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The WebMarketCentral Blog

The official blog of WebMarketCentral.com, the web marketing portal, covering B2B lead generation and marketing, Web 2.0 social media, business blogging tools, micromarkets, interactive PR, and web marketing tools and resources.

New Hub Site Focuses on B2B Marketing IntelligenceJuly 1

A new B2B marketing community site, B2B Marketing Zone officially launched today. Conceptually the site is a bit like Social Media Today and other targeted content portals, though it's the first (that I'm aware of at least) focused specifically on providing information for B2B marketers.

Hosted by community organizer (I mean that in a good way) Tony Karrer using his Browse My Stuff technology, B2B Marketing Zone features content from rockstar B2B bloggers like Brian Carroll, Paul Dunay and Newt Barrett. Additional bloggers meeting the high standards for the community will be added over time.

The home page displays the latest and most popular content, with the ability to drill down into specific topic areas such as social media, email marketing, analytics and YouTube. The site is designed to make it easy for visitors to navigate to specific

Best of 2008: Random but Interesting, Part 1June 30

Looking for the best career search websites? Online tools to help you check out that prospective employee, new next-door neighbor or potentially significant other? Specialty search engines? The story behind LOLcats? Resources to improve your Internet marketing skills? Find music online? Record and promote podcasts?

Find the answers to these random and unrelated questions and more in this set of valuable but difficult-to-classify posts from the last year.

Help wanted. Desperately. by Reflections of a Newsosaur

In a great post about online career resources, Alan Mutter traces the decline of the newspaper industry to the fall in help-wanted classified advertising. Mutter contends that newspapers once virtually owned the business of connecting employers with job-seekers, but, failing to sense the shift happening around them, have conceded billions of dollars in classified ad revenues, first to

Gord Hotchkiss, Neuroplasticity and Kids These DaysJune 29

Search marketing guru Gord Hotchkiss wrote an intriguing post last Thursday on neuroplasticity—the ability of the human brain to constantly adapt to its environment. In Grandma Via YouTube, he points out while this happens throughout our lives, and is generally called simply "learning," "there are two phases where the brain literally reforms itself in a massive restructuring: right around two years of age and again as teenagers."

Pondering the implications of this in an age of rapid technological advancement, Hotchkiss asks: "What happens when our children's brains develop to handle something we never had to deal with as children? Quite literally, their brains function differently than ours. This becomes particularly significant when the rate of adoption is very rapid, making a technology ubiquitous in a generation or less."

To put this in historical context, had you been born as recently as the late 1700s, your brain development likely would have differed little f

Best of 2008: Blogging for Business, Part 2June 24

Everyone who writes a business blog ultimately wants the same thing—more traffic. The posts below, some of the best of the past year on business blogging, provide helpful guidance on launching a new blog successfully; techniques for increasing visits to an existing blog; sources of free and cheap images to help your blog posts stand out; increasing your exposure through blog directories and RSS sites; and developing relationships with other influential bloggers in your industry.

How To Launch A Successful Blog In The First 90 Days by Influential Marketing Blog

Rohit Bhargava provides a list of tasks for new bloggers to focus on in the first three months of the blog, broken down into discrete time periods—for example, days 1-15 (find a good name, match your blog name and URL), days 15-30 (establish your blog "brand," get it listed in the major blog directories), and days 30-60 (reach out to other bloggers).

Social Networking or Social Notworking?June 22

With all the hype that's built up around social media marketing, it probably shouldn't be surprising to see a backlash of sorts in the form of a spate of recent articles suggesting that social media is worthless for marketers. These remind one of the link-baiting SEO is dead articles that pop up periodically.

For example, Luis Paez takes some liberties with statistics to make the case that social media is useless for marketing. There's even a term for this alleged uselessness: social notworking. Get it? As in, when people are Twittering, Digging or interacting on a social networking site, they are not working. And these sites are not working to bring in new business. Isn't that clever?

Well, let's see, what are some of the business uses for social media?

• Monitoring what's being said about your company