Voasi - 7:13 pm on Feb 23, 2009 (gmt 0)

Did anyone consider that fortune 500 types hire expensive expertise for their advertising campains. Yes they have more backlinks, due to public awarness plus the efforts by their inhouse or hired advertising/pr/media folks. Those guys know all the ways to increase quality scores, have worked the bid stratgies, and know people in the industry. they use expensive software to keep track of their positions, and modify their bids 24/7 to optimize their returns.

This is not as true as you'd like to believe. I've worked with lots of various Fortune 1000 companies and they still don't know exactly what is going on. Even if they're ranking, it's purely on domain trust and no because of well crafted SEO strategies.

I'm sure Google isn't ignoring the boom in social media - I know my clients aren't. Many of them watch the conversations where their brand is mentioned with intensity, and the number of tools for such conversation mining is mushrooming.

Are you clients seeing bigger gains in rankings due to those social interactions? ...and I'm not talking backlinks so much, but just mentions between the Twitters, Stumbles, Diggs, etc...