts (@mattcutts)

Twitter followers: 232,340

Klout Score: 84

When this guy speaks, people in the search space listen. Cutts is head of the webspam team at Google and professionals in the industry have always paid close attention to his tweets, videos or public comments about anything regarding search.

Rand Fishkin (@randfish)

Twitter followers: 91,809

Klout score: 78

Fishkin is the CEO and Founder of SEOmoz, the Seattle-based company that’s long been at the heart of search with its blog, products and resources. Fishkin regularly speaks at industry conferences and has a passion for content, social networks and, of course, search. He is also the co-founder of Inbound.org, a community for Inbound Marketing.

So, those are a handful of the many people worth following on Twitter if you want to keep up on the latest in search. A few other notable feeds are Search Engine Watch, Search Engine Journal, A Googler and Bing. What other feeds have you found to be helpful in keeping up with the search space? We’d love to hear about other helpful feeds that you follow.

The recording industry has moved light years from the days when everyone listened to FM radio and bought compact discs at the mall music store. But in some ways, the song remains the same. Today, Pandora sits at the heart of a controversy about artist compensation, even as it continues to break new musical ground.

200 million listeners can’t be wrong

Pandora has been around for more than a decade, helping people discover new music based on their individual tastes. As you enter more songs, the service learns more about your preferences and can recommend other tracks ranging from the well-known to the obscure.

For example, you can start a blues station by typing in an artist like “Son House.” You’ll get a song like “Preachin’ Blues” and see a list of related artists like Robert Johnson, Blind Boy Fuller, Mississippi Fred McDowell and Lightnin’ Hopkins. Then you can shuffle to other Son House songs or add other blues artists as you refine your station and provide data about exactly what music you like.

Pandora allows you to create and refine up to 100 unique stations that you can listen to on your mobile devices or in your automobile. You can listen for free or pay a small amount to not have to listen to advertisements. This recipe has led to tremendous growth – at least in terms of users.

This month, Pandora announced that it now has more than 200 million registered listeners after reaching half that amount just two years ago. Pandora now has more than 400 curated genre stations (compared to less than 40 genre formats on FM radio). While Pandora has more active users than Spotify, it doesn’t have as many songs as its Swedish rival.

Apple apprehension

Launched back in 2000, Pandora has been credited with reinventing radio – but with little to nothing to show for it in terms of profits. And then there’s Apple, that tech titan that no one really wants as a competitor. Apple has been getting all kinds of headlines about a product called iRadio, be a streaming music service that would be similar to Pandora in some ways. If that weren’t bad enough, Google reportedly aims to launch a streaming music service this summer as a YouTube product.

So, what are your thoughts about Pandora’s chances of turning its popularity into long-term profits? Will Apple or Google one day topple the leader in Internet radio? We’d love to hear your thoughts about Pandora or streaming radio in general.

A year after its acquisition, many believe that Instagram has delivered on the promise that made Facebook snatch it up – adding new features and filters as it has quadrupled its number of active users. Much of Instagram’s success has come through building a sense of community with content like #HowIShoot, a blog series where Instagramers share how they set up and process their photos; you learn pointers about their camera, vantage point, shooting and editing.

Fast, beautiful and fun

Co-founder Kevin Systrom spent two years at Google, where he worked on Gmail, Google Reader and other products before moving into Corporate Development. He started Instagram with fellow Stanford graduate Mike Krieger, who brought experience from Microsoft and Meebo. Their photo startup has enjoyed incredible success – attaining 100 million monthly users less than three years after launch.

There’s a certain simplicity in the value proposition offered by Instagram: turning the photos you shoot with your smartphone into professional looking shots through neat filters. And, of course, there are the added benefits of easy sharing and quick uploads of the snapshots you took anywhere from your backyard to business trips or family vacations. Instagram has enjoyed tremendous success in both iOS and Android, with millions uploading the free app from the Apple App Store and Google Play.

With Klout like this

Despite its wide appeal, Instagram has plenty of competition ranging from a rejuvenated Flickr to Twitter, a much larger social network with photo ambitions of its own. And there was the much publicized flap about user privacy when many Instagram users became enraged about new terms that apparently ceded ownership of their images.

So amidst these challenges Instagram must be happy to have some allies in terms of integration. Klout, the network that measures our digital influence, announced last month that Instagram photos will now affect your Klout score – an integration that could cause some users to be more active with Instagram as they seek to strengthen their overall influence.

And Instagram has also made waves in the news industry as some reporters are using Instagram-edited photos (as well as Vine videos) for their publications. When social networks like Twitter or Instagram make headway into industries like news, it causes you to think about the full societal influence of the networks. Regardless of the amount of impact, there will always be plenty of speed bumps. So will Instagram keep up its growth momentum? Will Facebook start to integrate the app directly into Facebook? We’d love to hear your thoughts about Instagram and its place among social networks.

For marketers, Quora represents a unique lens for us to see what types of questions people are asking in a given industry – whether we’re researching blog ideas for our own company or putting together a content strategy for a client.

But exploring a hierarchy of more than 250,000 topics can be intimidating if we’re not sure how to proceed. This post will provide some pointers on how to mine Quora for content ideas.

Inside the Answer Machine

Quora was released in public beta in 2010, founded by former Facebook employees Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever. The network recently rolled out full-text search capabilities and a blogging platform that allows marketers to publish content beyond just questions and answers.

Here’s how Quora works: You can ask and/or answer questions that are arranged within an overall topic ontology. Topics typically include a list of Parent Topics, Child Topics and Related Topics. For example, here is part of the ontology for the topic “Marketing”:

• Parent Topics: Business; Business Development; Communication
• Child Topics: Digital Marketing; Direct Mail; Product Marketing; Interactive Marketing; Social Media Marketing; Referral Marketing; Blogger Outreach (42 more)
• Related Topics: Startups; Business; Small Business; Email Marketing; Retail (15 more)

Within each of these topics, you can browse questions, ask your own questions, answer questions and follow topics or questions that interest you. You can mine Quora questions manually with an Excel spreadsheet or (if you’re more daring) with a site scrape. Once you’ve completed your questions research, you can create targeted content that provides helpful answers for your audience and helps people solve problems.

Spreadsheet wizard, there’s got to be a twist

If you’re going the manual route, create a list of Quora topics by clicking on the “About” tab of your Parent Topic. Then sort your list by the number of people following each Child Topic. (You can quickly view the number of followers by hovering over each Child Topic listed on the right hand side of the “About” page.)

Here’s an abbreviated list of Marketing Child Topics that’s sorted by followers.

Topic Followers Social Media Marketing 119,495 Digital Marketing 89,450 Product Marketing 5,289 Referral Marketing 262 Direct Mail 137 Interactive Marketing 105 Blogger Outreach 103

So now you’ve got an idea of the amount of Quora interest in each of these Marketing Child Topics. (Keep in mind that topics with a small number of followers might simply be newer topics.)

Once you’ve identified some popular Child Topics, go a step deeper by looking at questions within the Child Topics. Let’s look at Social Media Marketing, since it has nearly 120,000 followers. When we visit the Social Media Marketing page, we see a heading for Frequently Asked Questions that we’ll want to browse. The first question is “How will marketers use Google+?”

We then see numerous indicators that this question has major interest (shown by the level of engagement). Check out these Question Stats:

• 1,257 people have viewed the question
• 37 people are following this question
• 8 people have answered this question (and most of the answers have comments or votes)

Suffice it to say that this is a hot topic, as is the other Frequently Asked Question, “What are the best Twitter clients?” Put these two questions in a “Frequently Asked” tab of your research spreadsheet and record the engagement metrics. You can also browse the Related Questions located on the right of each question page.

Next, click on the “Trending” tab to see Quora’s list of Trending Questions for Social Media Marketing. List these questions in a “Trending” tab of your spreadsheet as you go through them, filtering the spreadsheet by a metric like the number of answers or the number of followers. (These two metrics show a higher degree of engagement/interest than a metric like a page view.)

When you’re done browsing the “Trending” tab, click on the “Questions” tab and create a corresponding tab on your spreadsheet. Then list the questions with a higher number of answers or followers. Also take a look at the “Best Questions” listed on the right of this tab.

As an alternative option, you can scrape Quora to create your spreadsheet of categories, topics and questions. Just make sure you’re comfortable with Quora’s terms of service if you decide to scrape.

So, what have been your experiences with Quora? Do you see it as a valuable site for coming up with content ideas, analyzing your competitors or discussing your brand? We’d love to hear your thoughts on this popular question-and-answer community.

Here at Slingshot SEO, we use the Skype chat functions for individuals and teams. Using Skype allows us to communicate quickly and frequently over the course of the day – voicing ideas, asking questions and working together to solve problems – whether we happen to be working in Indianapolis or traveling to another state for a client presentation.

Skype recently announced that users are spending an astounding 2 billion minutes a day connecting over the network. At peak times, there are more than 40 million Skype users online.

Estonian innovation

Written by a trio of Estonian developers, Skype was first released in public beta back in August 2003. Their software has had a large impact on modern communications over the past decade — allowing us to communicate by voice, video webcam and instant messaging. For video, it takes just an Internet connection, a webcam and a computer or other device with audio capabilities; this allows families and other groups worldwide to communicate in video chats.

Technologies developed by Skype have long attracted the eyes of larger companies. eBay acquired Skype in 2005 for $2.6 billion as part of a strategy to enhance communications between buyers and sellers. Six years later, eBay claimed to have made a total return of $1.4 billion on its original investment. Later, Microsoft bought Skype from investors led by private equity firm Silver Lake, the largest investor in a group that bought 70 percent of the company from eBay in 2009.

Microsoft microscope

In the $8.5 billion Skype deal, Microsoft bought a company with hundreds of millions of users that had yet to become profitable. Many observers have argued that Microsoft overpaid for Skype and questioned whether the tech titan will be able to properly monetize it; however, Skype has since rolled out in-app advertising and upgraded its infrastructure. Moreover, video calling is a hot trend as smartphone and tablet sales continue to climb.

This year brings a fresh set of challenges and opportunities for Skype. Millions of us are looking for new ways to efficiently collaborate with peers and communicate with loved ones, and Skype offers everything from group chat to file sharing. Yet like many other tech companies, Skype must navigate some dangerous waters involving issues like user privacy as it seeks profits amidst a competitive tech landscape.

What are your thoughts about Skype? Does your company use it for communication, or are there other preferred alternatives? Do you personally use Skype to communicate with friends and family? We’d love to hear your comments about Skype, Microsoft or voice over IP technologies.

Put me in coach, I’m ready to play

Every kid who grows up playing baseball dreams of making it to the Big Leagues. Similarly, many of us with a love of writing dream of making it to the Chicago Tribune, copywriting for a Fortune 50 company or becoming the next big-time blogger. Few of us will reach those heights, but here are some tips straight from the dugout for maximizing your blogging potential.

Get lots of batting practice: In blogging, this translates to reading – lots and lots of reading. Read the major blogs in your area of business and discover the emerging bloggers who will be tomorrow’s thought leaders. You also need to spend the time reading everything that’s written on your own blog. Let all those thoughts germinate so that you when you step up to the plate, you know exactly what pitches you can hit.

Read the manager’s signs: Yep, that’s the guy with the glasses standing over there frowning. He’s your company’s marketing manager or social media manager and he’s got a vision for what he wants to do with your company’s blog, what topics interest readers the most and how all your company’s previous blog posts have performed. Pick his brain about blog titles and topics. Ask him to share his blog analytics so you can see for yourself what is resonating with your audience.

Maximize your Slugging Percentage: Whether you end up on base or not, make sure you’re making contact with the baseball. In blogging, that means performing adequate research, engaging readers in your writing and taking the time to edit your work. The outfielder might catch your ball, but at least you’ve given yourself a chance at a big hit because you’re gone through the correct process: keeping your eye on the ball (research), swinging your bat at the right pitch (writing), and sprinting to first base (editing).

Point to the fence: Like Babe Ruth pointing to center field, you’ve got to be confident that you can deliver a home run. You know your industry, the business trends that matter and what everyone is talking about, and you’ve done the research to understand your audience, so be bold and point to that center field fence. Believe your next swing is going to send that ball 500 feet.

Swing for the fences: Write with conviction and passion – taking your readers on a journey that gives them value and helps them solve a problem. Don’t be afraid to take risks (within the context of your content governance). Sometimes hitting a home run means not being afraid to strike out. When you’re disappointed with the results of a post you were excited about, learn from it. Ask your manager and others how you could have made it better and listen closely to their feedback.

Switch hitting: Show your expertise in what you know, but don’t be afraid to venture into new territory. For example, maybe you’ve written a lot about social media and want to challenge yourself by writing more about blogging strategy. Be willing to explore new writing subjects; just make sure you communicate your new direction with your skipper.

Pinch hitting: Even the best bloggers can hit a wall in terms of inspiration and ideas. Encourage colleagues who haven’t participated on the blog to contribute. Offer to provide support/guidance to help mentor these budding bloggers. Know others in your field who could spice up your blog? Think about helping to find guest bloggers who can share their expertise on your blog.

Load the bases for the cleanup hitter: Let’s say you’re good at the blogging equivalent of getting walks or hitting singles. Think about how you can challenge yourself and others to get some multiple base hits. Maybe you can work with your cleanup hitter on a co-authored piece that can get some traction. If you challenge him enough, maybe you (and others) will be on base when he hits his home run – and it will be a grand slam instead of a solo shot.

Be willing to take one for the team: Whether you’re a reporter, copywriter or blogger, you will eventually have to write about something that doesn’t particularly interest you. Do it anyway. Square around for a bunt or stand there and let that pitch hit you, shake it off and trot on down to first base. And then come up with a better idea for your next post; you’ll undoubtedly get your best batting results when you’re passionate about the subject.

Keep your eye on the ball: Always know the inning and the score. (You’re regularly reading your company’s blog, remember?) And know your team’s record by understanding what types of posts are resonating with readers and writing more of those. Taking your team to the playoffs means writing with true purpose. Familiarize yourself with your company’s content calendar and understand the value of coordinated content. You’ll prove yourself as a thought leader while taking your team straight to October.

Maybe you’re just one player on an award-winning blogging team that’s producing valuable content all day long. Or maybe your company has just started to blog and you need to establish some initial momentum. Your situation really doesn’t matter; the rules of the game don’t change from tee-ball to the bigs. Get your batting practice, wait for the right pitch and swing for the fences.

For more blogging tips, check out our Blog Post Optimization Guide.

Back to beta

Delicious lets you add links to the community, organize your collection of links and share them with specific people, and browse links curated by the community. You can collect and curate links that you find involving interests such as marketing trends or social media.

Marketers can use Delicious in any number of ways, such as sharing links with others in your company, tracking social mentions and organizing the interesting content that you find on the web.

Delicious was founded in 2003 and became a popular service that allowed people to easily share web bookmarks. The site was acquired by Yahoo in 2005 as part of Yahoo’s Web 2.0 makeover, but Delicious would fall into decline in the succeeding years. Delicious eventually realized it was no longer a good strategic fit for the search engine.

Yahoo sold the site in 2011 to Avos Systems, a San Mateo California-based company led by YouTube cofounders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. Avos took Delicious “back to beta” with a re-launch in Fall 2011.

Social bookmarking was a craze in 2011 as Pinterest, the pinboard-style photo sharing community, became all the rage. But Delicious wasn’t totally outclassed. A VentureBeat writer described the new Delicious as a slick revamp filled with new features and functionality like Delicious Stacks, collections of links that you can share.

Social Integration, Better Search

Delicious has been working at integrating with other social networks – rolling out both a Twitter Connector and a Facebook Connector last year. Twitter Connector gives you the option of tethering your accounts so that a link is saved each time you tweet, retweet or favorite on Twitter. Facebook Connector lets you import every link you’ve ever shared on your wall while maintaining your original privacy settings.

Early this year, Delicious launched a major update involving a new design, better search capabilities, enhanced profiles and keyboard shortcuts. The company touted the refresh as a faster, mobile-friendly experience that gives users better access to the community as a whole.

So, what do you think about Delicious? Do you think the site has been heading in the right direction since its acquisition by Avos two years ago? How do you think it compares to social competitors like Pinterest? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

Once the undisputed king of photo sharing, Flickr would fall into years of decline. But in recent months, the site seems to have regained its mojo.

Almost certainly the best

Describing itself as “almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world,” Flickr has two stated goals: to help us make our photos available to those who matter to us, and to help us find new ways of organizing photos and video.

Flickr dates back to 2004 when it was launched by a Canadian company called Ludicorp. The site became immensely popular with bloggers in its early days. Yahoo acquired the site in 2005 and, by some accounts, ruined a good thing over the years amidst the rise of sites like Facebook and Instagram. (If you can stand the gore, read Gizmodo’s Flickr story that describes how Yahoo “bought it and murdered it and screwed itself out of relevance along the way.”)

Imagine millions of images

Despite the harsh criticisms, Yahoo deserves credit for the resurgence of Flickr in recent months. Some observers have credited new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer for listening to the clamor to save Flickr after she took the helm of the search engine that’s trying to become more of a player in the search space.

Early this year, Yahoo announced that Flickr photos are now showing up in Yahoo image searches. In the announcement blog post, Yahoo said that tens of millions of photos are now ours to reuse and repost under Creative Commons terms.

This came on the heels of a rave review in Mashable of Flickr’s updated iPhone app that comes with 15 photo filters and is integrated with Twitter, Tumblr and Foursquare; in addition, the app enabled Facebook uploads for the first time. Another strong review of the iOS app came from Wired, which followed up two months later with the story titled, “Flickr is Back, Letting Us Go Home Again.”

In a similar vein, the New York Times Bits blog declared that as Facebook and Instagram face their own challenges, “Flickr Has the Opportunity to Become the Next Flickr” – the place where we all go to share beautiful images online.

So what are your thoughts about Flickr? Do you think it’s “almost certainly the best” site for sharing images, or does it still have a way to go? If it’s not the best, which photo community do you prefer? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

Buffer allows you to set up a posting queue and automatically posts for you on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn over the course of the day; in addition, Buffer allows you to designate colleagues who can help share from your profiles.

Birmingham Beginnings

San Francisco-based Buffer was founded by three entrepreneurs back in 2010. Founder Joel Gascoigne came up with the idea for Buffer after thinking about how difficult it is to keep Twitter followers updated with great content; the British programmer envisioned Buffer as a smarter way of sharing tweets spaced out over the course of the day. Gascoigne built Buffer using a Lean Startup Methodology – moving from idea to first paying customer in a matter of seven weeks.

Buffer appeals to a wide array of marketers, social media managers and other social enthusiasts. It allows you to share posts including videos, photos and links. One of its most popular features is its browser extensions for Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera. Buffer also integrates with apps like Scoop.it and Feedly.

In late 2011, Buffer raised some $400,000 in funding from angel investors and apparently aroused the ire of U.S. immigration, causing a temporary relocation to Hong Kong.

Width of the Web

Buffer has had the benefit of some positive reviews that explain its value in scheduling tweets, Facebook posts and LinkedIn posts.

With a redesign launched late last year, Buffer increased its focus on analytics and integration – encouraging users to post to Buffer on blogs and other sites across the web. Buffer had some 400,000 users and some 10,000 websites carried the Buffer button, TechCrunch reported in December. Mobile was another part of the new emphasis, with some 10 percent of users downloading the iPhone app and an Android app planned for the first quarter of this year.

So, what are your thoughts about Buffer? Do you see value in apps that help you schedule social posts, or would you rather handle the posting personally? We’d love to hear your thoughts and personal experiences.

Create, don’t hesitate

Part of Tumblr’s appeal is its simplicity. The network enables you to easily post text, photos, links, videos and more from your desktop, tablet or smartphone. You can even post via email and save time with handy keyboard shortcuts. The platform allows you to follow other people’s blogs while choosing from different privacy settings for yours.

Tumblr has received some impressive accolades, including when Tumblr’s CEO David Karp was named the Best Young Tech Entrepreneur in 2009 by Businessweek.

Better recognize

Perhaps Tumblr isn’t as simple as it seems. It has been described as the “anti-blog” – a haven for those who are more interested in sharing with a handful of friends than cultivating a large-scale audience.

Regardless of how people are using Tumblr, there’s no denying the traffic: it boasts some 170 million monthly visitors, and much of it is mobile traffic. In fact, Karp expects that traffic from mobile devices could overtake desktop traffic this year. His company is trying to capitalize on the mobile momentum by bringing advertisements to its mobile product. Tumblr also courts sponsors for its Tumblr Radar, a showcase of some of the most interesting media on the network, and Tumblr Spotlight, top content that’s curated by a team of editors.

In February, Tumblr rolled out real-time dashboard notifications – a tactic designed to increase user engagement that has been described as similar to Facebook’s News Ticker.

South by Success?

Karp recently participated in a roundtable about innovation during the SXSW 2013 festival in Austin, Texas – an event that draws national interest in the tech space and beyond. As his company seeks to increase brand awareness and advertising revenues, it will be interesting to see if Tumblr can maintain its impressive growth on its way to turning profits.

What are your impressions of Tumblr? Do you think the network is well positioned for profitability? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

We’ve seen a slew of question-and-answer websites in recent years, but Quora has stood out as a social network to watch.

Inside the Answer Factory

Quora was released in public beta in early 2010, founded by two former Facebook employees: Adam D’Angelo (who’d served as CTO and VP of Engineering) and Charlie Cheever (who’d worked on the Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect).

Here’s how Quora works: You can ask and/or answer questions in more than 250,000 topics that are arranged within an overall topic ontology. Topics typically include a list of Parent Topics, Child Topics and Related Topics. For example, here is the ontology for the topic “Marketing”:

• Parent Topics: Business; Business Development; Communication
• Child Topics: Digital Marketing; Direct Mail; Product Marketing; Interactive Marketing; Social Media Marketing; Referral Marketing; Blogger Outreach; Trade Marketing; In-store Marketing; Marketing Trends (39 more)
• Related Topics: Startups; Business; Small Business; Email Marketing; Retail (15 more)

Within each of these Marketing-related topics, you can browse questions that people have asked, ask your own questions, answer questions for which you have an answer and follow topics or questions of interest. You can get a sense of the interest in individual questions through metrics like the number of answers, the number of comments and the number of people following the question.

Bing, Blogging, Brands

Quora has drawn quite a bit of interest as a network with great potential reach. Last August, the Bing search engine continued the build-out of its social search functionality with a Quora integration that will return Quora posts for relevant search queries.

But Quora has moved beyond just questions and answers into a broader information community. This year, the network added a blogging platform that makes it easy to post content on the topics of your choice. More recently, Quora added a Reviews feature that functions similarly to questions and answers, giving you the ability to include a star rating for your review. Readers can see the identity of the reviewer, so they’ll have a sense of the reviewer’s level of subject matter expertise.

Searching for the Money Solution

Despite Quora’s expansion, many observers have questions of their own about the network’s profit positioning. One question involves whether the new blogging platform will attract big brands and serve as part of the path toward monetization. Another question involves whether people should have to register to use Quora’s full functionality.

Nevertheless, Quora seems to be moving in the right direction as executives ponder the tricky question of monetization. The network recently rolled out full-text search capabilities that most observers have viewed as a positive move. It will be interesting to see how Quora attempts to monetize in the coming days – and whether the network succeeds in converting all those eyeballs into tidy profits.

What do you think of Quora, and do you think Quora is well-positioned for monetization? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

StumbleUpon is a discovery engine that categorizes and recommends websites, photos and videos according to our individual interests.

Stumble Beginnings (and Winnings)

StumbleUpon dates back to 2001, when Garrett Camp and other entrepreneurs came up with the idea of a network that allows people to share and rate content – using social networking principles to recommend targeted content. The company is based in San Francisco and offers some impressive employee perks, like breakfast and lunch five days a week.

The social network uses collaborative filtering that combines our opinions with machine learning about preferences to create communities of people with similar interests. Content is rated according to your preferences, your friends’ recommendations, demographics and other proprietary factors.

When you set up your account, you’ll provide your Stumble DNA – a summary of the interests you might enjoy stumbling. That will provide the network with an initial data set in terms of what might interest you. As the data increases over time, StumbleUpon should have increasingly better insights into what kinds of content you might like.

For marketers, StumbleUpon can be a great channel for driving traffic because a solid piece of content can rack up stumbles like crazy. Businesses can also buy targeted ads on Paid Discovery, the network’s advertising platform. There are three targeting options: Auto Targeting, which lets StumbleUpon choose topics and demographics for your campaign; Precise Interest Targeting, which allows you to manually select audience interests, and Broad Interest Targeting, which includes topic bundles aimed at groups like Business Professionals and Humor Seekers.

Don’t call it a StumbleBack (They’ve been here for years)

EBay bought StumbleUpon for $75 million in 2007, but the social network didn’t prove the best fit for the mammoth online marketplace. Camp, venture capital firms and others bought StumbleUpon back in 2009 for a reported $29 million. Two years under eBay had left StumbleUpon adrift, but a comeback was on the horizon. StumbleUpon would later undergo a major redesign that improved user experience and also launch popular mobile apps for iPhone, iPad and Android.

Still, things are never easy in the competitive world of social. StumbleUpon went through another round of growing pains early this year, reportedly laying off some 30 percent of its staff as part of a structural reorganization toward profitability. But things are far from bleak for the network. Millions of stumblers are intensely loyal to the network and StumbleUpon recently upgraded its offerings for iPhone and iPad.

What are your thoughts about StumbleUpon? Do you think the network is quietly (compared to the likes of Twitter or Facebook) moving toward becoming a top-tier network, or is the top social tier too crowded? We’d love to hear your opinion.

Pinterest has diversified into a true community with millions of loyal fans. Users can read pinterviews from top pinners, and Pinterest is testing a new look that enhances user experience with more intuitive navigation, bigger pins with more information and backend changes to speed up the network.

In just a few years, Pinterest has established itself as one of the larger social networks – and as one that drives a gob of traffic to retailers. Still, the network has yet to monetize.

Trying to pin us down (and succeeding)

Pinterest is a recent phenomenon compared to networks like Facebook and Twitter. Development began in late 2009, with the site launching in a closed beta version the following March. Growth came at an astounding rate for the San Francisco-based startup as people across the globe found the network as an innovative way to discuss their hobbies and share images, get style tips and plan projects.

Soon everyone seemed to be finding “pinspiration” on the new network, and the momentum has continued to amaze. A Pew study of social behavior in 2012 found that Pinterest is as popular as Twitter and, unlike other networks, is equally popular with different age demographics. Moreover, another study found that Pinterest was one of the largest referrers of social traffic – and that people coming from the network were willing to spend more on average than were Facebook referrals.

Analyze (and salivate?)

Businesses like Sephora, Etsy and Jetsetter are sharing their stories of how much value they’ve gotten from Pinterest. And Pinterest recently made headlines in all the top online tech publications with its announcement of Pinterest Web Analytics, which gives you data like how many people visited your site from Pinterest, how many people have pinned your site and how many people have seen those pins.

Pinterest raised some $200 million from venture capital firms in February at a valuation of $2.5 billion. However, the company has not yet rolled out advertising or other means of making money; the free analytics offering is a step toward monetization.

So Pinterest has been driving traffic like crazy, but hasn’t yet capitalized monetarily from its potential. Do you think Pinterest will lure advertisers in droves, or will it struggle as social networks often do when it comes to turning eyeballs into dollars? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

Need help optimizing your LinkedIn profile? Download our guide to Increasing Conversions with Social Media.

Digg represents an interesting case study in social news. Once a hot commodity, the site fell on hard times and has since struggled to regain its mojo. Today a new team at Digg is attempting to recapture the old magic by rethinking the user experience.

Digg dug

Back in late 2004, Digg was a startup with an original design that was free of advertisements. Among its founders was Kevin Rose, an entrepreneur and venture capitalist who most recently took a post at Google.

Digg’s appeal was simple: users could show whether they liked a piece of content by giving it a “digg” or expressing their dislike with a “bury.” This constant stream of social signals gave the site a constantly changing list of popular and trending content about anything under the sun. Digg quickly caught on with millions as a way for people to vote on and share fascinating, quirky or outrageous new stories.

Startup letdown (and re-emergence)

But somehow Digg eventually lost all its momentum and began to languish. By 2011, TechCrunch reported that not even Rose was using Digg much anymore. Other networks like Twitter and Reddit were gaining a lot of popularity while Digg faded into obscurity.

However, Digg was in for a second chance. New York-based tech firm Betaworks bought the remainder of Digg last year after LinkedIn and the Washington Post had scooped up some of its personnel and intellectual property.

Betaworks felt that Digg was way ahead of its time in 2004. So a team of 10 editors, engineers and designers took Digg back to startup mode with a new version. Tech influencers like Gizmodo praised what the new Digg team was able to do in six weeks – dramatically improving the site’s design and usefulness in presenting trending content.

And these seeds of change are yielding fruit. Last month, Digg reported that its user base had doubled since August, with more than 10 million user emails on file. However, the question of profitability remains. Like many social networks – even those that enjoy tremendous traffic – Digg must figure out how to allow advertisements or some other way to monetize without alienating its loyal users.

So the question remains: Will Digg 2.0 continue to grow in an intensely competitive social landscape? We’d love to hear your thoughts about Digg or social news in general.

Social news sites have had a remarkable impact over the past decade as we try to keep up with the mushrooming amount of content being produced online. Reddit, in particular, has made a big impact on social news; the site had more than 55 million unique visitors in February of this year.

Take me to your redditor

Known for its cute alien mascot, Reddit has made big waves in its eight years of existence with its own take on crowdsourcing. The social news network went live back in 2005 and has since expanded into communities of fans in more than 175 countries.

Here’s how it works: “Redditors” vote on the stories and discussions that interest them; their votes serve as a steady stream of signals as to which content is hot – and which is not. Any user is able to create an independent community known as a “subreddit” on topics that interest them. Today there are literally tens of thousands of subreddits for people to peruse.

Reddit was acquired by Condé Nast Publications in October 2006, and later split from Condé Nast to operate as a subsidiary of its parent company. The network became an open source project in 2008 with most of the code available on GitHub.

Redd(it) gold

Reddit introduced Reddit Gold in 2010, which offered new features for a modest amount of money (about $30/year). Last month, Reddit began accepting Bitcoin and credit card payments in addition to PayPal and Google Wallet.

But Reddit is about more than just social news; there’s also Radio Reddit, which allows you to listen to live radio streams, vote on music, discover new music being promoted by redditors and upload your music to be heard by others.

The year behind (and ahead)

Taking a look at the year 2012 gives us an idea of the scope of Reddit’s influence among its millions of enthusiasts. The network’s top posts of the year included everything from President Obama to Korean rapper Psy.

One staple of Reddit in recent years has been “Ask Me Anything” interviews involving entertainers, athletes, journalists, politicians and other popular personalities – everyone from Michael Bolton to Bill Gates.

So similar to networks like Twitter, Reddit runs the gamut in terms of the subjects discussed. And there appears to be plenty of interest from outside investors. TechCrunch reported in January that Reddit was rumored to be raising money at a $400 million valuation.

We’ll just have to wait and see what the future holds for a network with such high traffic (some 37 billion page views in 2012, according to TechCrunch). Will Reddit continue to rise in popularity, or will it suffer the fate of numerous once-hot social networks? We’d love to hear your thoughts on Reddit or social news sites in general.

LinkedIn has also been a hot stock of late after reporting fourth quarter revenues in excess of $300 million. But despite its momentum, LinkedIn will continue to battle in a competitive social environment where established players and startups alike are vying for our attention (and for advertising dollars).

Moving beyond just brokering connections

Launched back in 2003, LinkedIn has grown tremendously over the past decade. The network made its name as a site that professionals use to advance their careers by connecting with business colleagues and other professionals, and by accumulating professional recommendations. The wealth of professional data gathered by LinkedIn even serves those just joining the working world. For example, recent graduates can map their careers by exploring the careers, talents and connections of their school’s alumni.

However, LinkedIn has grown well beyond the business of brokering digital connections. Today the network has numerous features such as industry and topical groups, company pages, advanced search and a multitude of applications. So, how do you rise above the noise? Over the past couple of years, LinkedIn has also dramatically increased the ways in which you can customize your professional profile.

One of the more compelling aspects of LinkedIn is that it’s truly global; LinkedIn says it has more than 200 million members in more than 200 countries and territories. The Mountain View, California-based company had some 3,458 full-time employees at the end of 2012, including workers in international offices in cities like New York, Amsterdam, Munich, Hong Kong, Sydney and Tokyo.

A map on the LinkedIn site shows the breakdown of LinkedIn’s membership. More than 74 million members are from the United States. India has more than 18 million LinkedIn members, while Brazil and the United Kingdom each have more than 11 million members.

LinkedIn Today

At the center of LinkedIn’s drive to become the premier destination for professional content is LinkedIn Today, where you can go to get “the day’s top news, tailored for you.” You can access LinkedIn Today from your profile by clicking the link under your “News” tab at the top. LinkedIn Today customizes your news according to factors like the Industries that you follow (and it’s not shy about suggesting additional Industries you should include).

You can also follow the content of selected companies like Slingshot SEO. Content produced by these companies on their blog is syndicated to LinkedIn Today – providing LinkedIn Today with fresh, relevant content while boosting the visibility of the contributing companies.

Are you an Elite(st)?

Like other social networks, LinkedIn can definitely play on our sense of vanity sometimes. In February, LinkedIn began sending out messages to its “elite members” – those who were in the top 1 percent, 5 percent or 10 percent in profile views for 2012. This gave rise to a wave of social media bragging from some of those who received a message. (Remember braggers: One percent of 200 million is still a group of 2 million.)

Certainly LinkedIn deserves accolades for its tremendous growth over the past decade and its continuing innovation in finding ways to help us connect with other professionals. But it will be interesting to see how well the network can keep our attention amidst a landscape of established networks and startup challengers.

What are your impressions of LinkedIn? Do you like how the network is expanding into a professional content hub? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

Need help optimizing your LinkedIn profile? Download our guide to Increasing Conversions with Social Media.