The following are some social media newsmakers I came across today:

Digg Joins the Twitter and Facebook Party

Digg jumped on the bandwagon and added the ability for visitors to easily share stories on Digg.com with Twitter and Facebook; a sign that even the competition can no longer ignore the success of Twitter and Facebook. In addition, Digg removed the controversial “Shouts” feature that Digg users were none to happy about.

Stories with additional detail:

• Digg Adds Twitter and Facebook Sharing Options
• Shouts on Digg Are Now Gone – Replaced With Email, Facebook and Twitter

The New York Times Hires its First Ever Social Media Editor

Today I expect the New York Times has elevated the legitimacy of social media for many skeptics by hiring its first ever Social Media Editor – Jennifer Preston (on Twitter @NYT_JenPreston). So what will Jennifer be doing exactly? Well here is an excerpt from a leaked email at the New York Times I found via Mashable: Read more…

Last week Microsoft announced a few updates to adCenter that anyone doing pay-per-click advertising should take a look at. Here is a quick summary created with snippets from the announcement:

• Better Targeting Options
  “Now you can apply customer targeting and incremental bids for your entire campaign with new campaign-level targeting, and then further refine targeting at the ad group level.”
• Greater Bidding Flexibility
  ” Now you can set default keyword bids for your ad groups, and use nondefault bids to override the default when you prefer”
• Improved Keyword Research Tool
  You can now: “use new filters to refine your list of suggested keywords … view performance and demographic data by keyword …  add selected keywords to your negative keyword list … bid on keywords and review estimated performance data … review keywords and bids and add them to an ad group”

Here is the link to the detailed posting at Microsoft. In addition, here are links to the other updates Microsoft has applied this Spring to adCenter: Account Management Updates, adCenter Desktop, Content Ads (US Only).

Today the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) released version 1.0 of the guidelines for measuring click fraud. The guidelines were created with the aid of Yahoo, Microsoft and Google in order to ensure that all major search engines would back the finalized guidelines. Here is a key snippet from the document’s Scope and Applicability section: Read more…

Here are the top posts on “Tips” from the old StepForth SEO Blog.

The Ten Minute Optimization REDUX – A SEO Tips White Paper

‘A 10 minute process to optimize a web page for top search engine rankings.’

How to Troubleshoot Dropped Search Engine Rankings – A StepForth SEO Tutorial

‘Discover why your search engine rankings have dropped and what to do about it.’ Read more…

Here are the top posts on “Social” from the old StepForth SEO Blog.

Two Great Tips for Optimizing Your LinkedIn Account

‘LinkedIn SEO must haves’

Do it Yourself Social Media Marketing – A StepForth White Paper

‘A how to on promoting your brand (be it yourself, a product, a service, or a company) by strategically making your presence known across various social media networks (such as Digg, StumbleUpon or Myspace)’ Read more…

Here are the top posts on Search from the old StepForth SEO Blog.

‘Submission to local search based engines is becoming more and more important for any sites servicing a local or specific geographic audience.’

Google Latitude Adds More Social to Mobile

‘See where your friends are right now.’ Read more…

Today is the launch of our new website. Unfortunately the majority of our blog content still resides on news.stepforth.com while we deal with transition issues so here are the top posts on Links from the old SEO blog.

‘The ins & outs of Link Building’

3 Methods to Build Links with a Blog – An Interview with Ross Dunn

‘Advantages of blogging for building valuable links and reputation online.’

Building Links with Directory Submissions

‘Some things to consider before using online directories to build links to your site’ Read more…

I came across a video on Twitter yesterday (thanks to user @mypluginplay) and after watching it I learned a few things about LinkedIn (a property where I have a profile but I haven’t researched yet) that were definitely worthy of sharing. Read more…

This week’s SEO 101 on WebmasterRadio.FM featured Search Engine Journal owner Loren Baker as our guest to discuss the ins-and-outs of Link Building. Read more…

I was doing some of my daily news digging when I came across the following chart on MarketingCharts.com showing the Share of Ad Spending by Medium as of September 2008. With all of the discussion these days about TV and print advertising suffering during the (brace yourself for the phrase we all hate) economic downturn it will be interesting to compare these numbers to data a year from now. Read more…