Hubspot's recent market survey on the state of Inbound Marketing for 2011 reveals some interesting trends in marketing spend validating the importance of inbound marketing as a low cost lead generator.  Consumers are becoming immune to uninvited communications and wish to be left to their own methods when going through the buying decision process.  It's about control, and the consumer is now the one who now has the power of choice in what information is received.

"What should I do on my LinkedIn profile?" As people become increasingly aware of the importance of social media and their personal brand, we hear this question more and more often. For businesses and career minded individuals, LinkedIn is often the de facto choice for dipping a toe in the water. As of August, 75+ million professionals have a personal LinkedIn profile (some even have several). How helpful and current their profiles are varies, but many have long since been forgotten. 

Since the beginning of search, the robots have crawled sites, chewed on links, and carefully digested each page. A page’s historical performance factored heavily in its ranking. Just as important were the inbound links that a page accumulated over time. Over the last year or so, this has all begun to change as the major search engines have experimented with three new factors that will dramatically change how we search (and how we optimize for search). 

Remember the good old days when a first-page search engine ranking was the Holy Grail? When social media was just for gossip, throwing sheep and re-connecting with old friends? Yes, it was a simpler time. Today’s landscape looks very different for those of us working to connect with our markets online. 

Let’s not mince words here. It’s probably because they don’t know you’re there, or they know, but they’re not going to search for your fan page just so they can click the like button. You should make it easier by adding Facebook’s new like box to your website. We've recently done it on this site.