Looking for informations, advices, strategies or hints guiding you on your paths through the social media djungle?
Here you’ll find a composition of free ebooks that might be helpful on your efforts to successfully use social marketing mechanisms for building a brand, attract traffic or gain significance on a certain topic.

So these Links will keep you busy for a while…

Instructions and sum ups

The Art of Listening and Engagement Through Social Media
Brian Solis about new tools and philosophies, how to effectively listen and engage with customers and in turn, cultivate a more significant community, enhance your brand and build relationships.

Social Media and Social Networking Starting Points
Social Media expert Chris Brogan gives you starting points how to inroduce your organization into social media and social networking

What is Social Media?
“a short, sweet summary of the phenomenon called social media”

The Essential Guide to Social Media
A sum up of some essential guidelines, written by Brian Solis

The Art and Science of Social Media and Community Relations
Interesting example of a company entering the realm of social media communities

Social Media Marketing Kit
Tips and tricks for the survival in the social mediasphere, plus a video Webinar

The Zen of Blogging
Really amusing story about a guys efforts to dive into the higher spheres of blogging – with a slight wink of an eye

Learning Web 2.0
Examples of ways in which associations are using new web 2.0 technologies and what possibilities they
may represent for your organization’s professional development

A Primer in Social Media
Advices for approaching social media with their new paradigms and, rules and philosophies

Studies

Blogs & Social Media
This article reports on a three-year-long international survey of public relations
practitioners examining the impact blogs and other social media are having on public
relations practice.

Social Web Analytics
This ebook gives a brief overview of the characteristics of the Social
Web, also known as Social Media.

Research-Based Webdesign & Usabilty Guidelines

Distributed Influence: Quantifying the Impact of Social Media
Attempt to propose a new way of calculating an individuals online influence beyond the “traditional” method of analysing a blog’s inbound links to incorporate other social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

SEO for WordPress blogs
How to use WordPress to ensure success for your weblog in the Organic Search Engine Results.

Google Adwords Secrets
Tips for keyword research, choosing a domain name, placing keywords, link building, effectively using SEO tools

We Have a Website. Now What?
This ebook provides straightforward advice for entrepreneurs new to search engine optimization.

Marketing

Get Viral Get Visitors
Trying to give and understanding of what viral marketing is about and how methods of successful campaigns can be adopted

The New Rules of Viral Marketing
Whatever you call it—viral, buzz, word-of-mouse, or word-of-blog marketing—having other people tell your story drives action. An example how it’s done…

Marketing With Case Studies
How to Sell Your Products or Services Using Story-Telling Techniques

Twitter for Business
A compact and dense round up how to use twitter.com to promote your company successfully

Geeks Guide to Promoting Yourself With Twitter
If you use the site properly you can build up another stream of traffic to your website or blog, not to mention developing a brand for yourself as well.

New_Rules_Of_Business_Blogs
How business owners and managers should act in blogosphere if they want to explore this new communication channel.

Masters of Marketing
Cleaning up some hypes and myths of internet marketing and giveing ideas for using social media mechanisms

Podcast Marketing eBook
This guide is intended only to give you a broad overview of some of the basics of podcast marketing.

Effective Internet Presence
How to build up a significant and productive internet identity

How to Write a Marketing Plan
A marketing plan guides a company step-by-step how to market its product or service to a specific target market and it helps a company remain focused on its marketing objectives.

You are web designer and have to work full contact with the customer? Then you will know this situation, the customer wants that headline bold and purple – no, make it green or is blue a better choice? This goes back and forth, which would make you go crazy if you had to do the changes on thousands of subpages. Using CSS you do changes faster than the customer decides between green and yellow.

Ok, enough chit chat here are some tricks to get more effective:

• Assign multiple classes on one element

  This is a real saver, one simply creates a “virtual” class by combing several ones, which is highly flexible and lowers the amount classes you will have to use.

  Example:

  The text should be black, underlined and bold, now instead of using a single one containing all three attributes, you setup three with each single value (black, underlined, bold)

  <style type="text/css">
  .black {color: #000;}
  .underlined {text-decoration: underlined;}
  .bold {font-weight: bold;}
  </style>
  
  <span class="black underlined bold">the text</span>
  

  On the first hand this looks intricate, one could do this with a single class, but remember if you combine the three classes, you’ll get six “virtual” ones.

• Using multiple stylesheets

  Splitting up the a single stylesheet first of all makes it easier to maintain for the web programmer.

  <style type="text/css">
  @import "main.css";
  @import url("additional.css");
  </style>

  It’ also possible to embed further .css files into a specific .css file by integrating “@import url(“additional.css”); right at the top of the .css document.

• Abbreviations
  
  As there are always many roads to reach your destination, CSS is no exception. One can shorten the CSS code to increase the clearness of the structure.
  Example:
  Instead of:

  .classname{
  margin-top: 10px;
  margin-right: 15px;
  margin-bottom: 20px;
  margin-left: 25px;
  }

  the abbreviated version should be used:

  .classname{margin-top: 10px 15px 20px 25px;}

  The order of the values is important, they are arranged clock wise:
  top (12 o’clock), right (3 o’clock), bottom (6 o’clock), left (9 o’clock),
  That also works with the attributes padding and border.
  
  Compressing attribute values

  Several attributes can be concentrated in a single one.

  Example:
  Instead of:

  .classname{
  border-width: 10px;
  border-style: solid;
  border-color: #000;
  }

  Use:

  .classname{border: 10px solid #000;}

  This also works on “font” and “background”, i.e. .