Last week I had the opportunity to beta test a cool new product from Flowtown. By entering in someone’s email address into the Flowtown system you can find out who a person is: their name, age, gender, occupation, and location.

The cool feature is that Flowtown also lets you know the social media profiles that are attached to that email addres. So you canfind out whether a prospect/customer is on Facebook, Linkedin, MySpace, etc and so can tailor a campaign specific to them.

Last week I spoke with Ethan Bloch, co-founder of Flowtown to learn more about their company and product and this is part of that conversation

Can you tell me a little more about the Company and why you developed this product?
We’re in the businesses of helping businesses do better business. Specifically Dan Martell (the other cofonder) and I are both passionate about helping small businesses move the needle and do more with less. We developed this product because the technology was ripe. So many people are now on social networks, you can get an accurate picture of who someone is and where they are based on information they’ve made available to the world at large. The difficulty lies in sifting through it all and finding the gems, and that’s where Flowtown excels.

What makes Flowtown.com different from its competitors?
Our core focus is on ’social’ – other marketing or CRM platforms expect you to manually collect information on your customers and contacts. Well when they’ve already share everything you need to know on the internet, that doesn’t make a lot of sense. We aggregate all of this into rich customer profiles which you can they use for email marketing, customer service, call centers, outreach etc…

After using your demo, this seems like a great tool for a hiring manager or HR person. Can you talk a little more about the benefits they would have using your site?
Sure. Starting with just an email address Flowtown can tell you the persons is: Name, Age, Gender, Occupation, Location and what Social Networks they’re on. You no longer have to Google someone and spend 45 minutes find all their social profiles. Within 60 second we do all this starting with just an email address.

Other than HR, who is your target audience and why should they use Flowtown.com?
Our target audience is small businesses. They should use Flowtown because we help them ‘care at scale’. Delivering world class service to every prospect and customer is how you’ll win in the decades to come and Flowtown is set on making this easier and more lucrative then ever.

Can you give me an example of how a company is using your site.
Feed Projects is using Flowtown to build stronger relationships with their community and donors nationwide. Just last week they we’re throwing a New York only event and wanted to send a personal invitation to those only in NY. Because Flowtown know’s who’s in NY they were able to do this and begin their email along the lines of ‘Being that you’re in New York…’

Dan and Jennifer run the extremely popular askdanandjennifer web site. They have been featured in magazines, newspapers and radio programs, and have appeared and/or consulted with the Television programs like Dr. Phil and CNN Headline News

Dan and Jennifer, your site has really taken off over the last twelve months Can you tell me about your decision to launch a relationship advice web site?

We ran an online dating web site for over 3 years and in that time saw that so many people are having deep issues not only finding someone, but in their real life relationships.

Over the years, we became more and more involved in helping our users and answering dating and relationships questions, so that eventually an advice column was the only logical choice. ?

One of the main features of your site is strong use of video. Tell me about your decision do to so many video posts?

It’s always interesting to look back and see the unlikely twists and turns that are so fateful in retrospect.

We initially hoped that doing a few videos would drive a lot of traffic to our advice column. At the time we didn’t own a camera or video editing software, and didn’t know ANYTHING about filming, lighting, video editing, choreography, sound effects, video transitions, anything related. That’s all a major field (or several fields) in and of itself.

Well, after a major learning curve (about 2 frustrating months) we put out our first video – which looks laughably horrible in comparison to what we’re doing today. Yet it looked better than most of the stuff you see on YouTube.

Funny thing… after doing a few videos, we didn’t see much traffic FROM YouTube. But we tried framing those videos in our advice articles to see what our readers would think.
The reader response was overwhelming – people LOVED the videos. So after a few more weeks we decided to convert our advice column to a video blog, where all our answers are on video. After all, we do actually answer all these questions together, why not get it all on film – and make it more fun!

And here’s another bonus… those YouTube videos with their ever-increasing views got us a significant amount of media attention, including various TV and radio appearances and print media features.

Check out our first national TV appearance: http://www.askdanandjennifer.com/media/

You have created your own channel on YouTube. Does video search actually generate qualified traffic for you?

Absolutely, it generates some web traffic, but it’s only a fraction of the traffic we get. So that’s not why we’re doing it.

We do video because it’s a much better, more dynamic, more real way to get your message out to your audience. It’s more personal, and you’re more “real” when people see you. They can really connect with you and see that you believe in what you’re telling them. Also the bulk of human communication is NOT verbal (or written for that matter).

In addition, having all those videos out there generates traffic to the videos themselves, getting our message out there to millions and millions of people. And those results can’t be quantified, but they’re quite significant.

Also video is a hot new medium with a significant entry barrier. So if you use this medium proficiently, you immediately get ahead of most of your competition. Of course there’s a term used by some Internet marketers that we’re quite fond of: “co-opetition”.

YouTube Results:

In addition to mainstream media attention and appearances…

As of this writing, we have 78 videos on YouTube. These videos get over 300,000 YouTube video views per month – growing by roughly 50% per month on average.

Here’s our weekly growth trend since we started doing YouTube videos: It’s not linear!

You have built up a sizeable reader and subscriber base in a relatively short period of time. What tactics have you used to being visitors to your site?

Produce very solid content, be honest and up front with your readers, don’t be afraid to talk about the hard issues that others won’t touch, and get your content out there in front of as many people as possible!

Basically – be yourself and do what you do best without worrying about what others might say.

You web site has felt the impact of successful social media campaigns. What social media tools or tactics have you used? What works? What doesn’t work?

Social media is wonderful for not only driving traffic, but for getting your message (and yourself) out there in front of an incredibly large audience.

What works…

• write great content and get it out there
• participate in the major social media sites, really. Don’t just lurk and hope people will like your stuff. Be part of the community.

What doesn’t work:

• stuff people consider “spam”, a word that’s taken on a very broad meaning of late, encompassing pretty much anything people may not want to see.
• submitting only your own stuff to social media sites. You have to truly add value to each community that you participate in.
• Some of our favorite tools are listed in a recent blog post on BlogSuccessJournal.com.

What are some of the opportunities in social media that you see that marketers are not taking advantage of?

Taking the time to actually put out great, helpful content that people actually WANT to read. Most marketers just want to put out the equivalent of press releases. People don’t want to read those. Do you? No!

Also, make use of the many automation tools out there to help you submit to and participate on these sights more efficiently.

What new social media tactics do you see trying in next 12 months?

The sky’s the limit… whenever something new and hot comes out, we’re on it!
We joined Netscape the VERY DAY it became a social news site back in mid 2006, and are still hanging in strong even after the very rocky Propeller migration. And when another giant like Netscape is launched, we’ll be there in force.

Also, our goal is to be a recognized expert on these sites – that means researching and submitting quality content in our niche that’s not from our website.

Which social media techniques that you think are wastes of time?

Putting out a lot of garbage hoping that people will click on it and link to it. It never works, yet people do it day after day, hoping for a different result.

Do not spam the big social media sites, it simply doesn’t work and it gives you a bad reputation on these sites. Be a true contributor!

Tell me about your most successful social media campaign?

Thankfully we’ve had many successful social media campaigns, so it’s hard to isolate just one. We believe very strongly in developing and fine tuning a REPEATABLE process, regardless of what you’re doing.

So each of our successes is usually followed by a larger one, and then a larger one, and so on. That’s how we went from 10,000 page views in January 2007 to over 300,000 page views in September 2007.

Our biggest success was a Digg homepage story that brought us over 100,000 page views over a three day period. The key to being successful on Digg and other sites is creating a strong network of like minded friends. And then supporting one another!

Here’s an illustration of two of our more successful social media promotions, in sequence. We won’t go into details, but the results speak for themselves.

This week Wendy Piersall steps into the interview chair as part of our ongoing series of interviewing the top people in the social media marketing space.

Over the past year Wendy’s has been busy expanding her blogging empire and increasing her visibility online. In addition to her main blog Wendy has also found the time to launch a second blog called Shoestring Smarts and she also has a site on Entrepreneur.com called Inspired Business Growth.

Wendy, your blog has really taken off over the last twelve months Can you tell me about your decision to launch a blog

Honestly, I did it on a whim, purely because it sounded intriguing and I knew it would be good for SEO purposes. I had NO IDEA what I was getting into, how big it would become, and that it would hijack all of my other online marketing plans!

Since I had a good amount of experience being a work at home mom, I just kind of figured there would be a few other moms out there interested in my entrepreneurial experiences.

Hundreds of thousands of mom and dad visitors later, I guess I was right.

How has your blog helped you promote yourself as an expert on working from you and being a female entrepreneur?

Since blogs are such a conversation medium, I think people have really appreciated the fact that I write with an honest and authentic voice. It has enabled me to build a lot of trust and a good following in a niche that is riddled with scams. I’m also quite transparent about my shortcomings and my growth challenges, which I do on purpose. I believe it helps my readers, especially women, realize that if I can do it, they can too.

But the success just tends to build on itself now, which makes it a little easier to promote myself and the site as a whole. The visibility of the blog has helped to land other great promotional opportunities, such as writing for Entrepreneur.com and speaking engagements – which again, work to grow the business further.

You have built up a sizeable reader and subscriber base Wendy. What tactics have you used to being visitors to your site?

Social networking and social media have been extremely important to the site growth – arguably the most important of all. There is always a fine line between obnoxious and elegant self-promotion, though. I will sometimes forgo some promotional opportunities if they come off as spammy, yet I know I promote myself and my site more than most people do. Either way, it takes constant work to maintain and grow traffic and readership.

You web site has felt the impact of successful social media campaigns Wendy. What social media tools or tactics have you used?  What works? What doesn’t work?

I do a small amount of self-promotion around my best content, including seeding social media sites with submissions. But even though I know enough people to Digg me to the front page, I would never go that route – for one, it breaks trust and I also think it violates the social media communities. I’d rather the content succeed or fail on its own merits.

On my site, it is important to make social bookmarking icons and voting buttons easy to see and prominent. I use FeedBurner’s FeedFlares prominently to show off votes, which gives a level of social proof to the popularity of top content – and also encourages more votes.

What are some of the opportunities in social media that you see that marketers are not taking advantage of?

Honestly, I can’t believe how few businesses are jumping into social media – even blogging.

The Marketing “rules” have changed over the last year or two. If companies want to skip social media and are waiting for “what’s next”, they will be even more behind the ball when “next” arrives, because the next thing will grow out of social media.

What new social media tactics do you see trying in next 12 months?

I would really like to experiment with finding some kind of cross between a forum and a blog. Blogs tend to build community around the author, and I would really like to broaden the community on my site to help my readers connect more directly with each other. I haven’t found anything like this yet, I may have to bite the bullet and just build it on my own!

Which SMO techniques that you think are wastes of time?

Personally, I think trying to get every single article or post to the front page of every social bookmarking site is a waste of time. I think it’s kind of like the “boy who cried wolf” syndrome.

Tell me about the most successful campaign you have seen in SMO?

I recently decided to do some SEO around a very competitive term – I optimized my site for the term, then spent hours on a fantastic post written specifically to raise my rank for it. I purposefully left most affiliate links out of the post to ensure it would be well received, and it was very popular on several social media sites.

The combo of the optimization and the social media popularity have been responsible for a 55%+ increase in search traffic to my site in less than 2 weeks time, and honestly, without the social media part, I think it would have been more like 5%.

Tell me about the biggest blunder you’ve seen in SMO?

Pretty much already covered – either doing it too much or not enough. It’s a critical component to online success these days, but don’t overdo it.

This week we Rand Fishkin steps into the interview chair as part of our ongoing series of interviewing the top people in the social media marketing space.

Rand is an Internet Marketing Consultant and the founder of SEOmoz, a Seattle-based SEO company, serves as a hub for search marketers worldwide, providing education, tools, resources and paid services.

Rand has been involved in web development since 1995 and search engine optimization since 2001. Rand specializes in working with both online and brick-and-mortar firms to improve traffic, usability & conversion rates on the web. His clients include companies around the globe in the retail, financial, healthcare & communication sectors.

1. Rand, your blog is one the best sources of information in the SEO world. How has your blog helped differentiate SEOmoz from the competition? How has your blog helped you generate new business?

First off, thanks! We do work very hard to make the blog the best it can be. I think we differentiate SEOmoz with a lot of different tactics. We try hard to cover or present new material rather than simply discussing the major memes or news in the SEO space. This, of course, means that folks have to go elsewhere to get their critical news, but we never wanted to compete in that space during the early stages of our growth.

The blog has been a differentiator for the company by providing a lot of press and publicity as well as serving to expose us to a lot more opinion and feedback in the search marketplace. With an average of more than 30 comments per post, and many with more than 100, we get to see a lot of broad experience. The blog has also built a community of private contacts that’s simply fantastic – I can email thousands of people in the web world and get a quick response – that’s invaluable when you need help or need to to help someone else.

The blog has helped us generate business primarily through the publicity that comes with it. Even in the early days when I was still learning SEO (of course, I’m still learning today), people seemed to take the popularity of the blog as a sign of expertise. Thankfully, the network the blog helped us build allowed me to stand on the shoulders of many giants in the industry and become someone who knew what they were talking about (at least, most of the time ).

2. One of the main features of your blog is strong use of video. Tell me about your decision do to so many video posts?

When we hired Scott Willoughby, he had worked in the film industry and had some strong video skills (which we’ve only leveraged a tiny bit due to our lack of serious hardware). We started Whiteboard Friday as a test and found that it was fun, popular and a great way to present SEO content in a new style.

3. You have created your own channel on YouTube. Does video search actually generate qualified business inquiries for you? Or is it just high school kids who think you’re cool?

I doubt any high school kids think we’re cool. We’ve got a lot of subscribers to the channel, but I think they’re more interested in the community and learning aspect than in becoming a client. Of course, some of them are probably premium members too, so that’s certainly helping us out financially >

4. You have recently added some community features to SEOmoz.org like YOUMoz and the premium content. Can you tell me about your decision to launch these web 2.0 features instead of the more traditional features like a forum?

We never really wanted to run a forum – there are a lot of good ones out there about SEO and we’re really seeking to provide a lot of signal with very little noise, so the pre-approved system at YOUmoz is a perfect fit there. It’s also exciting to be able to submit something that could potentially get in front of tens of thousands of eyeballs on the main blog, and even on YOUmoz, you see 10-20 comments per post, which is far more than even many other popular blogs, so YOUmoz is a terrific place to get feedback.

The premium content isn’t really very “web 2.0″ – it’s actually probably the opposite direction from UGC & free & open. Our decision to launch it was based on a desire to have a far broader range of interaction and help many more small and mid-size folks, rather than simply consulting with large companies (which was becoming a trend for us). Premium content also scales much better than consulting, where you’re always trading time for money.

Part 2: How SEOmoz clients are using social media tactics

1. SEOMoz has an impressive customer base. Are your clients asking you for an SMO strategy? What social media tools or tactics are you seeing them use? What works? What doesn’t work?

I’d say that for nearly all of our clients, social media marketing plays some role in the strategies we provide. Typically we’re talking about viral content development, opportunities for leveraging social media functionality on their own sites, getting UGC into the picture, monitoring brand and reputation on blogs/forums/social sites and building profiles on social portals. I can’t universally say there’s anything that works for everyone – certainly someone like NPR uses social media in a far different way than a web 2.0 company like Yelp or Farecast.

2. What are some of the opportunities in social media that you see that marketers are not taking advantage of?

I think the vast majority of marketers aren’t even aware that social media marketing exists – they have no idea that content can be submitted to Digg, no idea that companies can have Facebook or LinkedIn profiles, little clue about why Yahoo! Answers or Wikipedia might be important. Inside the search industry bubble, people are very aware of these tactics, but if you go out into the mainstream world of marketers, you’d find little to no engagement whatsoever.

3. What social media sites do you see rising and/or falling in favor over the next 12 months?

I think Facebook is going to run over MySpace sometime soon. Granted, they both have their niches, but Facebook is accelerating at a very fast pace and has the media steamroller behind it. I’m hopeful that Reddit will do more in terms of functionality and growth as well – the site’s great, mostly due to the community of submitters and voters, but they haven’t evolved much since launch and there’s a lot of opportunity for growth. Finally, I’d say that Flickr needs to extend its popularity – it’s a great site and very popular in the techy circles, but it has yet to reach a wider audience. If they don’t do it, I’d be concerned that a competitor will eat away at that market, maybe even a new version of Picasa.>

4. Link baiting is a tactic that you are well known for. Can you explain what it is and how a company can use it?

I’ve explained the concept behind linkbait here on the Yahoo! blog. That’s probably a good resource for those who are new to the topic. Basically, the idea is to put out content that will spread virally across the web through “connectors” – owners of blogs, posters on social media sites, participants in forums and web communities, etc. I think the biggest example of this to date is surely YouTube’s growth from a non-player to market leader in 3 months with the Lazy Sunday video off SNL.

5. Which SMO techniques that you think are wastes of time?

Bullshitting. I think it’s totally useless to go onto social media sites and pretend to be a “big fan” of some company or product in a fake way. I see it on occasion and it’s so easy to spot and so repellent to the community that it hurts the brand more than it helps.

6. Tell me about the most successful campaign you have seen in SMO?

I don’t think I can reveal that, actually. I can talk about a recent success though – we worked with Chris Null who runs FilmCritic.com and used some cool linkbait on the site to help push them from #380 for “movie reviews” to #8 today (hopefully that acceleration will keep up).

7. The FilmCritic.com example you gave was very interesting, especially with such a competitive keyword. Can you share what the time frame was that you were able to move the site 370+ places in Google?

We launched a re-design of the site in late June and began the linkbaiting around that same time frame, so approximately 30-40 days. It was a lesson for us in how powerful linkbait could be

8. Tell me about the biggest blunder you’ve seen in SMO?

I saw a company “pretend” to do an independent review of several vendors of a particular product/service on a website. They got very popular with hundreds of thousands of visitors and tons of blogs and social buzz about them, but then one intrepid blogger started investigating and found that the company who was ranked “best” had actually paid a social media firm to put together the whole project. Ugly stuff – that blog entry got nearly as much coverage as the original piece and many bloggers actually deleted their links to the ranking site. That sucked.

The interview series is the most read section of the blog and I have been working through a list of people that I wanted to hear from. But now I want to hear from you about who else I should try and interview. Would you rather read about what someone like Rand Fishkin (plug for next week’s interview) has to say about social marketing or would you prefer to hear more form people like James Connell of Roots Canada.

Leave you suggestions as a comment below

This week Andy Hagan steps into the interview chair as part of our ongoing series of interviewing the top people in the social media marketing space.

Andy is well known in the SEO field and is a frequent speaker at conferences like Search Engine Strategies, WebmasterWorld and South by Southwest Interactive.

1. Andy you are one of the early evangelists of social media optimization, especially for link building. Can you tell me about your decision get involved in this market?

Basically, it’s by far the most cost-effective way to get editorial citations, which lead to organic search rankings. Social media has been a profit driver for us, so we’ll ride it as long as it continues to be.

2. Social media marketing has really taken off over the last 12 months. What has been the biggest surprise to you about the growth of social media?

Biggest surprise? How weak Digg’s anti-spam team is. Compared to Netscape—Netscape is much more aggressive.

3. What do you see as the biggest opportunity in social media over the next 12 months?

I think you’ll see niche sites start to take off. Sites like Ballhype, Sphinn, Hugg, Tweako, etc… smart webmasters will submit to the niche sites regular and take advantage of the small—but highly targeted, and growing—stream of traffic.

4. What social media sites do you see rising and/or falling over the next 12 months?

Will Netscape just die already please?

5. What are some of the opportunities in social media that you see that marketers are not taking advantage of?

Scale. One link bait success is a shot in the arm. One per week is a huge competitive advantage in organic.

6. Link baiting is a tactic that you are well known for. Can you explain what it is and how a company can use it?

Sorry no ? Here’s a link though to Andy Hagans’ Ultimate Guide to Linkbaiting and SMM

7. Tell me about the biggest blunder you’ve seen in SMO?

Getting a bunch of sites banned from Delicious and Netscape hurt for a little while. We have many sites though ?

We are really excited that social media leader Neil Patel has agreed to be the interviewed in our social media optimization series.

Neil Patel is the founder of Advantage Consulting Services which was started in 2002. He has lead Internet marketing strategies for small and medium sized businesses as well as top companies such as Hewlett Packard and Wal-Mart.

In the interview Neil talks about his thoughts on social media as well as what SMO strategies he is advising clients to use, and which ones to avoid.

Neil you are one of the co-founders of ACS. Can you tell me about your decision to launch a Social Media Marketing company?

When we first launched ACS 4 years ago we had no idea that we would do a lot of social media marketing. It just so happened that we became good at it and started helping others with social media marketing.

You launched your company blog under Pronet Advertising. Why did you create a separate brand for Pronet?

Pronet originally started as my blog and then turned into the “company” blog. If I had to do it over again I would make the blog part of ACS that way the branding wouldn’t be confusing.

How has your blog helped you generate new business?

Helping others through content has showed people that we know our stuff. Because of this people end up contacting us and inquiring about our services.

Social media marketing has really taken off over the last 12 months. What has been the biggest surprise to you about the growth of social media?

The biggest surprise is how much money people are making off of social media. Sites like the muscly jerk made over 1 million dollars because of social media and probably didn’t even spend 1000 dollars to make that million.

What do you see as the biggest opportunity in social media over the next 12 months?

Social media can help build a strong brand or crush a brand. One of the biggest opportunities I see is leveraging social media as a PR move.

ACS has an impressive customer base. Are your clients asking you for an SMO strategy?  What social media tools or tactics are you seeing them use?  What works?

Our clients are asking for SMO strategies. Most of them are using MySpace profiles or creating Facebook Apps which seem to work as long as they are targeting correctly. Think of social media as banner ads, although many people don’t think they are effective it actually is if they are targeted correctly.

What are some of the opportunities in social media that you see that marketers are not taking advantage of?

Marketers seem to be ignoring the smaller social media sites like Netscape. The long tail of social media can drive a lot of traffic as long as you can provide value to them.

Social retailing is one of the hot buzzwords in 2007. How are your clients using it?

Our clients are trying to get bloggers and social network users to recommend products to their friends. If you can do this it is effective because you are more likely to buy something your friend recommends.

Which SMO techniques that you think are wastes of time?

To be honest I am not sure because, but one of the best techniques is to add friends with common interests.

Tell me about the biggest blunder you’ve seen in SMO?

Companies like Comcast ignore social media and their brand starts going down the toilet (or at least in my mind). Not sure if it is affecting their revenue, but I personally am all about brand management.

It’s the end of a very interesting week. On Monday we kicked off the week with an interview with Cameron Olthuis. Cameron gave some really insightful answers. I asked Cameron what has been the biggest surprise to him about the growth of social media. His answer was:

The biggest surprise to me is that many big brands and industries have failed to recognize this trend and leverage it. Take the surfing industry for example: many of the big lifestyle brands in that industry have large followings and crazy brand evangelists that would be perfect for social media marketing, yet none of them have recognized this trend or leveraged it properly. That whole industry needs a kick in the ass when it comes to online marketing.

Our interview series has provided some great insight and ideas about how to successfully use social media marketing from many of the leaders in social media. If you have not read all the interviews I recommend checking out all our interviews here. In the next two weeks we have interviews lined up with social media expert Neil Patel and link bait expert Andy Hagan.

On Tuesday we wrote about how PETCO is Creating A Marketing Buzz Via Video. Why did Petco decide to build a marketing campaign around user-generated content? John Lazarchic, Petco vice president of e-commerce says that:

“At the end of the day we always want sales. And with the video reviews, if they are done well, I think we will see an uptick on the products that have that type of review,”  “With the written reviews, we’ve been able to tie it back to ROI. But I think the return with video will be more on engagement with the web site, site stickiness, and people’s tendency to come back to Petco as a source of information than necessarily a direct purchase as a result of this technology.”

Later in the week we wrote about Measuring Social Media Campaigns. How to measure the effectiveness of a social media campaign is a topic that has spawned thousands of blog posts, many of which throw up a mathematical formula that would give Einstein pause to think. Some of the best thoughts came in the comments to the post.

Katie of KDPaine’s PR Measurement Blog (http://kdpaine.blogs.com/) wrote in response to the article:

The reason why Social Media Measurement has spawned such discussion is that “R” in ROI changes from campaign to campaign. Not everyone dives into Social Media to generate conversion. Many are there to listen to customers and improve products and better understand the marketplace. Others are there to change minds, educate the marketplace or simply inform. That’s why we are all gravitating to engagement and influence because we’re not all agreeing on what return to expect.

We are really excited that social media leader Cameron Olthuis has agreed to be the interviewed in our social media optimization series. Cameron is CEO of a media startup that is currently in stealth mode and his blog is a must read for anyone interested in social media ad search.

Cameron, you are one of the early evangelists of social media optimization. Can you tell me about your decision get involved in this market?

I guess you could say that I stumbled upon social media optimization by accident. In the early days of Digg I had an article from one of my sites get on the homepage and it didn’t take long for me to see the amount of traffic and links that were a result of it. Coming from a strong SEO background I knew the power of inbound links and it was common sense that this would be a very powerful tool for building links. From there I started to explore other social media sites and the various ways they can be used for marketing and connecting with consumers outside of search. I’m still to this day blown away and at how much power social media marketing has.

Social media marketing has really taken off over the last 12 months. What has been the biggest surprise to you about the growth of social media?

The biggest surprise to me is that many big brands and industries have failed to recognize this trend and leverage it. Take the surfing industry for example: many of the big lifestyle brands in that industry have large followings and crazy brand evangelists that would be perfect for social media marketing, yet none of them have recognized this trend or leveraged it properly. That whole industry needs a kick in the ass when it comes to online marketing.

What do you see as the biggest opportunity in social media over the next 12 months?

I think the biggest opportunity is for companies and brands to integrate social media features within their own sites. This is especially true for brands that are already heavily involved in traditional media and are perceived as ‘cool’ by consumers. Can you image how successful a social network would be for Oprah?

You have worked with an impressive group of companies Cameron. Are your clients asking you for an SMO strategy?  What social media tools or tactics are you seeing them use?  What works?

Some clients do ask for an SMO strategy but most of the time it’s me, the consultant, that is educating them on why they need SMO and how it would benefit them. The tactic that is most successful depends on the goals we are trying to accomplish with the marketing campaign. YouTube may be the most successful to use for viral videos and branding while creating content for social news site would be successful for link building and SEO.

What are some of the opportunities in social media that you see that marketers are not taking advantage of?

Like I mentioned before, there are several industries and brands that are completely failing to see the opportunities that are available with social media marketing. I also see a lot of marketers that fail to create SEO friendly campaigns. Search is huge and just about everyone uses Google to navigate the web; these campaigns would be more successful if they leveraged SEO.

Social retailing is one of the hot buzzwords in 2007. How are your clients using it?

They’re using it to leverage the power of word of mouth. We’ve seen a lot of studies lately that show proof that word of mouth plays a huge role in purchasing decisions. By tapping into peer networks and making content easy to spread, our clients are able to make it easy for consumers to make the right purchasing decisions. Even if that sometimes means your product is the best for a given situation. It’s nice when a consumer can ask for feedback on certain products or seen what others with similar interests and needs are buying.

Which SMO techniques that you think are wastes of time?

I think trying to game the system is a waste of time. Even if you do go popular on social sites that content is so bad that it won’t result in any kind of success. I also think it’s a waste of time to try and spread mediocre or bad content. Instead marketers should focus on writing/producing remarkable content that will easily spread on its own once you give it a little push.

Tell me about the biggest blunder you’ve seen in SMO?

I’ve seen some pretty bad ones. One that comes to mind was actually just mentioned on your blog a few days ago. When Walmart tried to launch a social network aimed at teens, it was shut down within a few months because it went nowhere. Everything from the idea to the execution was just horrible. It was an example of a large corporation trying to cash in on the social networking craze who had no clue what they were doing. They failed to innovate and their social network offered nothing unique or cool enough to stick.

We are really excited that Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank® Online Marketing, a Minneapolis, Minnesota search marketing agency has agreed to be the interviewed in our social media optimization series.

In part one of our interview,Lee discussed how TopRank uses social media tactics to distinguish itself in the market. In part two Lee talks about how TopRank’s clients are using social media to grow their business online.

1. TopRank Online Marketing has an impressive customer base. Are your clients asking you for an SMO strategy? What social media tools or tactics are you seeing them use? What works? What doesn’t work?

Some of our clients have been with us/me for nearly 10 years, so as part of our ongoing online marketing consulting services, we provide overall recommendations based on what we think will best help the client stay successful and do not limit tactics to one particular channel.

Depending on the goals of the company, the industry, target market, internal resources and types of content that can be produced, TopRank provides its clients education and consulting on how best to use social media in their overall marketing mix.

Social media is not applicable for every company nor is it appropriate for all marketing programs. Helping clients figure out a strategy and the corresponding implementation plan can be a big part of the services we provide.

It all starts with an understanding of the client’s goals and their target market. Then we inventory the kinds of media and content resources they have to work with. Businesses that already produce video, images, podcasts, write a blog or run a user community can have a significant advantage of companies that still rely on text for their online marketing.

What works is alignment of the target audiences’ interests and needs with the content being delivered and promoted. What doesn’t work is pushing a marketing message without considering the communities that will see it.

For example, pushing articles and videos about how to make pillows is hardly going to resonate with the Digg community. Unless of course, the pillow has a computer inside of it running the Ubuntu OS. Publishing a MySpace page or a blog about that topic and growing a network of friends and RSS subscribers would help that content travel much further amongst craft and pillow making enthusiasts in a more relevant way.

2. What are some of the opportunities in social media that you see that marketers are not taking advantage of?

I believe there’s a tremendous opportunity from really getting to know what the social communities are about. Because there’s no unified method of performing SEO, many of the newer search marketers perform site optimization tactics much like throwing spaghetti against a wall to see if it sticks. Doing that with social media without considering a social community’s way of interacting, can result in alienation and distrust of the resource being promoted.

In order to get value out of a social media marketing channel, marketers need to understand the importance of creating value for the communities. I’ve seen many drive-by social marketing efforts fail in their attempt to engage the audience and instead, create a negative brand experience because the marketer did not become a part of the community or offer something the community members would value.

Successful marketing with social media is a combination of active participation, involvement and creation of value as well as a continuous process of testing and measuring new channels to see what new communities might become the next Digg, Facebook or StumbleUpon.

3. Which SMO techniques do you think are wastes of time?

I think the issue of time wasting SMO techniques is mostly an issue of alignment. There are many purposes for conducting a social media campaign such as: SEO, driving traffic for content monetization, branding or public relations. When marketers implement tactics seen as successful without understanding the context in which they are successful as well as the purpose, it’s a waste of time.

In other words, what works for a social media SEO focused campaign is not necessarily going to transfer to a social media public relations effort and vice versa.

One example is the over promotion of social bookmarking and social news sites on blogs and resource web pages. Showing a multitude of links or icons for every major bookmarking service is a waste of time. More often than not, providing so many options confuses the visitor and they end up not bookmarking or sharing anything at all.

It’s better to test which bookmark services that users tend to click on and implement a select few services that best resonate with the blog’s audience. We’ve learned this lesson ourselves and have reduced the number and types of bookmark services listed after each post to the services we feel are most relevant to our content and our reader’s usage.

4. Tell me about the biggest blunder you’ve seen in SMO?

There are plenty of blunders inasmuch a lot of effort was put into various social media promotion efforts and no one noticed.

But I suspect you have a different kind of blunder in mind, such as when fake blogs or videos are outed. In particular, I think there are some large brands that in combination with their PR agencies have made some unfortunate decisions to launch campaigns involving fake people and content.

For example, fake blogs like Walmarting Across America or Sony’s fake PSP blog which, now curiously links to a site for Haagen-Dazs, come to mind.