John Bottom has crafted an amazing, creative, interactive B2B social media landscape image with links to a large group of key B2B bloggers like Mark Schaefer, Joe Pulizzi, Beth Harte and Tony Karrer. Influence in social media: how to find the top bloggers by blur Group. This post outlines three key measures of social media influence and three key tools to help identify the most influential bloggers in any specific topic niche. Social media marketing has gone well beyond the hype stage and is now mainstream business practice. Which social media monitoring tools should I use? MORE >>

B2B Social Media Strategy: 5 Steps to Gaining Executive Buy-in by B2B Bloggers. With the amount of helpful content about social media marketing growing faster than Facebook’s user base or Lindsay Lohan’s court appearances, it’s tough to keep up. Here’s a modest contribution to help with that effort; more than six dozen of the best, most bookmark-able articles and blog posts about social media tactics, tools and strategies written so far this year, by leading writers like John Jantsch , Lori Dicker , Lee Odden , Lisa Barone , Jay Baer and many more. 5 stars. MORE >>

The two most popular blogging platforms are WordPress (used for 43% of all blogs) and Blogger (35%). Though social media marketing is now used in about 90% of companies, techniques, platforms and best practices continue to evolve.  Should you include Pinterest in your mix? Increase use of video marketing? Is blogging coming back or trailing off? What will likely be the hot trends in social media over the next couple of years? Social Media Stats and Demographics. Marketing Pilgrim ). MindJumpers ). MindJumpers ). 56% of Americans have a profile on at least one social networking site. MORE >>

She describes herself as a “small business coach, speaker, corporate trainer, blogger, singer, lover of life, dreams, family and God.” She’s an entrepreneur, marketer, blogger, and alum of Wharton and Purdue. Her Connect the Docs blog—frequently featured on the B2B Marketing Zone —is a platform for her own thought leadership content as well as frequently solicited insights from other B2B bloggers. She’s been named by Forbes.com as one of 20 top Women Social Media & Marketing Bloggers. Wendy is a blogger and digital marketer focused on the pharmaceutical industry. MORE >>

This tip from guest blogger Mark Traphagen (again) is almost too good to share. Will Google+ be a “Facebook killer” or just Google’s next failed social network? It’s certainly gaining traction, with over 500 million users now on board, already half of Facebook’s total. Then again, the average Facebook user spends nearly seven hours per month on the site—compared to just three minutes for the average Google+user. Many of this year’s best posts about Google’s newest social platform were written early in the year. So what makes Google+ special? MORE >>