Thunder Booms! Search and Social Favorites for August 26, 2011

Ever wondered how much revenue SMX conferences and online sites (like SearchEngineLand.com) generate? Inc.'s 2011 500 list ranks Third Door Media (the owner of SMX and SEL.com) #1585 with revenue of $4.6 million in 2010, an increase of 173% over the past 5 years. Way to go Chris Sherman, Danny Sullivan and everyone at Third Door Media!

This meeting of course is in response to the riots in England that were partly organized via Blackberry and other social media devices. There's been reports in the news that Parliament is "examining whether to ban suspected troublemakers in the riot from using social media and other digital communication tools". Naturally, anyone who uses any "digital communication tool" is probably wondering...how will they do that? While it all reeks of "big brother" potential, it also reflects how quickly and broadly social media is impacting society. This article just confirms that Twitter, RIM and Facebook have all confirmed their participation or, at least, their willingness to listen. The more interesting news will be watching how all this develops, if at all.

For those of you interested in weather related things, you might find this useful. Todd Wasserman has posted 12 different ways to track Hurricane Irene online. Why would you want to do this? Well maybe you have friends and family that you are concerned about, or maybe you just have a lot of spare time. Personally, I have both. Isn't technology neat?

It goes without saying, Arnie Kuenn is just killing it lately when it comes to leveraging content for SEO & online marketing. This post takes a little different spin than some of his others, as it directly targets the business owners & marketing directors who manage their company's website. As an agency SEO, I found this to be a really useful guide to help establish the content marketing mindset with my clients. One of my favorite points that he makes is in the beginning, it's "If you have a website, then you're a publisher, and you need to think like one". Knowing, accepting, and embracing this is critical to success online, and it's something that I think a lot of business owners find hard to comprehend. But once you can get them to adopt the publisher mindset, the content will flow. The only hard part then is filtering the bad stuff from the good. But that's what they hired us for, right?

Link building is a big part of client campaigns here at Thunder, so I'm constantly looking at ways to make my prospecting queries better and more accurate. This is a great post from YouMoz by Paul Rogers that talks about the different ways to build prospecting lists. I had heard of using tools like FollowerWonk and advanced search queries, but some of the tools, like TinEye and BuzzMarker, were new to me. Definitely looking forward to checking out some of these other tools for streamlining the link building process!