Today I presented to a group of Utah business teachers from the Alpine School District. My presentation was focused on three possible scenarios teachers could use when utilizing social media in the classroom.

The main problem I focused on was how the school district blocks most social media websites on their networks. There are very real and obvious reasons why schools are aggressively not allowing these sites (which I highlighted a few). Yet, it is apparent that the collective “we” is becoming more and more dependent on digital communication and schools are beginning to have discussions on how to safely inject social media into their curriculum.

I have been rather quiet here on MyMarketer. It’s not that I have given up on blogging or all the beauty that goes along with it. Rather I have my head somewhere else.

Back in November my wife introduced me to an amazing website—Pinterest. Unless you live under a rock you have heard of Pinterest. If not, you can check out my collection of tutorials that shares anything you want to know about Pinterest.

Anyway, in January my longtime friend and online pr expert, Janet Thaeler, and I decided to dive into Pinterest and understand how businesses can utilize the tidal wave of traffic that it generates.

The other day my friend Leland asked if I knew any great SEO SERP tools that were free (serp is an acronymn for search engine ranking position). Personally, I am hooked on the paid tools SEOmoz offers, but I understand that when you start out in SEO you often don’t have the luxury of paying for the all the new shiny tools out there.

Leland’s biggest frustration was that when he did a search in Google all the tools he tried didn’t work. A lot of these websites can’t sustain their tools since they are free. It actually takes real resources to crawl the engines and return results. If a SERP tool pings the engines too often their IP is banned for a day. Get banned too many times and you can count on being permanently locked out.

So, you can see why finding a decent free SERP tool can be difficult. I love the challenge of finding free resources to help people in their SEO quest and hopefully my research from these efforts can help others. Therefore, below are the different tools I found that actually worked. I haven’t used most of them more than once or twice so my feedback is limited. Yet, the one thing I can guarantee is that they will show you your SERPS and that they are free (at least at the time of writing this).

I came across a website that actually has SEO valentine’s cards. The site is lacking in design, and it looks like they haven’t done anything on it since 2007, but the cards are very humorous!

The service allows you to forge the sender, so I spoofed an email to a SEO buddy. I setup the ecard to be from his wife and he did receive it. However, if you do this make sure you spell your friend’s wife’s name correctly or he will throw it into his spam folder Ü.

It’s too bad they don’t have more cards, it truly is a great idea. I talked to my friend after he received the email and he recommended I make the Matt Cutts eCard my avatar and go leave a comment on his blog. There’s no doubt it would be hilarious, but I told him he could be the creeper that Matt files a restraining order against.

We have seen in the past few years Bing growing leaps and bounds in the search market. However, the growth really isn’t coming from Google’s market share, though it has nibbled some away. Instead Bing is growing because it is cannibalizing its partner Yahoo!

Growth is growth though, and Bing is becoming a significant player in the search industry. As a search marketer this is obviously very important to me. I personally don’t care how my users find my website (Google, Bing, or their mother), just that they do find it.

Yet, there is a significant problem with Bing that continues to hurt them—quality. Hate or love Google, it is hard to deny that their quality isn’t light years ahead of Bing. Due to this fact, Google recently has become extremely sensitive about Bing stealing utilizing Google results.

With the birth of 2012 comes the renewed determination to push out content that sits in my drafts folder being perpetually worked on. This post has been one of my perpetual projects since I wrote part one waaaaaay back in September on common SEO mistakes.

Originally with this post there were 16 total mistakes, but the last five were the main road blocks in the post being published. However, with just the below 11 tips this article is already almost 2000 words long. So I don’t think the omitted five mistakes (which will be added to part three) will be missed too much.

Count on one—possibly two—more post that will wrap up this subject. Let’s just hope it doesn’t take me to 2013 to do it. ~Paul W.

“It’s all about people.” ~Mike Davidson

Michael Stelzner, the genius behind SocialMediaExaminer.com and other ventures, just announced what he calls the Networking Clubs. The basic idea behind his idea is having an online forum that is honed in on social media.

Before you leave a comment flaming me about how you already belong to 29 social media groups on LinkedIn/Facebook/Google+/DigitalPoint/WarriorForum/WickedFire and so forth, let me share five reasons why I think Social Media Examiner’s Networking Clubs are different and better.

“I don’t want you with me! I don’t need you! I don’t need anybody! With my strength — my power — the world is mine!” ~The Incredible Hulk

As a kid I loved all the super hero comics, and now, thanks to Hollywood, I can relive them through the movies. Yet, it is even more fun when cartoonist Caldwell Tanner from the College Humor fame turns Internet companies into these same heroes and villains.

Below you will see heroes like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and several others showcasing their unique Internet powers. Unfortunately, I feel that Caldwell has left out some important heroes/villains and some iconic Internet sites. If I were an illustrator I would add them, but alas that is not one of my super powers.

“I am convinced that we are in a terminal process.” ~E. P. Thompson

I found this list on SocialFresh.com which helps you diagnose if you are addicted to Social Media work. Quite enlightening.

A while ago, I wrote a post about how social media itself is more addicting than porn, but I never thought to take into consideration the addictive nature of those who create it. This is most likely because I am among the ranks of these deeply troubled souls!

So, I know this horse is pretty dead, but I think I am going to kick it one more time. As many already know, a few months ago Netflix angered their user base by breaking up and charging more for their services.

My wife and I were one of the many customers that canceled our account with them when they made these changes. The change on their part really made us ask how valuable was this service really to us. I know we would have kept on paying our $9.99 monthly fee without asking this question if they had maintained their usual course. However, once we did ask the question we realized that there was enough free streaming (hulu) and paid DVD (redbox) services for us to confidently walk away from our Netflix addiction.

I can’t say that we don’t miss our Netflix account, and might have actually considered returning for the right “We’re sorry” deal. So, to receive the below email was more like pouring salt in our movie wound.