A very smart move and one that will create more traffic from the Yahoo homepage to other parts of the Yahoo property I would predict…maybe a spike in people using Yahoo Buzz?

Facebook announced a new feature that they are rolling out to pages that lets the administrator automatically publish the update to Twitter.

Fascinating and tied to the recent Wired article about the growth of the walled off Facebook network. Here’s the full article listing how total search queries grew in Facebook, but drop in Google.

I had a great time on a panel yesterday about social media organized by the DC Chapter of the American Marketing Association. I pulled together slides of useful online marketing tools and wanted to share them here. It was tons of fun getting folks excited about social media and web measurement.

For all of you still trying to convince your bosses that social networking is something you should be involved in, feel free to reference the latest research from Neilsen Online which shows that people are now spending more time checking social networking sites and blogs than reading email.

I had a great time this morning leading a training session for Leadership Alexandria’s alumnus related to online marketing, local search and social media for non-profits and businesses.

Here’s the online marketing presentation from today’s training.

I wanted to share with everyone the buzz monitoring tools I’ve discovered and think are useful. This list assumes that you’ve set up Google and Yahoo Alerts and are looking for the next step.

Keotag – lets you search various social media sites (delicious, facebook, etc) by tags.

Yahoo Pipes

Back Type - to follow and monitor comments

Social Mention – searches across a variety of social media sources, including Google blog search, Twitter, Delicious, FriendFeed, Flickr, Digg, YouTube. You can also set up RSS feeds and email alerts.

Serph – a search engine that searches across various sites.  The major social media sites that Serph uses are: Technorati, Digg, YouTube, Flickr, Google Blog Search, Bloglines, and Newsvine.

BuzzFeed.com – They say: We feature the kind of things you’d want to pass along to your friends: an outrageous video that’s about to go viral, an obscure subculture breaking into the mainstream, a juicy bit of gossip that everyone at the office will be talking about tomorrow, or an ordinary guy having his glorious 15-minutes of fame. And when you read BuzzFeed, you’ll always know the movies, music, and products that are on the rise and worth your time.

And last but not least, EgoSurf. This one just makes me smile. My blog received 2563 Ego points for my name, while my website recieved 2157 points. The ego meter graphic is one of the most amusing aspects.

Thought these Flash videos about social media were neat. They cover how HP used bloggers in their marketing plan, how Facebook Connect works, how to use Twitter as  a Tool, and how to create your own social network.

So I’m impressed by the creativity of the Salvation Army of Chicago’s marketing efforts. You can see their YouTube vide where they have Chicagoans helping them play a Christmas carol using the SA bells, and their online donation kettle.

They get a gold star for innovation, but no stars for effectiveness. Why? They did not develop a promotional plan for either effort, and in the crowded social media scape, there’s a good chance that no one will see these efforts.

Here’s where they can improve:

1. Their YouTube video should be on a channel that is branded with their colors and they should apply for nonprofit status through YouTube so that they can have a donate now button on their page. Even better, they should create their “red kettle” icon as a gif and upload it to their page. You’ll notice that no one has commented on their video. This is because (as far as I can tell) they have not promoted it to their list or social media sites. Neither their description nor the title of their video have the keywords “Salvation Army Chicago” in them, so traffic from search is limited. I don’t believe they’ve done any keyword research. If they did, they would use the worlds “holiday volunteering”, “Chicago at the holidays” are terms people are currently using in search. (You can see for yourself by using SEOBook.com’s free keyword tool).

2. Their online holiday kettle page does not allow sharing to any social media site (like Facebook). In fact, their set up process is 4 steps long. This has clearly not been tested by users. They should create shorter sign up process (user name and password with an email asking for more info later) and a link to the code that you can then embed into your blog, myspace, facebook, would be much more effective. I abandoned the process at step 3 when I was suddenly asked to fill out 15 fields. That’s too much info for helping SA by installing a simple widget onto my social media profile, blog or website. In fact, if you visit their Facebook page (with 4,000 + fans) they don’t mention either of these tools. And this is the type of community where (if you make it easy for them) they will spread your message to their friends.

I wonder what kind of adoption they will have with both endeavors. My guess is very little due to the fact that the widget was build without the user in mind and without any usability testing, both items where set up without any strategic thought to selecting keywords on the pages that would capture natural traffic, and (as far as I can tell) neither were launched with a promotional plan encouraging those they know to use and spread the tools.

So close and yet so far….

This is the first time I’m going to do a full online marketing 101 crash course (including email) in under an hour, so we’ll see how it goes. If you’re interested in viewing the presentation I’ll be using for Environmental Working Group this next week in Washington, DC, you can view the online marketing 101 presentation here.