When it comes to Pinterest, far too many people insist that the image-sharing site is mainly geared towards a female user base, especially one which falls within the middle age bracket. However, there have finally been some facts presented to disprove that myth. A recent article from Mashable features a slideshow of 11 men who are all heavy users and big fans of Pinterest. Their activity on the site serves as evidence that Pinterest has appeal to both men and women.

Recently, I wrote a post leveraging the WSJ's high costs of high-speed technology sentiments.  Today I see more of the same money leveraging taking place.  In this scenario it involves the coming presidential election.  In many ways, the election involves huge marketing campaigns, where loyalists and foil-ists endeavor at outdoing one another.  Behind the liaisons, the campaigning, the slights at others, is the purpose of it all, to provide value to the nation, by elucidating its next best leader.  Like with services and products, ideally all of the marketing is to supply end users, the general public, with value, right?

For SEO professionals who have been grappling with the process of adjusting their companies' Facebook Fan Pages to the new Timeline format, here is some news that will inspire them to keep at it. A recent study was conducted by Simply Measured, a company that creates social media analytics software, on 15 companies that updated their Facebook Fan Pages to Timeline on or very close to February 29th, 2012, which was the date that Facebook made Timeline available to businesses on the social networking site.

The reason for the immense appeal of the social media site Pinterest lies in its basis on image-sharing. We are living in a society that is increasingly becoming more drawn to pictures than to words. People are gravitating much more readily to websites that feature many images versus those that contain a lot of written content. Anyone who has been paying attention to the evolution of website designs over the past several years can definitely attest to this growing trend among internet users.

It's that time of the week again…More news about the exploding social media site Pinterest from yours truly. Just when you thought you had heard enough, I reveal how much more there is to add to your store of Pinterest knowledge. After all, every week brings fresh news of how various companies and organizations are making good use of the site for their marketing needs. In addition to that are the changes that the fledgling company is starting to implement, in its efforts to keep apace with the rapid growth of its product on an increasingly massive scale.

Last night I gave my first ever public presentation on SEO at Triumph Brewing Company in Philadelphia as a part of the monthly meetup, SEO Grail. I had been to 6 SEO Grail meetups prior and was extremely impressed by the level of knowledge each speaker possessed. And the beer was pretty good, too.

Paul Adams, who is the Global Brand Experience Manager at Facebook, gave a talk yesterday to marketer professionals at the Federated Media's Signal conference in San Francisco. An article from TechCrunch reported on the interesting responses, comments, insights, and advice Adams gave to the marketers who were in attendance.

Oh boy. The latest news on the street is that the re-designed profile page that Pinterest happily rolled out last Friday – and that I blogged about on Thursday and Friday of last week – is facing a severe backlash full of harsh criticism and complaints from members of the Pinterest community.

Is your online business concerned with search engine rankings (surely, you've heard about potential Google changes to come) or fiscal business strategies?  Trends often ferment online; leveraging IPOs and 'boards' is a current trend of big-boy brands, those banking on increased revenue, impressing brand consumers, and (more importantly?) investors too.

Have you ever wondered about the characteristics that make a Twitter account credible? If you are an SEO marketing professional, it is quite likely that you have, and often. Luckily for all of us, Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University took it upon themselves to conduct a study on the trustworthiness of tweets, and released a ten page report on the results of their analyses.

There's no better way to start off the week than with an incredibly important question: how many followers do you have on your Twitter account? Any business that is running a social media and SEO campaign on this integral micro-blogging site knows just how important the number of followers it has is to developing its online presence.

Do you think that the release of the new iPad is the only exciting event to take place this morning? Think again! As I reported in my blog post from yesterday, Pinterest had announced earlier in the week that it would be rolling out a re-designed profile page for users of its popular social media site. Well, today was the big day for Pinterest, just as much as it was for Apple, and the time has come for us to peel our eyes off of that bright, brand-new retina display and onto the new format of the Pinterest user profile page.

Breaking news! This past Tuesday at the South by Southwest Conference that has been taking place in Austin, Texas all week, Pinterest Co-Founder and CEO Ben Silbermann announced the release of a re-designed Pinterest profile page that will roll out this week.

If you're not in this business names like Rand Fishkin and Matt Cutts may not ring any bells.

The world of SEO is continuously morphing. Whereas optimizing a business or organization's website has long been the primary goal of search engine optimization, the tables of the game are just starting to tilt in a new direction. What is this change, and why did it happen?

The results of a marketing study that Facebook conducted in collaboration with Forrester Research were recently published. They reveal some very interesting and significant changes in the world of marketing, and how professionals in the field now approach the task of promoting brands and products to consumers. The final verdict is that social media has produced great changes in the landscape of marketing. It has established its place on the list of primary mediums through which businesses now carry out their SEO and other marketing campaigns.

It's easy to get encapsulated in a microcosm.  We, as search engine specialists, forget what it's like for those outside our industry; at present, many are unsure how to brand the evolution of SEO.  Also, it's easy to think about marketing practices within the boundaries of the United States; yet, there is such a service as international search engine optimization.

The world of social media may seem large and confusing to many small businesses that are just starting out. However, there is absolutely no reason to shy away from including social media in your SEO marketing initiatives. The benefits of using social media marketing far outweigh any negatives and, if done properly, can ultimately prove to be profitable.

Online Marketing - Gifts from the Gods or Just Seuss Reiterations?

Of course it was only a short matter of time before an analytics tool for Pinterest, the latest phenomenon in the social media world, would rise to the surface. PinReach is a service that measures the amount of a user's influence on Pinterest. This is done by gathering information about the total numbers of pins, repins, likes, liked-s, followers, following, comments, and boards.

As if you didn't need any more reasons to start using Pinterest for your business: the latest news on the Pinterest front is that the new social media star has surpassed Twitter in generation of referral traffic, as reported by TechCrunch. This is an incredibly huge piece of news, mainly because Twitter has long been the giant among social networking sites in sharing links and generating huge referral traffic back to original sites. Well, not anymore – Pinterest is taking the crown from Twitter, and placing it on its own image-laden head.

With the announcement about the new iPad officially made, and the well-sought details regarding its attractive new specs and features finally revealed to the eagerly-awaiting public, it only makes sense for everyone to continue their speculations into what Apple will next be introducing to its many offerings of mobile device-related services.

I really appreciated this recent article on TechCrunch that detailed five main reasons for which companies experience failure in their Facebook marketing endeavors. The fact of the matter is that Facebook marketing possesses a world of potential in profitability – but only if it is used correctly, and consistently.

At the Facebook Marketing Conference that was live-streamed on Wednesday, February 29, 2012, Facebook unveiled some interesting and important new marketing solutions for businesses both big and small. There are several key points from the conference that TechCrunch decided to highlight in a recent article. Overall, the general goal that Facebook seems to be striving towards is creating a more streamlined ad experience that would improve the user experiences of its site, and force businesses to develop more creative SEO and social media marketing campaigns that feature engaging content.

What kind of personality traits are involved in your brand's marketing?  Of course, inanimate sentiments don't have direct personalities as we understand people to behold.  However, the way in which brands market and leverage specific online implementations affects consumers in the same manner.

A week ago I wrote on businesses that use Pinterest as a great social media and SEO marketing tool for their products and services, citing several great examples. However, you don't need to be a for-profit organization to take advantage of the promotional services that Pinterest provides. There are more than a few non-profits that are jumping onto the social media site to spread the message about their organizations, inspiring others while bringing well-needed attention to their causes. And the attention is definitely coming, if you can take recent articles by Mashable and The Huffington Post on non-profits' Pinterest boards as evidence.

When it comes to social media and SEO, I've discussed two major players so far: Twitter and the up-and-coming Pinterest. Here is yet one more: Foursquare. This is primarily a mobile app for smartphones, but it can be so much more for businesses that know how to utilize it for promotional and marketing activity. Foursquare trades on the currency of fun, but the app and social media tool can produce tangibly profitable results if businesses use it in just the right way.

There many marketers out there who may have heard about Tumblr, but are struggling to grasp its true worth regarding search engine optimization. This unique form microblogging site actually contains a great deal of SEO potential that, if utilized properly, can really help boost a business or a brand. If you need any examples, just take a good long look The New York Times and its recently launched Tumblr blog, titled "The Lively Morgue" as reported by Mashable.

By now it is likely that you have read tons of articles and literature on the importance of social media in search engine optimization, as well as in a brand's general advertising initiatives. Even with all of this information, it may hard to truly visualize just how essential social media is to a company's marketing strategy. You may still be wondering, is it really worth investing your precious time and money into something that seems like an esoteric, new-fangled fad?

Is your brand producing at a faster and better pace?  It seems to be a growing trend, especially in the tech-related industries.  Apple understands the rate of competition.  As Reuters reports, the Apple brand is hosting an event next week, showing its faster and better iPad tablet to the world.  Apple's event is invite only, including reporters Apple asks to see and "touch" the brand's latest creation.