I know enough about SEO to be dangerous to people like Brian Chappell, who is our expert, but this is sort of an SEO 101 post anyway. When I started Ignite Social Media in July of 2007, I could see pretty clearly that I didn’t rank very well for my name. While I’m no “John Smith,” I do have some competition for the term “Jim Tobin”. Battling me for first page results on Google are:

• Jim Tobin, the Nobel Prize winning economist, called “one of the giants of 20th century econ” (pictured above right);
• Jim Tobin, a baseball pitcher in the 30s and 40s who apparently was pretty good;
• Jim Tobin, the CEO of Boston Scientific (pictured below right), who apparently made $38.1m bucks in 2005 (mad…); and
• Jim Tobin, who was convicted in 2005 of trying to help George Bush’s re-election effort by jamming Democratic phone banks.

This is post two of a three part series on how to use widgets for marketing. Widget development can be costly and time consuming. It is important to ask the right questions before developing widgets. Here is somewhat of a checklist that needs to be answered if you are considering developing a widget as part of your social media marketing campaign.

1. Why would people want to use this?

This should be your first question when you decide to develop a widget for marketing purposes. What is the widget’s purpose? Does the widget provide value to the user? Is it a badge that allows a user to proclaim a significant statement? Most people treat their social profiles and blogs as a declaration of who they are. If you can’t think of a reason that someone in your target demographic would add this to their blog or social profiles then you might want to reconsider using a widget for social media marketing.

Recently I stumbled across the microsite for the “Filter For Good” campaign, which is a collaboration by Brita and Nalgene to convince people to stop buying bottled water. Well, I didn’t stumble across it, exactly. There was an ad on Pandora’s website pointing me in the right direction, and the same day a few other people in the office also found it in the same manner.

The site initially caught my eye because I noticed they had placed a content aggregation widget on their landing page, which led me to be curious about what other social media tools they were employing. Here’s a brief survey of what I found:

Continuing with the series, 26 Social Media Marketing Examples in Detail , I will cover The Library of Congress. Perhaps you may think that this isn’t the most exciting example to showcase on a Friday, but hopefully you will be just as pleasantly surprised as I was to see the neat ways the largest library in the world is sharing some of its unique content. And if you are a library geek like me, you’ll find yourself subscribing to some of these tactics by the time you are finished discovering them.

Here is what they are doing:

How we talk about social networks has changed a lot in the last 12 months.

• It used to be: “Kids use these, but not many people over 30 use them.”
• Now it’s: “The fastest growing user segment on Facebook is over age 55.”

Digg recently released DiggBar to a wave of criticism normally reserved for Facebook whenever it rolls out a new piece of functionality. What has gotten folks, in particular SEOers and content producers, all riled up?

At the behest of @influxed and @ashtonmae, I decided to do a brief round up of some best practices when managing the Twitter account for a company. There are companies that entrust their Twitter activities to a team of people, especially when updates need to be timely (a news organization, for example). But because Twitter is a conversation, you have to be careful with the whole concept of “ghostwriting,” and extra careful with the company’s image. Once you tarnish that, it’s a struggle to rid them of the stain.

Here are a couple of things to keep in mind:

I recently gained a Twitter follower named Gaming873. Now, don’t get me wrong, I like gaming and everything, but I am not a gamer, per se. I might have at some point in time Twittered something about some video game, or possibly the word “game,” but that doesn’t mean that I am by any means a “gamer.” So, I ask you Gaming873, why are you following me? Do you care what I have to say? And for that matter, what are you doing to engage others who might be interested in gaming? Oh, nothing? That’s cool. Keep it up.

We recently did the first-ever sponsored Tweet-a-thon for one of our clients, NCM Fathom Events, and their event A Powerful Noise. It was the first time just sending a tweet generated a donation from a third party, and it went extremely well, with more than 2,800 Tweets rolling out in 4 days.

Since then, there have been several cases where we’d like to do the same thing again. But we haven’t, because in all likelihood it would not be as successful as the first. Why? At this point in social media marketing’s life, roughly half the blog chatter is about what you’re doing, while half is about the fact that you’re doing something new.

Widgets have been around for a while, but recently more people seem to be discovering the power of the widget. So I thought I’d give a 101 type post on a widget is and what it can and can not do. I’ll be following up this post with a series on some great (and some not so great) widgets and why they work.