One of my favorite new advertising opportunities is Twitter’s promoted products. Competition is low, engagement rates are high, and research indicated the audience actually likes seeing them. I spoke on Twitter’s promoted products at the SMX Social Media Marketing conference in December, which inspired this blog post. Here’s why I think Twitter is worth your …

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Now more than ever, your blog’s traffic depends on how much your community shares it. More and more, search engines are looking to reward rankings to the highest quality content, and the best content gets the Tweets, Facebook shares and Google +1′s that the search engines engine take into consideration. So it pays to pay …

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What I’ll call the “Great Google Convergence” continued yesterday as Google announced that they would be merging their Google+ (G+) data into personalized search results (aka Search, Plus Your World). On the surface, this appears to be a desperate play by Google to make sure its social networking experiment, G+, gains more traction. However, I …

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The work isn’t done at Raven once we launch a new feature. As proud as we are of our new Social Stream and revamped Social Monitor, we’re always working on new ways to make our tools even better. Here are some of the tweaks and changes we’ve made recently on our social tools. Even more …

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With even the Pentagon getting their feet wet with social media this year, the industry saw major growth – and growing pains in 2011. Here are nine of the biggest social media stories of the year. What are your picks? 1. Photos finish first While Google Plus got most of the hype, photo-focused social sites …

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If you love lists, top 10s and bullet points (and, come on, as Internet marketers this stuff is our bread and butter), the week between Christmas and New Year’s is a gold mine. We all try to make sense of the year by cataloging its high points and missteps, then move on to making bold …

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Customer care is everything. It’s in every facet of your organization. A developer fixes a problem. Someone on your marketing staff interacts with a client at an event. A publicist notices a complaint and helps assist. All of these touch points require your team to be kind, efficient and – most important of all – …

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SMX Social Media Marketing in beautiful Scottsdale, Ariz., just wrapped up yesterday and I have full-fledged conference brain. You know, the kind of mind melt that happens when your head is just too full of great new information and all the conversations you’ve had with smart new friends? Yup. But even in the fog of …

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Love. Help! Delicious. Decent. Style. The words that customers use in social spaces give you significant insight about how they think—and feel—about your product or services. If you mine social media conversations for word trends, you’ll probably be surprised by the results. But surprise or not, you can learn exactly what action to take in …

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It’s a question we get a lot. If Raven has a main company Twitter account—@RavenTools—then why do Raven employees use Raven Twitter handles, too? Like this… @RavenArienne (that’s me) @RavenJon (Jon Henshaw) @RavenPratt (Taylor Pratt) @RavenCourts (Courtney Seiter) @RavenGiant (Brannan Atkinson) …and so on. (There are more. Go follow them if you like.) This question …

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