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Looking to get some quick insights into a specific consumer vertical? Trying to put your finger on the pulse of  what your audience is talking about today? Searching for clues and trends for your upcoming marketing initiative? Aside from keeping a close eye on the publications and blogs you and your team regularly track, it may seem  this may seem a little overwhelming to keep up. Yet there are a wealth of tools at your disposal that can quickly get you and your team spotting trends and opportunities. Trend Watching offers up their trend watching tips, some practical, some more contextual with you in mind:

Let’s face it, the only thing that separates you—passionate CEO, marketer, entrepreneur—from being in the know, is the time that must be devoted to tracking and applying trend content. And yet, when we ask professionals if and how they spot and apply trends, we’re told they’re still having a hard time getting a handle on the basics.

Here’s the list of Top 10 Tools to get you started:

1. Google Alerts: Set them up and let them run. The easiest way to stay on your toes.
2. Google Trends: Compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics.
3. Tweetmeme: The hottest links on twitter, by category.
4. Monittor: Monitor the twitter world for a set of keywords.
5. Trendsmap: Real-Time Local Twitter Trends
6. Trendistic: See trends in Twitter
7. Yahoo Buzz: Instead of editors, people submit the stories and “buzz up” the best ones.
8. Bing Social: Look at all that Facebook content!
9. Marketing Charts: Everybody loves charts and graphs.
10. ComScore Data Mine: Our newest favorite for quick insights.

The tools are always changing and this is our basic list. All are open, free and even customizable. What tools are you using? Did we miss anything. Let us know in the comments.

The question that everyone we talk to in our business conversations wants an answer to: “How do I measure social media ROI?” Well, it looks like the social media marketing world is starting to mature a little as we see start to see case studies and high profile stories of success. BarnRaisers is on a quest to compile 100 case studies that prove social media ROI. They’ve taken a cut at 34 in this recent post and have some interesting examples to dig into:

These 34 case studies cover B2C, B2B, profit and non-profit areas.  They include businesses big and small.  They prove social media ROI based on:

• Sales
• Shorter Sales Cycles
• New Leads
• Improved company operations
• Innovations that resulted in a better way to do business

Conclusion: Significant results are proven to occur in social media where low out-of-pocket investments lead to high ROI’s when businesses: 1) Have a clear business strategy, 2) Aren’t afraid to jump in 3) Use their imagination to make the most out of social channels, customer engagement and brand relationship.

As a digital marketing agency, we’ve always relied on the power of SEO as a star in the constellation of our service offering to help us execute successful campaigns. No matter the client or the size of the engagement, putting our clients at the top of results pages, whether organic search, paid search or social media has always been a benchmark of our collective success.

Mashable has a good article on the Facebook and Bing announced last week that allows Microsoft’s search engine to return results based on the Facebook “Likes” of the searcher’s friends. Additionally, Google recently began including Twitter updates in its search returns and has some interesting insights into how digital agencies and SEO can be leveraged to tap into results tailored to the searcher’s existing social footprint.

Of course, as with any complex question about a dynamically evolving industry, there is a caveat. While the Bing-Facebook agreement and the recent updates to Google will change elements of how we do our business, the fundamentals will remain the same. As much as innovation shapes the day-to-day processes of optimization, the core foundations of the industry remain unchanged.

For years now, successful SEO firms have not been focusing their efforts strictly on organic search results. They’ve been steadily evolving along with changes in search engines: new Google algorithms, the emergence of Bing, the development of Google Local, instant searches, paid search, and searchable Twitter feeds. At my company, we believe that to be successful, SEO firms need to become something more advanced…

brandchannel has a nice summary of the key messages that Seth Godin has been advocating recently: Savvy consumers are over-saturated with the glut of brand advertising and “no longer want to be spammed with information about a product, service, or experience; they want to feel a connection to it,” as Emily Molitor reports.

The job of CMO today, added Godin, should stand for “chief movement officer” and not chief marketing officer. In short: don’t market — inspire, lead, tap into your brand’s passions and you’ll tap into consumers’ passions and build a small and committed following that will scale through word-of-mouth.

Ford has partnered with Pandora to create a new cause-marketing campaign that allows Pandora visitors to use the platform’s social share feature to share a “mixtape” from playlists compiled by artists such as Jewel and John Legend. When a song is shared, Ford and Pandora will make a donation to the artist’s charity of choice.

Cause-based marketing campaign have sprung up all over the web this this year. From the high profile Pepsi Refresh Project to the non-profits like Feeding America, cause-based marketing campaigns have come into their own despite the lagging economy. Adweek has a good overview on some recent consumer research that suggest that consumers’ interest in corporate support for worthy causes has not succumbed to the downturn of the past several years:

Assuming companies are attuned to consumers’ attitudes in this regard, does this limit their own interest in supporting causes and making a point of letting the public know about it? “Not at all,” says Alison DaSilva, evp, knowledge leadership and insights at Cone. “Cause marketing provides a competitive advantage, not a license to increase prices. And when it does come to opting for a more expensive brand, we are still talking about one in five customers who would be willing to pay more — and even more moms and 18-to-24-year-olds. If you promised a brand manager that one out of every five potential customers would consider his or her brand, even though it was a bit more expensive than the competitive set, I think they would ask where to sign.”

Well, for starters they spend nearly a third of their time online on social networking sites and playing games.

“Despite the almost unlimited nature of what you can do on the web, 40 percent of U.S. online time is spent on just three activities – social networking, playing games and emailing leaving a whole lot of other sectors fighting for a declining share of the online pie,” said Nielsen analyst Dave Martin.

NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–BBE (Broadband Enterprises), the digital video authority, today announced that the maiden season of its original online program, “Jen and Barb, Mom Life” (www.jenandbarbmomlife.com) has posted successful numbers—and its run isn’t over yet.

Launched last November, “’Jen and Barb’ features 43 episodes of four-to-five–minute segments on ‘life in the trenches of motherhood.’ The show has two major sponsors for all 43 episodes, including Kraft, which put up a ‘television-sized’ budget, according to Matt Wasserlauf, founder and CEO of BBE.

Over the first 30 episodes, “Jen and Barb” garnered over 40 million impressions, and its average audience is over 1.3 million impressions per episode.

Best of all, the show was profitable the day it went live.

“I read all the time about how original online video programming isn’t profitable and can’t attract television-sized ad budgets,” said Wasserlauf. “‘Jen and Barb’ proved them wrong.

“Jen and Barb—and BBE—knew something that nobody else knew at the time: no moms were doing shows for moms – not Oprah or Ellen or Tyra – and that moms online equal money online. There are over 35 million moms online with children under the age of 18. They represent the most powerful consumer group in the U.S., controlling 85% of household spending, estimated to be worth over $2 trillion. And online video is perfectly suited to them—short, to the point and you can watch it anytime.

“We proved it.”