Google to Launch “Meta” Social Network - GOOG Stock Hits $700

Not that we’re saying that GOOG stock has hit $700 simply because of this announcement, but it is interesting to watch these two stories unfold on the same day.

On October 29th, we learned that Google was planning on launching it’s own social network - of sorts. Under the code name “Maka-Maka”, it was revealed that Google planned to - at least indirectly - compete with Facebook by launching an open development platform that can access not just Googles’ information, but also the information of other social networks as well. This would give developers the ability to aggregate data from Google, LinkedIn, Orkut, and other social networks in their applications.

More details emerged today when Michael Arrington revealed on Techcrunch that the platform will allow fairly comprehensive access to information. The new project, which will be called OpenSocial (not yet launched as of this writing), will provide access to any network which chooses to allow access to their information.

Arrington notes that OpenSocial will involve a set of API’s that will allow developers to access the following information in participating social networks:

• Profile Information (user data)
• Friends Information (social graph)
• Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)

So far, OpenSocial will provide access to the information of Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle.

Originally, the date given for the launch of OpenSocial was on or after November 5th, however Arrington notes today that the platform may now launch as early as Thursday.

Analysis

At SMX Social Media last week, we were involved in a lot of discussion about how there needed to be some kind of system that could access all these social networks. Between digg, facebook, myspace, linkedin, ning, and others, there aren’t enough hours in the day to be active or effective in them all. An overarching system that could access all of these systems at the same time would be a social marketers dream come true. It is this need that OpenSocial could - potentially - satisfy.

Coming on the heels of Microsoft’s acquisition of 1.6% Facebook for $240 million (to some criticism), this news would seem to suggest that Google did not have as big a stake as Microsoft in winning the small slice of Facebook. Why buy a piece of real estate if you can run the toll booth for everyone entering and leaving? If OpenSocial becomes widely adopted, Google would find itself at the very epicenter of online social networking, tied in with multiple levels of user data.

At the same time, there is potentially a lot of value for developers and savvy marketers in OpenSocial. With the ability to access multiple sources of social profile information, without having to learn yet another programming language, comes the ability to more easily tailor content to specific people. If marketers can access the likes and dislikes of a visitor, map out aggregate friend and network information, and understand what visitors are interested in, then promotional and marketing activities can be more effectively tailored to the market. And as we all know… ads can be unobtrusive - even helpful - if they are relevant enough.

Web users rely on community-contributed-content sites such as Wikipedia and Yahoo Answers. These sites enable you to communicate directly with an engaged audience. But contribute to the conversation with care. Too much spin and you’re credibility will be shot-and your brand damaged. You’ll come away from this session knowing how these influential sites work and how to participate constructively.

Moderator:

Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speakers:

• Lise Broer “Durova”, Administrator, Wikipedia
• Jonathan Hochman, Founder/President, Hochman Consultants
• Matt McGee, SEO Manager, Marchex
• Stephan Spencer, Founder & President, Netconcepts
• Don Steele, Director of Digital & Enterprise Marketing, Comedy Central

First Up: Matt McGee

Yahoo Answers

You create a profile page with link to your website

• links are nofollow

Audience Reach

• US: 21 million
• World: 95 million users

Professionals are welcome

• you are encouraged to market your business - if you are a professional
• You are allowed to link to your site if it is helpful

His Blog:

• highest source of new visitors
• Lowest source of bounces

Search Traffic

• Yahoo answers ranks in search engines

How to use Yahoo Answers

• Every category has a feed
• sort wisely
• make sure you sign your name
• don’t spam: there is a strong community review process

Next up: Jonathan Hochman

Wikipedia

• digg is great, but Wikipedia has much more visibility
  (the graph displayed at this time shows a wide difference)

Marketing

• is OK if you answer questions, interact with editors
• Don’t Advertise, write about yourself, or

The fundamental rule of all social marketing is “don’t be a dick”

Top Newbie Mistakes

• don’t use a product or business name as your username
• don’t violate copyright
• don’t write about yourself or your company

Spamming is a bad idea

• other websites use Wikipedia’s blacklist to filter out spam
• therefore, being blacklisted at Wikipedia can blacklist you at thousands of other sites as well
• IP addresses are not private

The Power of Wiki

• Your audience does the marketing
• Content spreads virally
• Participating can improve your reputation

Next Up: Stephan Spencer

How do you get your edits to “stick”?

• Be a “virtuous” marketer
• develop your profile and user page
• add valuable content as the same time as you add links
• communicate with the main editor
• you can negotiate with them: “I had an idea for this section of the site.. what do you think?”. If they give you the thumbs up, it might stick
• Use References to substantiate your claim

Create New Entries

• you need to have street cred by logging in with a “virtuous account”

Clear the “Notability” Hurdle

• establish notability if you are covering a smaller organization
• press releases don’t generally help establish notability
• you can’t work on the page if you work for that company, but you can participate in the “talk” page as it’s being built
• Awards may or may not help
• Wikipedia also relies on friends: the more, the better
• Watch pages you are interested in

Playing the Game

Tools:

• Wiki Scanner: tracks edits by IP address - everything you do in Wikipedia can be tracked, even years later

Next Up: Don Steele

What they do

They look at everywhere Comedy Central has been mentioned and paying attention

• South Park has over 150 pages - each episode, each character, etc. Whereas Mahatma Ghandi has 1 page
• if your brand is on Wikipedia, you have to understand what people are saying about you
• what are they saying about your products
• when people are on their shows, the Daily Show and Colbert Report shows up in their Wikipedia entry
• Wikipedia is free traffic

Things they don’t do

• edit their own pages
• add promotions, etc. to Wikipedia

Summary

• Monitor traffic from Wikipedia
• Don’t edit your own pages

Next up: Lise Broer

Example:

• A person began adding information on a company
• a VERY long discussion ensued in which the person responded to accusations of spam with general sales responses
• When the IP was tracked, it was traced back to the company
• eventually, editing of the company page was disabled, as well as doubt cast on the neutrality of the article

Volunteers get jaded

• when they see too much spam, they begin to expect the worst

Pick an interest area, and there’s probably a social media site that’s serving a community around it. These sites might be “micro” in size compared to some of the large, well-known services, but they have passionate members who might also be a more targeted audience that you wish to reach. This session tours some of the many smaller communities out there.

Moderator:

Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speakers:

• Liana Evans, Director of Internet Marketing, KeyRelevance
• Rand Fishkin, CEO & Co-founder, SEOmoz

First up: Rand Fishkin

Q: What are Vertical Portals?

A: Smaller social networking sites

Why focus on them?

Traffic vs. Relevance:

• reach the right people, and not just “everyone”
• you can make your voice more heard
• chances are, people involved in that smaller vertical social network are connected to other people interested in that topic

Strategies: How do you find Micro-Communities?

• Search Engines
• Social Media & Web 2.0 Lists
• Recommendations and Networking: ask your friends

Look for:

• Topic Focus and Relevance
• Leverageable features
• comments, create petitions, email accounts, job hunting network, etc.

Dozens of Networks:

• care2
• WebMD
• Library thing
• Yelp: local reviews
• Trulia
• PeerTrainer
• ThinkVitamin
• Minti
• Real Estate Voices
• DeviantArt
• SportsShooter
• Threadless
• Cork’d
• Imbee
• Virb
• Wayfaring
• Couchsurfing
• WIkia
• Wikihow
• Helium
• Elsy
• Bakerspace
• Foodcandy
• sphinn
• The Stranger
• ebay

Next Up: Liana Evans

Highly Competitive Markets

• Medication, casinos, travel, adult, shopping, shoes, personal injury lawyers, wine

Case Study

A Diet client

• client only ranked for his brand name
• PPC: $40k spent in 3 months
• less than 50 requests
• no return purchases
• sometimes you need to start the conversation: people need to know about you before they can talk about you
• So decided to do “Fat Blogging”
• approached bloggers who were blogging about losing weight
• Social Media is more than just web 2.0
• Sent bloggers a free sample

Plan a strategy

• prove you have read the content of the blog you are approaching

Be Honest

• Follow WOMMA guidelines

One of the bloggers they worked with was featured on MSN

Take the good and the bad

• Listen to the audience

Value of Social Media

• over 400 subscriptions
• 308 Trials delivered
• 98% of people reported drinking the free sample
• $600 in sales

Further live coverage here:

Search Engine Land
Search Engine Roundtable
Search Engine Journal

Want to be really successful in social media marketing? You need to be an evangelist and activity participate in communities, forums and blogging. Leave this session knowing how to evolve from community observer to community participant and influencer.

Moderator:

Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speakers:

• Sarah Hofstetter, Vice President, Emerging Media & Client Strategy, 360i
• Rob Key, CEO, Converseon
• Adam Sherk, Search/PR Strategist, Define Search Strategies

Note: Was late to session due to presenting in this morning’s first session.

First up: Rob Key

Second Life

Second Chance Trees Project

• Created a youtube video to promote the second life property where you can purchase trees virtually in SL
• became viral
• mainstream media picked up the story

Effective Social Media Strategies Require a Process

• you need to listen before you engage

Next Up: Adam Sherk

Enterprise SEM Limitations:

• Corporate SMM takes multi-dept coordination
• Corporations can be big ships that turn slowly
• You need to plan for SMM
• you may not be able to update certain pages on the website
• Work with limitations of ad revenue and legal dept.

Common pitfalls

• no strategy
• lack of support
• enthusiasm and strategy are 2 different things
• just because you want to create a facebook profile doesn’t mean it’s appropriate to your business

Path to Success

• you should get buy-in from upper management and key depts
• company should understand that they must participate and offer value in order to succeed
• need the right people on board, and they need the right tools
• you must test
• you need time to build “street cred”
• never submit your own content, or wait before submitting your own content

More to consider

• it takes time to be successful
• need to consider what happens if your “brand ambassador” leaves - what if they quit after building up
• a profile after 2 years? Transferability should be built in
• transparency is important - be honest about who you are
• should have a coporate social media policy in place: should employees digg stories about you?

Finding what works

• the daily green: finding users that are receptive to the content. use content as linkbait
• Good Housekeeping: their linkbait made the front page of digg
• TV Guide:have a full time “brand ambassador” who creates profiles online to promote the site
• they do “indirect” SMM to create viral buzz
• “High School Musical 2″ (TV Guide) - had a song that could not be downloaded anywhere else
• had unique content, could get a CD
• very successful: blogged, went viral, direct contact, drove traffic and buzz, and magazine sales were up 65%

Next Up: Sarah Hofstetter

Case Studies

• HGTV - “Living with Ed”
• NBC’s “Heros”
• Tune-In Campaign
• Engagement

HGTV - Living with Ed

• new show with evironmental theme
• needed to build awareness of the show
• Had image issue on Google - sites on different theme were ranking
• tried using PPC, etc. for Google, but didn’t work
• so reached out to bloggers, influencers, etc.who write about the environment (simple email)
• they linked back to the website, which raised up their rankings in Google

NBC’s “Heroes”

• didn’t need SEM generally, just wanted to generate awareness and buzz
• found digital assets that could be used to promote the show
• be careful when reaching out to bloggers, as they may publish their pitch
• look at the “bad pitch blog” - you can see bad pitches
• multiple messaging sent viewers to different assets

Indecision 2008

• was a traffic building campaign using blogs, etc.
• was able to track more traffic coming from blogs

Harnessing the Opportunity

• don’t use interns - use smart people who know your brand
• bloggers don’t care about press releases
• make sure you keep an updated database of people you can contact
• don’t assume that your content is blog-worthy

Consumers are sharing best-of-Web content with bookmarking and tagging sites like Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon. Flickr, YouTube and Technorati tap into “tagging” to categorize material, so people interested in topics can locate community finds. This session is a marketer’s guide to using bookmarking and tagging effectively.

Moderator:
Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speakers:
Guillaume Bouchard, CEO, NVI
Michael Gray, President, Atlas Web Service
Neil Patel, CTO, Advantage Consulting Services

First up: Guillaume Bouchard

Social bookmarketing: Social + Media + bookmarking
-allows you to share and organize bookmarks
-eg. del.icio.us, stumbleupon, furl
-Every bookmarking site uses Tagging - use words to categorize the content

Benefits
-higher visibility in search engines
-gain natural inbound links
-Brand awareness
-can influence traditional media

How to Tag
-check what people already like to tag on that service
-pick the tag that is most relevant
-avoid separating tags with commas
-co-ordinate efforts, establish tagging standards

Manual s. Automatic Tagging
Manual
-You create your own tags
-needs people to do this
-found on del.icio.us, stumbleupon, etc.
-best with images

Automatic
-tagged by a computer
-does not benefit from human creativity
-Facebook does this for it’s features

Abuse
-As tagging becomes more popular, there is more incentive to take advantage of it
-may result in less useful descriptions of the content

Technorati
-blog tagging
-As you use the biggest social sites (Reddit, Digg, etc.), the popularity of your blog will increase and you may rank better in Technorati

Flickr
-Image sharing
-can drive traffic to your website
-upload photos relevant to your industry
-select tags that are already “popular”
-If you want pictures to appear in technorati, mark them “public”

Youtube
-content is more important than tags
-amateur vidoes have been successful

Facebook
-create attractive profiles & be honest
-develop a widget for your market
-Invite friends and influencers to join your group

Next Up: Michael Grey

Your network: Getting Social
-can see who bookmarked it

Tagging Tips
-You can subscribe to specific tags in del.icio.us
-subscribe to the popular ones

Sharing with Friends
-can send people a link

“What’s Hot”
-See how many people are bookmarking
-See tags that people used
-See screenshot of the page

Del… Popular Page
-want to be on this page
-advantage of del. over digg
-many people use del…
-digg is mostly young males
-Look at the tags on the popular page

Del… research
-if you have two words are seperated, use +

Adding a Bookmark
-don’t have to use the description of the page

How to Use Del… for traffic
-create content that people might be interested in bookmarking

Expanding Your Exposure
-try to create a better title for the link

Advanced Tactics
-Del… updates the popular page every 4 hours. You can therefore time your submission & votes for just after an update
-Use your friends
-Don’t create multiple accounts - too many on one IP may get you banned, or may “discount” your vote

Next up: Neil Patel

Leveraging Stumbleupon

Why should you care?
-has driven over 12,000 visitors in one day

Audience
-mostly male audience
-45-54

Digg, Netscape, Reddit, Newsvine and others allow community members to share and rate news stories. They are primary news sources and influential outlets that must be considered by marketers. But don’t expect to post your old-school press release and get a good response! Learn how these sites work and how to best tailor your message for maximum visibility on them.

Moderator:

Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speakers:

• Neil Patel, CTO, Advantage Consulting Services
• Chris Winfield, President & Co-founder, 10e20
• Tamar Weinberg, Search Marketing Strategist, Rusty Brick, Inc.

First up: Neil Patel

Digg:why should we care?

• He has experienced over 129 unique links and over 10,000 visits in one hour after being on digg homepage

Requirements for succeeding with Digg

• Content, Video, or Audio

Important factors:

• it’s a voting system
• Time - 100 votes in 100 days is not as good as 100 votes in 1 hour
• Voters - who votes can count more or less
• Submitters - submitters with good reputation have more “power” to submit successful articles
• Friends - the more, the better

Unwritten rules

• don’t promote yourself (or don’t get caught)
• don’t pay for diggs
• Don’t spam
• No SEOs allowed: digg is not SEO friendly - so lie

Fun Facts

• only 0.7% of stories make the home page
• Top 100 users control 56% of the home page
• You can’t control what the community says

Next Up: Tamar Weinberg

Advice for Content that Wins

• quizzes
• “what kind of transformer are you?”
• Tools
• Pictures
• Breaking News
• Try to avoid “buy now” messages

Advice for Promotion as a Digg User: Networking

• Make yourself memorable - create an avatar
• Digg is a fickle crowd
• Network and make friends

More Networking

• Contact people offline (outside of Digg)

Tools

• Use tools to enhance your experience
• for example, use a firefox toolbar to submit pages to digg, as it is faster than submitting through the web interface. You can also monitor your story

Things to Note

• don’t be an SEO, don’t have SEO on your content submitted to Digg
• try to be diverse: don’t get the same people digging your stories all the time

Lesser Known Tricks

• Focus on a category: eg. It takes less diggs to be on the “Science” homepage

Next up: Chris Winfield

Why use Digg?

• can get up to 10,000 visitors
• bloggers are always looking for new content, and so turn to digg for ideas
• links remain for a long time

Understand the digg landscape

• FTW - “For the win”
• “i can has”
• RTFA - read the (F) article

Know what Diggers Like

• Heroes
• ipod

And don’t like

• Mr. Bush
• Sales

What not to do:

• Sell
• Fake it

What Works:

• Knowing your market
• Blendec: Using Blenders to destroy things
• Dove Campaign: showing how models get edited in photoshop
• Lists
• Get featured on a popular blog

The same site can have vastly different results, depending on positioning

Plan

• keep your niche in mind
• Use beautiful pictures, video, and cool facts
• Strip out sidebar navigation, etc.

Submitting to digg:

• need a definitive title
• use numbers instead of numbers written in words: eg. “11″ instead of “eleven”
• Description: highlight key points (people don’t generally read the content)
• Choosing the right topic: your story can be buried simply by being in the wrong topic
• Start a conversation

Spreading to Social Networks

• Stumbleupon: digg stories get stumbled, and remain in their index
• Stories can spread to influential blogs

Success

one story:

• 100,000 visitors in 24 hours
• 1,000 links in Yahoo
• 200 new email list signups

One Digg tip to live by:

• Have good hosting: if the site crashes, there’s no story

As most of you probably know, we are speaking at the first ever SMX Social Media in New York. Therefore, we will be summarizing some of the sessions as they occurr.

Keep coming back to this page to find out the latest information coming out of SMX Social Media.

NLC… getting out of bed at 3:30am to bring the the most up-to-date online marketing information.

Bounce Rates measure the percentage of visitors that access a page and leave without visiting other pages. They are a good indicator of whether the page meets the needs of your visitors or if they think it’s is a complete waste of time.  If your bounce rate is a relatively low percentage, then the page is doing its job – effectively leading users to the next step.

Bounce Rates have quickly become the new killer KPI amongst web marketers… But before you decide to toss your homepage because of a high bounce rate, it’s important to understand all the drivers of a bounce.

In this article, we’ll explore bounce rates in relation to your homepage:  explaining the factors that may artificially boost bounce rates and suggest how this data can be used to further refine homepage content and design.

How to Find the Bounce Rate for your Homepage:

1.  Select the Content > Top Content Report from the left side menu.

Within the listing of popular page URLs there should be a forward slash, index or default URL.  This is your homepage!

Your heart may quicken when you read the brutal truth – in this case, a 47.30 % bounce rate… But don’t panic.  Bounce rates are only truly valuable when taken in context. Let’s dig a little deeper…

2.  Click on the forward slash (or index or default url) to view a more detailed report of homepage activity

This view, the Homepage Content Detail Report, does not shed much light on the subject. But, select an option from the “Segment” menu and you’ll begin to understand why users may be bailing out.

Demystifying Bounce Rates with Segments

Three segments are particularly useful in explaining a high bounce rate:

• Source
• Keywords
• Network Location

Segmenting the Homepage Content Detail Report by Source, in this case, reveals that direct traffic visitors (users that bookmark or type in the website URL) produce a higher bounce rate than those that access the site via Google.

It also reveals that source #  3 produces a high number of visits and that the quality of these visits is fairly poor.  If you are running an advertising campaign via website source # 3 – you may want to reconsider running these ads or refining the campaign.

Segmenting the Homepage Content Detail Report by Keyword suggests what users are hoping to see when they visit your homepage.  A few years back, Jared Spool at User Interface Engineering explored the concept of “Scent Trails” & “Trigger Words”.  If the trigger words that users seek appear prominently on the page, then the user feels they are on the right track and will continue along their path.

Consider the list of keywords that users are typing in to access your homepage.  Does the homepage adequately reflect the keyword used?  If not, should the homepage content be re-written?  High bounce rates on keywords leading into your homepage may provide clues into whether or not the page is delivering relevant material.

It might also be possible that a large number of users are accessing your site with a completely irrelevant keyword.  For example, non-linear creations recently published a whitepaper on the “Google Search Appliance” – this whitepaper has received a lot of interest within the web community.  However, we do occasionally get traffic from irrelevant sources.  Because the word “Appliance” appears in the title, we get traffic from people looking for new refrigerators, washing machines etc.  Of course, because the whitepaper has nothing to do with refrigerators or washing machines, users will quickly leave and be counted as a bounce.  If this is happening a lot, then it’s possible to use filters in the Google Analytics Settings to exclude this irrelevant traffic from your reports and provide a truer sense of the bounce rate.

Finally segmenting the Homepage Content Detail Report by Network Location may reveal that irrelevant audiences have not been properly filtered.  You may find that a significant proportion of traffic to your site is actually coming from your own company if all corporate IPs have not been properly filtered out.  These internal users may access the site quickly and leave – artificially boosting your bounce rates.

SMX Social Media: New York, October 16th & 17th, 2007

Next week SMX Social Media, kicks off in New York. Part of the Search Marketing Expo series, SMX Social Media is a two-day show for marketers covering social media marketing and all manner of Web 2.0 marketing. This is a great opportunity to meet NLC’s Search Engine Marketing Director Helen M. Overland and hear her speak on the”Effectively Leveraging Social Networking” panel on October 17^th.

Tickets to SMX New York are selling out fast. Register now using the ID code SMX10offSM to receive a 10% discount off the current registration price.

The sessions at SMX cover a wide range of social media marketing topics and presents a good opportunity to learn how to best utilize some the leading social networking sites including:

• Digg - News stories and websites are submitted by users to be voted on to collectively determine the value of the content. A great blog post can sometimes receive what is known as the Digg effect, a sudden increase in traffic when an article is pushed up to the very top of the Diggs front page.

• LinkedIn – Social networking for business people. Unlike it’s flirty counterparts LinkedIn is all business. With over 14 million professionals using linked in to for business networking, to post their resumes and to search the job market LinkedIn when used correctly is a powerful marketing tool.

• StumbleUpon – StumbleUpon offers users a toolbar with a button that automatically goes to sites it thinks may interest you based on how you set up your account and how many users have given the thumbs up or down to those sites. Each time you hit the Stumble button it is like playing a Web 2.0 slot machine.

• Flickr – To simply call Flickr an online photo album for managing and sharing your favourite pictures would be an understatement. The impact Flickr has had on digital photo sharing has literally changed to way we store and share photographs.

• YouTube – Similar to Flickr YouTube a has become a phenomenon. As marketers become more aware of the power of video more and we are seeing YouTube Videos leveraged for advertising.

• Technorati – Arguably the grand-daddy of blog search engines with over 108.5 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media and frequented by tens of thousands of users everyday.

• Facebook – One of the fastest growing social networking sites on the web, Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends, family, co-workers and people of similar interests. The Facebook API has been available to developers since last summer and it seems there is no end the creativity behind the new applications being generated.

• Reddit – Another voting site where user votes train a filter that in turn recommends content based on your likes and dislikes.

• MySpace – Back in the day (early 2006) when Friendster lost it’s steam MySpace quickly took over as the social network. Used to connect with friends, for self promotion and brand management MySpace is still very much present on the social networking scene.

• Newsvine - Community-driven news stories and opinions. Newsvine offers users the ability to vote, chat and comment on news articles submitted by both professionals and users.

• Del.icio.us - a social bookmarking site that allows users to store, share and manage your web favourites.

• Twitter – Once described as “speed blogging”, where people answer the question “what are you doing now?” in 140 characters or less. Twitter can be used a part of a wider marketing strategy creating brand awareness and sustaining relationships.

• Wikipedia – An online encyclopaedia written collaboratively by volunteers around the world and the vast majority of them can be edited by anyone with access to the Internet.

• Yahoo Answers – Where the Yahoo! community goes to ask and answer questions. Yahoo! Answers covers just about every topic under the sun and is completely user generated content.

Not every online marketing resource has to be appreciated through XML feeds and RSS readers. For those who appreciate the feel of knowledge in their hands, there are a few hard-copy resources out there. Here is a quick round-up of print resources that write about online business.

RIP Business 2.0 Magazine (Finally)

I have to admit, sometimes it’s nice to read a hard copy resource from time to time. Reading online articles can be great for skimming though vast amounts of information quickly, but every once in a while it’s nice to sit down with a cup of coffee and flip through the satisfying full colour creative of a magazine.

That’s why I’ve been a subscriber of Business 2.0 Magazine for a while now. The name jumped out at me from a shop stand and I subscribed after reading that very first issue. As silly as it might seem, I look forward to it’s arrival every month. Is it superbly cutting-edge? Maybe or maybe not, but there’s almost always something that’s pretty darn interesting.

Which is why I was saddened to see that the very last issue arrived in the mail last week. Although we’ve known since July that the magazine was going to be shut down, there was something about seeing the “this is your last issue” cover that incontrivertibly proved that not even Facebook could save it.

Print Resources

Fortune
Several of the staff from Business 2.0 will be moving to Fortune magazine. While I haven’t been an actual subscriber to Fortune before, I am looking forward to my subscription to it. Here’s hoping those Business 2.0 writers will bring over some of that “What’s Next” and “What Works” orientation that B2.0 excelled at.

Search Marketing Standard
This print magazine is quite informative and helpful for marketers involved in, or seeking to be involved in online marketing. If you are the sort of person who subscribes to 140 blogs (like myself), you may find the information a bit of a review, but the majority of marketers may find a variety of interesting tidbits in each issue. Last issue, for example, had a run-down of the state of online marketing by country.

Fast Company
While not specifically an online marketing magazine, there are some interesting tidbits to be found here. Recent stories included features on Design, Wikipedia, and the iPhone.

Overall, there are a few hard copy resources out there for those who prefer to read “real” print. Feel free to suggest additional resources to be added here.