Spinning off this recent article that lists the Top Eight Social Media Campaign Management Tools I thought I’d add two more that I like and make it an even 10 tools that can really help social media marketers better engage their audiences and track results. There is a always a great deal of movement in the industry as new services launch and existing ones change hands or get acquired. My hope is that this list will still be accurate at least 17 seconds after I publish it.

Social media is a major force not only amongst marketers and their peers who find the topic fascinating but amongst our actual audiences too. Nielsen’s Q1 2010 Consumer Confidence Survey, Q1 2010 @Plan reports and Audience Measurement tools are citing some striking facts that paint an even more dramatic picture of our immersion into social media than we might have thought. I was particularly surprised by stats such as 21% of U.S. adults own or publish a blog or that 2/3 of global consumers refer to online product reviews when making a purchasing decision.

The concept of marketing to people based on where they are at any given time took a big leap forward as Facebook and Twitter recently announced the introduction of geolocation features to accompany user posting activity on their services. Combining their efforts with those of the already established players in the space such as Yelp, Foursquare, Latitude, and Gowalla, it seems that 2010 will be a year of great experimentation for this feature. Time will tell whether marketers and application developers can make this feature useful enough to consumers that they will want to enable it. However, it seems likely that we will soon see software platforms that allows us to monitor social media for people who are nearing our location and message to them thereby combining real-time search with real-time marketing.

I have often written that your social media marketing has to focus on the needs of the audience first. However this recent article by Clay MacDaniel cites research by Razorfish and She’sConnected.com are indicating that a primary reason for consumers to fan your company or brand is to receive promotions and discounts. Let’s take a look at some ways that you can find a balance between social media marketing that attracts the attentions of your audience and social media marketing that pushes sales messages to them.

We were told the earth would move, lesser devices would be swallowed into the yawing chasms of hell, the newspaper industry would be uplifted to glory, and our lives would forever change. Yet Wednesday’s announcement of the new Apple iPad leaves me saying, “That’s it?” It’s a big iTouch with a 3G plan.

OK I know that acronym thinking is trite and that many of us have already heard about the POST methodology until we want to PLOTZ. But, I have been speaking with many companies lately about their social media plans and I have to admit that this old methodology keeps coming up as the one of the best places to start. Here’s a quick review of how it works and why it works so well for social media plans in my opinion.

I enjoy the research published by the Pew Internet and American Life Project because it is not motivated by any particular agenda. So it came as a surprise to me to learn that they are reporting that 19% of those recently surveyed use Twitter or “some other form of status update service (not quite sure what they mean by this). This is up from 11% only 1 year ago. I know that Twitter is fast-growing but since Pew generally reports more conservative numbers than other surveys this is impressive. Additionall, the same survey is showing that the median age for Facebook users is rising: Up to 33 from 26 only 1 year ago–big jump!

I don’t know whether looking to the future for clues as to what will be the next big internet phenomenon is useful or whether it is the kiss of death for any ideas that we believe are poised to revolutionize our lives. However it is fun. So onto the discussion of what will be the next Twitter inspired by this article at IMediaConnection.

Every year SEOMoz puts out a great study of what factors top SEO experts believe to be most important in impacting your rankings. Here is a link to this year’s study which puts a great deal of emphasis on the quality and variety of inbound links to your site. As much as I value the information in a study like this, I’m struck by the fact that SEO experts still remain obsessed with the concept of how to drive people to a single site. With all of the developments in social media content and services permeating the web we need to move away from our obsessions with our own site rankings and develop SEO models that are based on optimizing how we are found within the total search experience of the user.

A study by the market research firm PhoCusWright indicates that travelers who select and purchase their travel options online spend over twice the amount of those who execute the entire process offline. This does not necessarily mean that online travelers spend twice as much per trip but they spend twice as much annually. So, in fairness, it could mean that the online traveler is a more frequent traveler than their offline counterpart. However stats like these place continued emphasis on the online channel for destination marketers.