Yesterday, Search Engine Journal posted an excellent article by Matt Leonard about why (larger) companies need social media guidelines for their employees.  Now at SEO Group and The Ocean Agency, we have some basic guidelines, but ours are more along the lines of Zappos - “be smart about what you put on the web”. 

Happy Friday everyone. As the week comes to a close, we have some wonderful SEO  links for you all to contemplate over the weekend (and if you’re in Chicago like us, check out the fabulous entertainment guides from a nearby community of Chicago apartments - yes, one of our writers compiles those).

From Read  Write Web, the HowCast Iphone application has surpassed 500,000 downloads.

Twitter and how you can use it for business purposes is quite possibly the hottest topic in the search engine optimization and online marketing fields these days (of course, you can follow our SEO company at @SEOGroup).

Nielsen Online recently issued a report that showed that two-thirds of the world’s internet population visited social networking or blogging sites, and that these sites accounted for 10% of total internet time.  In fact, social media has become more popular than email! More importantly, according to the data that Nielsen analyzed, the popularity of social media is only going to increase during the coming years.

There are a lot of people who call them social media consultants or even social media experts in the online marketing field these days - and some of them even have real online marketing expertise!  However, when working with social media consultants or SEO consultants with social media credentials, it is essential to recognize that it takes more than having a couple hundred or even a few thousand Facebook friends or Twitter followers to understand how social media actually works.

If you read any online marketing or social media blogs, you have seen the buzz about the new Skittles.com.  If not, the candy company has basically turned its homepage into a Twitter search results page for #skittles - so if anyone on Twitter is talking about tasting the rainbow, it will show up on the Skittles homepage.

Social media websites have become some of the most profitable and powerful locations on the Web. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and others are keeping internet users linked by age, preferences, interests and many other qualifiers - and our SEO company has certainly benefited from using social media as part of our overall online marketing plan.  If your business is not tapping into that market by now, what are you waiting for?

You are probably already aware that social media marketing is a great way to reinvent your brand image or to simply spread the word about any changes or developments at your website or company, and strangely enough, pop icon Britney Spears is providing a great example for companies out there looking to delve into the social media experience. Naturally, our SEO company is keeping an eye on Britney and all of her branding endeavors.

To round out this week’s collection of posts on Twitter and how it affects your search engine optimization and online marketing campaigns, our SEO company is highlighting another post on Twitter - this one is from Jeremy Schoemaker, a.k.a. ShoeMoney, and it covers his thoughts after using Twitter for four months.

Since it seems to be Twitter week at our SEO company, posting about our favorite ways to optimize your Twitter experience is definitely appropriate. The first one of those would be TweetBeep, which is basically Google Alerts for Twitter.