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This is my good friend Sheena Melwani’s version of All I want for Christmas originally by Mariah Carey. I refer to her first as my friend however Search Engine Marketing Group did have the honor of putting together her blog. If you like this song I hope you will check out the rest of her music at SheenaMelwani.com 7 Million viewers on youtube can’t be wrong! Happy Holidays!

Technorati Tags: sheena melwani, all I want for Christmas, Mariah Carey

When you think of Twitter, you probably think of a microblogging tool that helps you connect with friends across the world. But not every Tweeter uses their account just to chat back and forth with their online friends. Some have come up with truly creative ways to use their account.

What follows is a list of the 10 most creative uses of Twitter I’ve seen.
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Many people became successful from the “first wave” of internet businesses. But a whole new wave of opportunity has just begun to flow, and early-adopters of the newest technology and Web 2.0 have got an incredible opportunity to reach the heights of professional and financial success.

People around the country – and in many developed countries – are rebounding from the lack of ‘community’ that has occurred over the last generation. This has resulted in an explosion of online networking communities. Originally begun in the form of message boards or forums, they now abound, and while the big players (social sites such as MySpace, Facebook, etc., and business sites such as Linked In, Ecademy, Fast Pitch, etc.) are very established, there is still ample opportunity – and easily accessed technology – for new communities to be built for profit.

What many people do not realize is the complete ease at which they can start their own “niche” online networking community as a revenue-generating enterprise, thanks to the proliferation of user-friendly platforms for business owners now available at a fraction of the price of the need to hire a software developer or team (which for a long time was the only option).

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(photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid)

As regular readers will probably remember, Gerald made a post at the end of October that was titled 5 Social Media Sites That You Must Explore. In this post, Gerald provided an overview of five popular social media sites (Twitter, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, Technorati and Plaxo). In addition to discussing all five of these websites, Gerald also promised that a detailed look at each one would eventually be published on this blog.

Since my personal favorite out of these five websites is StumbleUpon, I thought that I would kick off the series of five detailed posts with a look at why you should start stumbling today (if you haven’t already).

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In my 17 years as a newspaper reporter, I can not even count how many times an editor had me go through stacks of press releases that were faxed to us, to see if there was anything worth printing. Usually the answer was no.

Obviously every single person who sends a press release hopes their press release is worth running in the newspaper.

Most of them get it dead wrong. And 99 percent of them end up in what we call “The Round File” - otherwise known as the garbage can. Which means the press release writer wasted their time and money faxing their press release to us.

Here are some ways to make your press release newsworthy and figure out if a particular media outlet would be interested in your story:

1. If it’s a small local paper, radio station, or TV station, they are looking for local news. If you self-published a book or just created a new product that you want to market…you need to find a local angle or the media will not be interested. If you live in town, that can be a local angle. If there is no local angle you are likely wasting your time and paper sending the press release to them. Blasting your press release to every media outlet in the country isn’t going to increase the chances that it will get published.
2. Come up with a charitable angle - donate 20 percent of your sales to a particular charity in your town, or some variation of this. Let all of the local media in your town know.

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What’s web 2.0? According to an old joke, for a site to be a web 2.0 startup, it needs to be in beta and have a strange hard-to-pronounce name. With hundreds of so-called web 2.0 startups popping up daily, this joke actually describes the reality. But not everything is that bad. There are still new projects that do have something unique and innovative to offer. I tried to pick those 4 standing out in the crowd that have emerged in 4 different niches:

• search engines;
• social networking;
• social bookmarking and annotating;
• user-generated content.

Compare CognitionSearch is a new enhanced semantic search engine.

Key feature: search Wikipedia using semantic search technology.

What’s so innovative about CognitionSearch? The tool allows to compare their search results with the "simple" search (i.e. Google. Yahoo, and MSN) giving a better idea of what behind the semantic search technology is and how it is different from the conventional or "simple" search. The difference is graphically represented showing you the overlap and the number of unique results for both cognition and simple search. What’s more, it shows you which exactly meaning of the term(s) searched the comparison was based on.

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Social media being a fairly recent phenomenon, some marketers still have yet to dip their toes in the social media river. This post is intended to help newcomers get started in the social media world. There are many social sites out there; however, the following 5 should be a part of any social media marketing plan. The following is a synopsis of the author’s 5 favorite social media sites; an in-depth blog relating to each of these sites will follow.

Twitter: Follow Me!

is at the forefront of the current social media craze. If you do not already have a twitter account, you need to get one right now and you can do that here www.twitter.com. (Ok you can finish reading this post first).

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