The information I shared with the students I spoke with is relevant for many of my readers and others out there.  With that being said I thought I’d share it here as well.

First off a small back story to put everything in context…

Over the last six months or so I’ve given probably five different speeches/presentations, primarily to start-ups and second stage companies.  This actually included a talk at the Florida Technology Partnership event in Ft. Myers two days prior to my talk at UCF.  As I was in my hotel room in Ft Myers, after my speech to a group of CEOs and marketing executives, I had a thought….I’ve given essentially the same presentation the last five times or so that I’ve talked focused on marketing strategy, SEO, Social Media and branding.  Though this presentation was good I realized this information and delivery is perfect for those who already have companies and are trying to grow them, but will it add the same value to motivated college students.  Many of these college students aspire to be an entrepreneur, but don’t have a venture in mind let alone a product or service to market now.

What should I do…Should I give the same presentation or craft a new one.  My talk was scheduled for 1 hour and I altruistically always want to make sure my audience gets the most from my experiences and insight.

Unsure of how to approach it, especially with a  day and a half to go and lots of work to do at Brand Advance the next day…I decided to sleep on it and plan my attack on my drive back to Orlando from Ft. Myers (about 3-4 hours).

I started to go through a simple marketing exercise that I take my clients through at Brand Advance and thought about who I was trying to reach and influence….what are their problems, motivations, experiences, etc.  What can I offer to impact them the most and add the highest value.

In the case of students, learning new marketing tactics to grow brand awareness of a business isn’t as important and essential as learning how to market themselves…after all you are the only product you will have for the rest of your life.  If you can perfect marketing and building your personal brand through the process you will learn and understand how to market other brands as well.   Building brand you will continue to pay dividends and attract great opportunities into your life.

Personal branding is more important today than ever before.  Unemployment is extremely high, more people are graduating and more people are getting laid off from their jobs.

What does this mean?

It means that you have more competition for both obtaining a job, and growing your entrepreneurial ventures. What causes you to stand out and land that good job, find investment funding, gain experienced mentors, or align yourself with those who will be energized to work on your start up?

It’s your personal brand- made up of your credibility, past achievements, experiences, the way you carry yourself, who you associate with, and the knowledge you have in your respective field.

Here’s how I foresee many falling into the trap…

1. A student graduates excited to get a job in their field
2. Realize that unemployment is extremely high and get a job in an un-related field to pay the bills until they can find a better job, or launch their start-up.
3. They end up working in that unrelated job for years, not building experiences and credibility in their respective field and not keeping educated on new trends and industry knowledge.
4. When the market turns around in a few years an employer is going to hire either a fresh college grad that they can mold, or hire someone who was laid off in the field with industry specific experience.
5. The college student working in an unrelated field to pay the bills will be stuck in a weird spot…they won’t have enough industry specific knowledge to get a relevant job or launch a viable start-up that solves a market need.
6. They then are at a time to move on in their life and get married and have a kid at some point making it even harder to close the gap as others who get on the inside track in an industry so to speak.

So the question becomes….How do you solve this and avoid the trap?

Here’s my thoughts…

1. Get Educated…I’m not talking about a school education, though in some fields like medical and education this is essential.  I’m talking about keeping up with industry trends and learning how others in your field are staying on top of their game.  School is great at teaching you how to learn or the basic fundamentals in a given area.  Truth be told many of the trends that can really help you can’t be taught in school because the teachers are too busy teaching older text book lessons to keep up with them.  Even if they did teach you something innovative or forward thinking they are also teaching everyone else.  You need to learn more than other students in your classes….remember you are competing with students graduating at schools all across the country as well as those experienced industry professionals who have lost their jobs.
2. Stand on the Shoulders of Giants / Get Connected…It’s essential to begin developing relationships with influencers in your respective field.  These influencers can connect you to other influencers and if you’ve built your personal brand, have credibility and deliver good results this can be a continual never ending process.  You can meet potential business partners, employers, investors and much more.  Also- those who are more experienced in an industry also will be able to see trends that you may not that can assist you in developing new ventures.  Building your network of mentors is also another very wise thing to do.  They will have a personal interest in seeing you succeed and will be able to connect you to others in their network to assist with your endeavors.
3. Flex your expertise / Build your brand awareness:  Once you’ve found innovative trends and can begin constructing your own thoughts on various industry topics begin flexing your expertise by starting a blog utilizing wordpress.org or blogger.com.  I also recommend identifying top bloggers in your field and build a relationship with them by commenting on their blog or talking with them on twitter…If possible see if you can become a guest writer for their blog, which in many cases will have thousands of readers.  I also would suggest finding online groups and physical networking groups (ex: Linkedin, Google/Yahoo Groups & Meetup) to join as well as answering industry related questions in Q&A sites like yahoo answers.  Revealing your expertise through blogging and online networking will work wonders…I have gotten clients from my blog, job offers, new venture opportunities, media coverage and much more.
4. Leverage your successes: Often times people will achieve something that can differentiate them from their competitors, but will not put it out there.  It’s not bragging, it’s establishing credibility and showing your value.  Create an achievements page, it’s essentially an interactive resume.  It’s much more powerful than a regular resume because it can go more in depth, show pictures and even link off to other pages where you elaborate.
5. Control your brand online or someone else will:  You ideally should want to own the page when someone types your name into Google with content that you want them to see.  Employers will search for you, potential business partners, customers, investors and many more.  This is a huge part of building your brand online.  You want it to be easy for others to find you and when they do you want their findings to represent how you want your brand to be perceived.Purchase your own domain name if you can get it, or some sort of variation.  This can be done at godaddy.com.  Get a wordpress blog up, which should take about 10 mins or so and start blogging!  Also be sure to watch what you post on Facebook as well as what others post.  Know your brand and what you are trying to convey and don’t do anything contradictory to that because it may end up online.  Everyone has smart phones with cameras and video recorders these days…Your slip could be the next viral sensation and really damage your brand.
6. Launch a start up:  Once you’ve taken time to build your personal brand you should have connections and an understanding of trends occurring in the market place.  In my mind at this point it’s not a bad thing to start planning and getting your start up concept in motion.   Even if you fall flat on your face you’ll learn.  Don’t get discouraged entrepreneurship can have a lot of ups and downs, but more potential risk…more potential reward.  Note:  I would never recommend running up your credit cards and sinking all your money into a startup.  This kind of financial strain is never really a good idea unless you have some strong proof of concept.  Best case scenario….Your start up will be a success and you’ll create a job for yourself or better yet an asset that will make you millions.  At a minimum you can equip yourself with something to differentiate yourself from others in a job interview.  Working on a pet project and showing potential and traction is in my eyes much more impressive than a coffee grabbing internship, unrelated job, or high gpa.  It shows that you are a self starter, are resourceful, disciplined and can add the same value to another organization as well.By the way colleges are a great place to launch a business for a large variety of reasons.

Anyway I just looked at the clock and it’s 3:48 am…time flies when your in the zone.  Another thought on that note…be prepared to work long hours at times.  Launching a start up and building a personal brand, especially when working another job takes a lot of hours.  Don’t let your health suffer, but be prepared to put the time in.  It will eventually pay off.

Remember:  If it was easy everyone would be doing it!

I hope this post helped.  If you please share it with others in your network via Facebook, Twitter, Digg, delicious or Stumble Upon.

Good luck on your journey to success and watch out for the trap!

Let me know what you thought about the post in the comments below.

I need some help marketing my last two dance classes. Any suggestions on where and how to get the word out?

There are a number of ways that you can do this….

1) SEO: If you have a website optimize it for local keywords so that people can find you.  There are two main aspects of search engine optimization what happens on your website and what happens outside of your website.  The on page factors include your website’s code, content, urls, page titles, etc.  A website’s off page SEO is basically their link portfolio- how many sites are linking to you, what is the quality of the sites linking to you, etc.  Here is a previous post that I wrote regarding link building.  There are many different tactics, but this article will go over the basics.  http://davidbrim.org/seo-and-link-building-101

Also be sure you are listed on google places, yelp, etc and the other major local listing sites.  Check out www.getlisted.org

2) Facebook Ads: Advertise to your potential customers on Facebook.  You can select your target customers demographics, interests (including dance or dancing with the stars, etc), location and more.

3) Google Adwords: Similar to SEO, but pay for placement.  You basically bid on keywords and the combination of highest price and quality score (relevancy and authority in google’s eyes) will show first.  You only pay on a per click basis.  If going this route make sure you track your costs and the amount of sales generated to make sure your getting a return on investment.  You can also target your ads to a specific geographic area so you won’t be paying for those who are not in the right area to take advantage of your service.

4) Social Media: Use tracking tools like www.socialmention.com and monitter.com to see who is discussing dance related topics in a certain geographic area on twitter and facebook.  Viralheat.com is another good tool for monitoring social media conversations globally or locally, but that is a paid subscription based tool.Once they are found you can engage these users with various tactics to raise your brand’s visibility.

5) Craigslist & other Classified marketing sites: Post your service on craigslist in your city.  This is a very highly trafficked classified site and can be very effective.  Other popular classified marketing sites include: Back Page and Epage.

6) Referrals: Tap into your current client’s social circles of influence and ask them for referrals.  It’s also wise to have your current clients become a fan of your brand on facebook so your brand gets out to their friends.  Possibly offer an incentive of a free class or discount to those who refer other clients.

7) Direct mail & Traditional Marketing: We worked with a dance company and did a direct mail campaign to kick off their grand opening.  We had formal invitations developed and mailed them out to homes tax assessed at $350K+.  They had a great turn out, but direct mail can be very expensive.  Radio and TV are also options depending on your budget, but internet marketing will provide a more cost effective and measurable solution.

Give a free performance- Attract people in with a free show or performance.  Once they are there give them food and/or wine (if legal aged) which can be donated from sponsors.  While there have people offer a free lesson to those who attend and sign them up on the spot.

9) Local Coupon Sites like Groupon- The local daily/weekly coupon craze is going full blast.  Leading the charge is Groupon, however competitors like LivingSocial, Tippr, and Buywithme are all gaining traction.

10) Harness the power of Local Meetup and Facebook groups- Local online groups can be a very powerful way to raise awareness of your venture.  Visit www.meetup.com and do a search for your zipcode and a relevant keyword.  Also visit Facebook and do searches to find relevant groups and fan pages.  There are several ways to utilize these groups and pages.

• First- you can simply participate in a popular local group- by sharing an insightful comment with a link to your website people will be intrigued to learn more and click through the link to learn more about your business.
• Second- You can contact the group creator or page admin and ask them to send out a message to their audience.  This may cost some money, but will give your brand good viability if you can find the right group.
• Finally- Start your own interest group.  If you have the time, it can be very valuable to start an online group around a topic of interest yourself.  You can network with people interested in this topic and if you ask intriguing questions and share thoughtful responses you will be perceived as an expert and someone a potential customer would want to hire.

I hope this helps!

If you have any additional questions let me know.

–

What do you guys think…Did I miss any anything?

If so feel free to comment.

All the best,

David

I recently came across this funny post on cafe mom…Well worth sharing!

Hope you get some laughs from it.

Enjoy!

So many business owners I speak to sign up for twitter and facebook with no real strategy.  They simply sign up because they have heard the buzz about these networks, or because someone said that they should.

I’ve had the opportunity to work with brands large and small helping them to effectively take advantage of social media.  If you give me 5 minutes and read this post I will share with you a solid social media strategy that I’ve used time and time again to help my client’s businesses grow.

Keep in mind there are many different social media strategies.  I’m simply sharing with you one that I’ve found to be effective.

That strategy is…. leveraging online influencers.

I define an online influencer as someone who has a great amount of respect, visibility and influence in their respective niche. This influencer could be a power user on twitter, a popular group administrator ( meetup, linkedin or facebook), premium blogger, top youtube vlogger, or simply someone with a lot of friends on a social network.

So how do you take advantage of this strategy and truly leverage online influencers?

Well lets start with the basics…

The cornerstone of any successful online marketing initiative is to first have a crystal clear understanding of those in your target audience.   This strategy is no different.

Every niche is unique in size, engagement levels, audience, etc.   Therefore there is no cookie cutter method to identify online influencers in your respective niche.

For example: The technology space on average has a greater interest and higher traffic than the scrapbooking/craft space.  Therefore the top influencers in the technology space will have significantly more eyeballs, subscribers or followers than those in the scrapbooking/craft niche.  Similarly you may notice that parenting blogs have significantly more engagement than extreme sports blogs.  Since this is the case, the criteria for determining an influencer in one market cannot be used in a different market because you cannot measure each on the same scale.

To begin implementing this strategy, spend some time establishing bench marks on influencers within the niche you are targeting.  Establish how many subscribers and comments a blog has.  Also look at how many unique visitors a site has using compete and the average traffic levels using alexa.  Finally look at the level of engagement and interaction the influencer has.  You want to connect with influencers who have meaningful interactions with their audience.

Here are some tools that I use to find various influencers:

• To find top bloggers:  Technorati.com, AllTop.com, various blogger awards, blog networks, blog rolls of other top bloggers.
• To find top users on twitter:  TwitterGrader.com, Klout.com, twellow.com, wefollow.com
• To find top groups: Search for groups on linkedin, meetup, facebook

Below I’ve noted the main options available to you once you’ve found your online influencers…

1. Observation: Utilize this tactic for market research purposes to keep up with customer, competitor and industry trends and intelligence. Observing your customers and competitors and seeing what topics people are interested, or what problems they are having can give your brand valuable insight into content ideas for your marketing materials or website.  You will also be able to see where the industry as a whole is going and be able to position your brand accordingly.
2. Participation: Participate in the conversation to increase your brand’s visibility and helps you build a relationship with the influencer. You don’t want to go into the social setting and promote your product, however it’s wise to join in the conversation and share valuable insight to position you/and/or your brand as an expert in the field.  If people see that what you are sharing is valuable they will often be inspired to learn more about you, or your company.  This is applicable for twitter, blogs and virtually any other social media channel.
3. Contribution: Become a guest writer for a popular blog or administrator for a group or forum.   This is a great option being that the blog or group already has an established audience that you can reach.  With this being the case it can be challenging to achieve this-there may be many others working to do the same thing.  The key with this option is that you really have to know what you’re talking about.  You have to be an expert in the field…If you are feel free to take a shot-email the blog or group owner and see what happens.    If you’re fortunate enough to achieve this- Reveal your expertise through quality content and interactions and you’ll often see great results.  There is also SEO benefits if you work your company link into or at the end of the article.
   
   
4. Sponsored Conversations: Find influencers that are the most relevant to you and reach out to them to review your product or promote a product you offer. Make sure to disclose and follow all FTC guidelines.

   Keep in mind-many times these influencers will not make the plug for free. If this is the case you have to judge how much the plug is worth to you.   It all depends on the quality and size of the group or audience.  Once you’ve decided the value you can choose to compensate them by sending them a complementary product, gift card or paying them accordingly.  You can also offer them commission if their audience or group members purchase a product- this is a very favorable solution since no money is paid out until a sale occurs.  This is called affiliate marketing.  This requires some effort and programming to set up, but how it works is that each influencer would have their own unique tracking link.  When they share it with their audience and a sale happens they would be compensated.   The good thing about this tactic is that no money is paid until a sale happens- which means no up front investment for exposure to the influencers audience.

   Sponsored conversations can be utilized through influencers in virtually all online channels:

   1. Relevant Group creators (Meetup, LinkedIn, Facebook)
   2. Influential twitter users
   3. Highly Visible Bloggers
   4. Etc
5. Advertising: Advertising is another option available to reach an influencer’s audience.  Ads are often purchased on a CPM (Cost per thousand impressions of your ad) or CPC (Cost per click). If utilizing facebook you can target by demographic, or add specific keywords related to your business when setting up your ad to reach those people interested in those topics.  You can also advertise using google’s content advertising network.  You can select the types of websites you’d like to advertise and pay on a CPC basis.  If you choose to utilize this tactic make sure that you measure and track everything- Number of clicks, click thru rate, CPC, which messaging and images are working best, cost per sale, etc.   Constantly work to refine and improve your conversion rates.  Advertising can get expensive and it is essential to keep your eye constantly on ROI.

Here are some additional action items available to you for several types of popular online influencers.

How to Leverage Twitter Power Users: Follow these twitter users and engage them in conversation to build relationships with those in your industry and become more aware of industry events and news.

Another valuable way to use these twitter influencers is to follow their followers. The people who follow these influencers are most likely interested in your industry (since these are the influencers in your industry). By following their followers you have a chance to gain visibility and connect with these people, which in turn may turn into champions, customers or facilitators of word-of-mouth marketing.

Generating Value from Online Groups : Join a number of  groups that are most applicable and participate in the conversation. Don’t sell, but simply participate in whatever conversation is occurring and by sharing insightful comments they will see what you do and if interested reach out to you.  Another strong way to utilize online groups is to reach out to the group owner or admin and have them send out a message to those in their group about your product or service (part of sponsored conversation tactic).

Taking Advantage of Popular Blogs: Build relationships with these bloggers by being a frequent commenter.  Each time you comment on these blogs you also generate a back link to your website which has SEO benefits.   Also, if you leave an insightful comment on a popular blog others will take notice and this will help increase your own credibility.    See what conversations are occurring ( what problems or interests) they are discussing and create content in the form of blog posts or videos to address it (linking back to the original source).  Reading industry blogs also keeps you on the cutting edge of advances and news within the industry.

–

One final tip….

One thing to remember is that typically if you are able to reach a member of your audience chances are they are connected to others within your target audience. The beauty about the web is that any one can be a publisher and share their experiences and thoughts with their social circle. Though the online influencers we discussed previously are the top influencers within a space that doesn’t mean that you should ignore other influencers. There is a term in marketing called the long tail. What the long tail essentially means is that there are several major influencers in each market, but if you are able to reach many smaller infleuncers this may equal out or surpass the value of any particular one infleuncers.

Assess your time availability and implement these tactics accordingly. Social media is a lot like working out and you need to set aside time to flex your expertise and social muscles. The more influencers you reach and leverage the better, but keep good form (quality) and if you have any questions seek out a good social media trainer. You don’t want to pull a muscle like these guys-Social Media gone wrong or these ones for that matter…Social media catastrophes.

An Experienced social media consultant can also help you to become an online influencer. This is a great goal, but takes time, hard work and guidance.

What do you think about leveraging online influencers?

Have you utilized any of these strategies…If so what results have you had?

Recently the internet comedy channel Indy Mogul came up with an awesome parody video- Twitter’s movie trailer.

It has been written: Soon every aspect of social media will have its own parody Social Network trailer.

Other parody versions have already been created for YouTube and MySpace.

I found the twitter movie trailer absolutely hilarious and well worth sharing.

I hope everyone enjoys it as much as myself and those in my office did!

This feature was not meant to be an advertising platform according to Facebook, but this doesn’t mean that you can’t utilize it to grow and advance your business.  The question is how?

Here’s 5 Rock Solid Ways that your business can take advantage of the new Facebook Questions feature:

Thought Leadership

By providing helpful answers to  questions asked by others you can reveal your expertise.  Once others are aware of you and respect you they are more likely to desire to do business with you.

Working through Problems with Industry Peers

Asking and answering industry specific questions can help you gain more knowledge that can be implemented to improve your business.  There is a popular saying that a rising tide floats all boats…Though you want to win in the market place and out do your competitor it is often effective to collaborate and help one another to achieve common goals, or over come mutual problems.

Uncovering your Customer’s problems (Content Strategies)

Being aware of the questions that your customers asks is a very effective way of understanding the issues and problems that they face.  This new found intelligence can be utilized for market research purposes to assist in developing new products, refining your service offering, or even developing content strategies to help answer these questions in the form of whitepapers, videos or webinars.

Connect and Engage with New Potential Customers

If one of your customers, or potential customers  is asking a certain question chances are many other members of  your target audience will be interested in the answers as well.  These consumers will seek out these answers and some will comment or participate in the conversation.  This basically creates a list of prospects for you enabling you to friend them, start building a relationship and raise exposure of your brand.

Increased Search Exposure

Unless you were in a box for the last five years you would know how popular Facebook is.  Google knows that they are popular as well.  In fact they are one of the few websites out there with a Page rank of 10.  Just to give you a bench mark- YouTube has a PR of 9, Fox News has a PR of 8, MTV has a PR 7.  This basically means that Google views Facebook as a high authority site.  With this high authority they have very strong SEO power and have a large amount of content indexed.  If you are answering questions that consumers in your market are asking there is high likelyhood that other consumers searching for information will find it and be exposed to you.

What do you think about Facebook’s new question feature?

How else do you feel question and answers can be utilized to grow your business online?

By doing this exercise you’ll witness first hand the power of social proof.

Here is how Wikipedia explains Social proof:

Social proof, also known as informational social influence, is a psychological phenomenon that occurs in ambiguous social situations when people are unable to determine the appropriate mode of behavior. Making the assumption that surrounding people possess more knowledge about the situation, they will deem the behavior of others as appropriate or better informed. Since observation of others usually provides only inconclusive information about what behavior is most profitable, the term ‘informational social influence’ is superior. Social influence in general can lead to conformity of large groups of individuals in either correct or mistaken choices, a phenomenon sometimes referred to as herd behavior.

Social proof is an inherent social principle that can be leveraged in social media to increase traffic and visibility to your venture.  The way I would recommend to best utilize social proof is the following:

1. First have a clear idea of the offer you’re trying to promote
2. Make sure the website of your offer has a strong call to action (or is a buzz worthy product).  Social proof is much more effective principle if the thing you’re looking at is actually worth while….If your product or service is worthwhile it will gain significantly more traction.
3. Plant the social proof seeds…This could be through well written or enticing content (articles, blog posts, press releases, etc) or through a genuine recommendation.Recommendations are a great way to facilitate the social proof process.  This can be done through sponsored conversations, which can be done by reaching out to online influencers with talking points and asking them to review or plug your product.  This kind of activity can be done by sponsoring blog posts, tweets, check-ins, or having a creator of a relevant social network send a message out to their group members.Now many people disagree with sponsored conversations, but lets face it….If you have a good product/service and can help facilitate the propensity for the site to go viral and reach the masses…why not?  (In the art/good practice of disclosure I did work for IZEA until May of last year, but I am not getting paid for this post.)  Another way to plant social seeds are through social bookmarking.  If you have a good product,service  offering or content share it with others by utilizing services like Digg, Delicious, Stumbleupon or sharing the post via Facebook/Twitter.

Social proof is in my eyes a natural catalyst for word of mouth marketing.  The good part is many times you don’t even have to say anything….simply revealing your actions to your social circle of influence or helping facilitate the process/enabling others to share your offer or content with their social circle of influence can do wonders.

Word of Mouth marketing…or in the case of social proof….(Traction by Action Marketing <–I coined that! ) is a very powerful asset to incorporate into your marketing campaign.

Now it’s your turn…Do you agree with my comments?

What role do you feel social proof plays in marketing?

SEO

• Search Engine Land: Link Building Trends For 2010
• Search Engine Watch: 5 New Year Resolutions for Search Marketers in 2010
• Acidgreen: SEO Trends in 2010: Search Engine Optimization Techniques for Online Marketers
• Internet Marketing Inc.: Three 2010 SEO Trends to Look Out For: Social Media, Onpage SEO & Link Diversity
• Small Business Trends: SEO Trends to Watch for in 2010
• SEOptimise: 20 SEO New Year’s Resolutions for 2010
• Search Engine Land: 6 New Years Resolutions For In-House SEMs
• Search Engine Journal: 2010: A New Age For Search Marketers
• SEOmoz: 8 Predictions for SEO in 2010
• David Harry: White Coat SEO resolutions for the New Year

Search Marketing/PPC

• Search Engine People: My 3 PPC Resolutions – Why 2010 Will be Defined by Mobile, Facebook and the Website Optimizer
• PPC Without Pity: Three PPC Predictions For 2010
• Search Engine Land: My PPC New Year Resolutions
• Search Engine Watch: Search Marketing 2010: Plan ahead by looking back
• PPC Hero: 5 PPC Resolutions for 2010
• Search Engine Land: Five Search Marketing Predictions For 2010
• Web.com: 5 Pay-Per-Click Trends to Watch in 2010
• Google: Think2010: Personalization and accountability (Google AdWords video series)
• Search Engine Land: 2010 Planning: 3 Tips To Improve Search Results Next Year
• eMarketer: eMarketer Weighs In on 2010: Online Advertising & Usage

Local/Mobile Search

• GigaOM: Will 2010 Finally be the Year of Location?
• Local SEO Guide: Local SEO Predictions 2010
• Mashable: Location, Location, Location: 5 Big Predictions for 2010
• Small Business Trends: Five Can’t-Miss Mobile Marketing Trends For 2010
• Search Engine Land: Predictions For The Changing Local Search Landscape In 2010
• Marketing Charts: Top 10 Wireless Predictions for 2010

Social Media

• Social Media Explorer: Five Things We Should All Do In 2010
• Mashable: Facebook: 5 Predictions for 2010
• ReadWriteWeb: 10 Ways Social Media Will Change In 2010
• Dan Zarrella: My Predictions for Social Media Marketing in 2010
• DreamGrow Digital: 22 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2010
• Social Media B2B: 11 B2B Social Media Predictions For 2010
• eMarketer: eMarketer Weighs In on 2010 Trends: Social Media & Paid Content
• Search Engine Land: 12 Social Media New Year’s Resolutions For 2010
• 10e20: 6 More Social Media New Year’s Resolutions For 2010
• Harvard Business Review: Six Social Media Trends for 2010
• 451 Marketing: Top Social Media Strategists to Watch in 2010
• SmartBlog on Social Media: Looking ahead to 2010 with Shiv Singh

Video

• Reel SEO: 11 Predictions for the Online Video Industry in 2010
• VidiSEO: 2010 Video Marketing Predictions

Analytics

• Search Engine Land: 5 Web Analytics New Year Resolutions
• Avinash Kaushik: Five Sweet Web Analytics Resolutions To Kick It Up A Notch

General Online Marketing

• Online Marketing Blog: 5 Online Marketing Resolutions for 2010
• Conversation Marketing: 11 internet marketing trends to ignore in 2010
• Search Agents: The Search Agents Predictions for Online Marketing in 2010
• Search Cowboys: Disa Johnson’s 2010 predictions
• Online Marketing Blog: 5 Top Email Marketing Tactics for 2010
• Ad Age: 9 Digital Marketing Mistakes I Won’t Make Next Year
• Hit Search: 43 Internet Marketing predictions for 2010
• MediaPost: 10 Things Changing Marketing In 2010
• Mashable: Marketing in 2010: It’s All About the Data
• Fast Company: 10 Marketing Predictions for 2010
• Search Engine Land: 5 Things On My B2B Wishlist For 2010
• Jeremiah Owyang: 2010 Trends: More Speed and Integration (video)
• eMarketer: Seven Predictions for 2010 from eMarketer’s CEO
• Forrester: 2010: The Year Marketing Dies…
• eMarketer: eMarketer Weighs In on 2010 Trends: UK & Europe
• Online Marketing Blog: SES Chicago: Internet Marketing Tips for 2010
• Web Profits: 2010 Online Marketing Predictions
• Evan Carmichael: The Top 50 Marketing Blogs To Watch in 2010

Miscellaneous

• Small Business Trends: Public Relations Trends for 2010
• Kosmix: Some predictions for 2010
• ineedhits: Our Search Wishlist for 2010
• Small Business Trends: Top Web Design Trends For Small Business In 2010
• John Battelle: Predictions 2010
• PR Squared: 2010 Predictions for Communications
• New York Times: Five Tech Themes for 2010
• TechCrunch: Ten Technologies That Will Rock 2010
• New York Times: Five 2010 Predictions About Tech Companies
• Google Operating System: Predictions for Google’s 2010
• USA Today: Ask an Expert: Top 10 Trends in Small Business for 2010 (Part 1)
• USA Today: Ask an Expert: Top 10 Trends in Small Business for 2010 (Part 2)
• CNN: 2010: Year of digital distraction?
• Web Design Ledger: Web Design Trends for 2010
• iMedia Connection: 9 digital trends to watch in 2010
• Digital Media Buzz: Top Digital Trends For 2010
• CNN: 10 Web trends to watch in 2010
• Trendwatching: 10 Crucial Consumer Trends for 2010

Have a Safe and Successful 2010!

The next was a post I came across was by internet marketing guru Seth Godin.  It was very short, but pro-found, so I decided to post it below:

Now there has been a number of twitter marriage proposals and who can forget the famous chapel entrance with the Wedding party breaking it down, but this facebook status update in the midst of the ceremony itself is the first.  Thoughts?