Bloggers Digest - 12/07/07

Naw, you've got plenty of time to do your Christmas shopping. Stay in this weekend, curl up with your notebook computer and a cup of 'nog and enjoy some good ecommerce and marketing reading!

Here's this week's Bloggers Digest:

Ecommerce News

• Big announcement for enterprise ecommerce software vendors Elastic Path (aka us) this week - we've launched the online store for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games which are being hosted right here in Vancouver. You can check out the mascots and find great gift ideas for that someone on your list who has everything -- because I bet you $1,000,000 Linden dollars they don't have this Canadian Olympic Hockey Jersey.

Reputation Management

• Thanks again to our special guest blogger Ayat Shukairy for sharing her wisdom of conversion rates with us. I bet you think I took the day off to watch every single episode of Ask A Ninja, but you're wrong. I was busy blogging about reputation management - what to do when your brand is trashed on forums and blogs, and some tips and tricks for nudging those search engine results off the first few pages. (I did ask a ninja about it, but he couldn't offer even one solution that didn't end up with someone dying).

Social Media

• In You've Made Digg, Now What, Chris Winfield shares some excellent tips for optimizing your link bait pages after you hit a homepage home run including adding calls to action and tweaking keywords for SEO improvement. (Hey if any of you have hit the Digg homepage and would like to share your success with the Get Elastic readership, please fire me an email and let's milk this thing for all it's worth).
• Lisa Barone over at Bruce Clay was liveblogging a similar topic from PubCon which went down in Las Vegas last week: "Monetizing Social Media Traffic".
• Chris Brogan warns us that like in SEO, there can be Snake Oil in Social Media. What's the difference between an "expert" and an "advisor"? Is "social media" just a buzzword? Does the term "user generated content" degrade us all? Go on, check it out.

Blogging

• Khalid over at Invesp Consulting discusses ghost blogging - its reality, its pros and cons.
• Can WalMart rise like the phoenix after a slew of social media marketing mishaps? The Wally Mart is givin' 'er another go, this time using real employees, not unlike their weekly flyers. Jeremiah Owyang catches up with one of the employee-bloggers in an interview.This means it's time for an update of our list of eCommerce blogs.Jeremiah did a really innovative thing. He asked his 1000+ Twitter-stalkers what they thought of WalMart's social media strategy, or lack thereof. Published in the article are some responses. (Chalk that up as one more reason to use Twitter).