1) Make sure that your content is in-line with your mission statement. The Content Marketing Institute asks: What are you doing to build a consistent, reliable, and valuable relationship with your existing audience? Don’t have a mission statement? The CMI recommends creating a simple statement about who you are—here’s the catch—for every single marketing channel you own. This might seem like an involved process at first, but in the end it will help clarify your marketing communications across every platform.

2) Don’t be a generalist. There’s no use in being a solutions-provider to every problem out there. Is Pinterest not quite masculine enough for your brand? Why not target your content the way you target your audience? Mashable suggests trying DartItUp, Gentlemint, or Manteresting as a way to more clearly frame your content.

Foursquare, National Post and GeoPollster Canada have partnered to create a fascinating social media campaign in the run up to the Canadian General Elections on May 2. The campaign acts as a game of location domination, pairing Foursquare users with a political party and displaying their check-in data as party affiliation.

How does it work?

Foursquare users opt to sign in to the GeoPollster Canada campaign, which links with their Foursquare account. Once account permission has been given, the user is prompted to choose a party to "vote" as, and every Foursquare check-in from then on is associated with that party.

I'm excited to be part of a talented panel discussion that will address the challenges and opportunities of building global websites as part of next week's travel and tourism marketing conference in Toronto.

This year the sixth annual "Online Revealed" tourism and online marketing conference has partnered with The Hotel Association of Canada and the Canadian Tourism marketing Summit. Dubbed as Canada's first and only user generated internet marketing conference, they are attracting over 500 of the top tourism and travel industry professionals to share ideas March 8-9 at the Sheraton Centre Toronto.

Almost everybody has heard of search engine optimization, but the idea of social media optimization is just starting to catch on. Back in 2006 marketing blogger Rohit Bhargava first coined the term, defining it this way:

"The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs."

YouTube and Google have created a fun little web app that lets you create a "search story video" just by choosing a few keywords and some music. The app is based on Google's popular search stories ad campaign that even saw one of their spots make it to last year's Super Bowl. Check out our own search story video and create your own.

We are thrilled to be a part of Starwood's Room With A View hotel webcams project which recently launched its second phase complete with a new user interface, enhanced social capabilities and an extensive list of new functionality.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the concept, over 100 Starwood hotels spanning five continents have installed webcams from their most picturesque views, making the live feeds available on roomwithaview.com and individual hotel webcam Room With A View portal sites.

Starting a blog is a test of perseverance, a lot of research and a love of sharing ideas. But what tools and strategies exist to make the job easier?

It's also important to ask yourself: why do I blog? What is the business strategy? Am I looking to add value to the company website? Do I want to attract web searchers through keywords, or do I just want to use the blog as a medium to convey the company's personality? It's important to put together a game plan and stick to your strategy from day one, and of course, adapt when necessary.

So, how can you keep ideas in the pipeline and ensure that you publish consistently? In this post we'll share some blog productivity tools and strategies that we've used to build our blog over the past six months.

Redoing your website can be a daunting process, but a little bit of planning and expert advice can make the experience painless and dare I say: fun!

How often should a company think about redoing their website? The answer depends a lot on the type of business you're in. For example, websites for clothing retailers like Abercrombie & Fitch or Lacoste often go through several incarnations each year. Or maybe you're in a seasonal business where redoing your website is a good idea in the months leading up to peak season. No matter what business you're in, it's considered good practice to redo your website ever 18-24 months, why?

Building your brand online and being discovered in search.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then how many words is a video worth? At least a thousand, if not many more. The greatest advantage video offers is the ease to which it can communicate an idea, and the degree to which our brains are naturally wired to absorb information in this way.

When the web first entered our homes, it was this new medium with which to share information and manage data on a very basic scale. In the early to mid-nineties, we were able to share text and images. With the explosion of broadband the web can now drive richer content to our screens and provide higher level experiences such as videos and interactive Flash websites. And with these new applications comes a greater opportunity to communicate who you are.

More recently countless businesses have taken to online video and viewed it as an opportunity to build their brand presence. Some have been quicker out of the gates than others, but now that so many have done it, it might be useful to ask yourself: why should I do it?

It's been a busy couple of weeks since the Web 2.0 Expo wrapped up in NYC. It was a great opportunity to meet some of the new faces behind up and coming web applications and to mingle with some of the more brilliant minds of the industry. The venue moved from the much larger Javits Center to the more intimate surroundings of the Sheraton NY in mid-town creating a more concentrated and inclusive atmosphere.

We all want to join the ranks of brands that have succeeded in creating buzzworthy marketing campaigns that drive word of mouth and impact sales. Unfortunately, there is no magic answer, no silver bullet. But what we can do is be inspired by what other brands have done and try to learn from their ways of thinking.

Facebook's new Like button may not catch on with everyone on Facebook, but Levi's has created a compelling reason for it to catch on with the youth market.

Levi's has added a 'Like' button next to every item on their online store. So not only can you 'Like' a pair of 501 jeans, but when the store loads, you'll be able to see which items your friends like. It will be interesting to see how this plays out between different age groups. Where teens may bow to peer pressure and buy what their friends like; those of us who are older will probably steer clear from buying clothes similar to that of our friends.