South Florida Web Marketing Blog

If you got nothing to do – this is a fresh way to watch Social Networking in action:

http://spy.appspot.com/

Spy can listen in on the social media conversations you’re interested in.

It is powered by:

• Twitter via Twitter Search
• FriendFeed via FriendFeed
• Flickr via Flickr
• Blog Comments via BackType
• Yahoo News via Yahoo! Search BOSS™
• Blogs (RSS) via FriendFeed
• Google Reader via FriendFeed

spy.appspot.com was created by Ben Hedrington

More marketers use social networking to reach customers
By Jon Swartz, USA TODAY

SAN FRANCISCO — Ford Motor has high hopes for Fiesta, a popular model abroad launching in the U.S. next year.

So how does it introduce the subcompact car to Americans? A massive ad blitz on TV? In-house promotions at dealers nationwide?

Nope.

In April, Ford tapped 100 top bloggers and gave them a Fiesta for six months. The catch: Once a month, they’re required to upload a video on YouTube about the car, and they’re encouraged to talk — no holds barred — about the Fiesta on their blogs, Facebook and Twitter.

Read more about the use of Social Networking…

Ning – The future of online social networking?
By Stephanie Chen

(CNN) — Whether you’re into baseball or backgammon, Harry Potter or heavy metal, Ning has an online network for you.

Story Highlights

• CNN talks to Gina Bianchini, CEO of Ning, a fast-growing Web site
• Ning lets people with common interests gather around niche social networks
• The site boasts more than 1 million social networks — some 200,000 of them active
• In March, the site added a real-time activity feed to help users stay updated

The complete story…

To visit the website:

http://www.ning.com/

I just read this article about Linkedin.

Bad news for workers is good news for LinkedIn

By Jon Swartz, USA TODAY
Social-networking site LinkedIn, which lets business professionals create online profiles to seek jobs and network, is adding members faster than ever despite its own recent layoffs and a management shake-up. About 1 million people flock to the network every two weeks now, compared with 1 million per month earlier this year. (The site has 33 million members from 8 million two years ago.)

To read more…

Social Networking is a great way to link your business and website. Linkedin has about 1 million people visiting the network every two weeks, according to the article. That is a tremendous amount of traffic. Anytime you can get a link on a website with an enormous amount of traffic – is an opportunity.

Delicious is a social bookmarking service. Users can tag, save, manage and share web pages from http://delicious.com.

With emphasis on the power of the community, Delicious greatly improves how people discover, remember and share information, articles, stories and more on the Internet.

What you can do with Delicious

• Bookmark any site on the Internet, and get to it from anywhere – like having your own favorites.
• Delicious makes it easy to have a single set of bookmarks always available from the internet
• You can share your bookmarks, and get bookmarks in return
• If your friends use Delicious, you can send them interesting bookmarks that they can check out the next time they log in.
• Discover the most useful and interesting bookmarks on the web
• See what's hot with Delicious users by checking out our popular tags.

I setup a Delicious account – http://delicious.com/MerlinIII

It's a fun way to share links