ReadWriteWeb

As more and more of us are shopping online and are conducting research online before we shop, many local retailers are finding themselves at a disadvantage. Many small businesses don't have the resources to do battle with the online presence and marketing power of the online retails and the big-box stores.

Wishpond, which launches today, seeks to help local businesses manage their online marketing activities so as to drive foot traffic into their stores. Wishpond wants to be a "gateway for retailers," in the words of founder Ali Tajsekandar, giving them a single place to manage their Google AdWords, Facebook, Twitter activities and more.

We've discussed previously why it's important for businesses to create a Facebook Page, rather than a profile. Pages come with detailed analytics and unlimited fans (as opposed to the 5,000 friend limit profiles have). Perhaps more importantly, representing a business on Facebook with a standard profile is a violation of the site's terms of service and can result in the account being shut down.

It's easy enough for companies just getting started on Facebook to create a proper Fan Page, but what if you've already established your brand's presence using a standard profile? Unfortunately, Facebook doesn't provide a magical button that automatically converts profiles to pages, so it's up to you to manually make the switch.

Teenagers in the United States are constantly connected to the Internet. About 75% of them go online on a daily basis, and that number increases every year. Whether they're connected via their phones, gaming consoles, laptops or the computer lab at school, they're online pretty much all the time. Social networking - on Facebook and elsewhere - is a huge part of what they're doing.

You'd think this would be a potential boon for social media marketers, right? Not quite. According to research released today by Forrester, only 6% of U.S. consumers aged 12-17 are interested in interacting with brands on Facebook, even though they are active users of the site in general.

Hubspot has just announced a Series D round of funding for their marketing-as-a-service platform. Investors include some very big names like Google, Salesforce and Sequoia, which shows how much interest there is in its service aimed at small businesses. It's also a big boost for the Boston startup scene, as Hubspot is now one of the fastest growing SaaS companies in history by revenue, only behind Salesforce according to their CEO Dharmesh Shah.

Along with main competitors Eloqua and Marketo, Hubspot helps small businesses move away from traditional cold-calling and display advertising and into the new world of social media, search engines and blogging. On my recent visit to Boston, Shah explained to me that the initial idea came about when he noticed how much traffic he was able to drive through his OnStartups blog, when many of the businesses he was helping were struggling to get a fraction of the exposure.

Strapped for time and cash, small local businesses are increasingly turning to free and low-cost social media tools for their marketing efforts. Not surprisingly, the world's biggest social networking site tops of the list of preferred tools.

Seventy percent of local businesses use Facebook for marketing, according to a new report from Merchant Circle, a network of U.S. local business owners. This represents a 20% increase over the previous year.

For almost four years, since the Facebook Platform was launched, I have been involved in delivering Facebook apps for top brands such as CBS, NBC, Lifetime, Universal Music, Visa and more. Here's what we have learned doesn't work, and more importantly, what does work.

First, deep campaigns don't work. Digital agencies love deep, expensive campaigns on Facebook, with tons of pages, interaction, and art. It fits in with how agencies build microsites and websites, and justifies the $100,000-plus price tag that they like to charge. Examples include lightweight games, prediction contests, treasure hunts where you include friends, and such. Unfortunately for agencies and the brands that drop a lot of cash, Facebook users decidedly don't like deep campaigns.

Word of mouth is an incredibly powerful marketing tool, but how do you work out which customers are most important in spreading your message? Services like PeerIndex or Klout help you find experts and influencers in particular communities, but can't measure what people have actually done for your business. The new Vipli.st service from Awe.sm aims to fill this gap by uncovering the fans who drive the most sharing.

Launched at the Strata Startup Showcase last week, the site visualizes how Plancast events are shared across social networks like Twitter and Facebook. It draws a tree showing the first person to create a plan, with links below to everyone who added themselves as attendees after clicking on that link, downwards through the entire history of the conversation around the event. Here's what it looks like for a SXSW Lean Startup plan:

In an age where digital advertising is becoming increasingly important, Toronto-based startup StickerYou aims to bridge on- and offline marketing with a new service that lets anyone turn their website into a "sticker selling machine."

StickerYou lets you upload your own artwork in order to make custom stickers. You can select the images, size, and the die-cut you want for your stickers. For fans of stickers, that's an exciting enough proposition right there.

Facebook is launching a new ad format called "Sponsored Stories," which allows participating advertisers to promote your Facebook activity by turning it into homepage ads seen only by your friends. This activity can include liking a Facebook page, checking in via Facebook Places or sharing content to the News Feed from a Facebook application.

These shares, which would have appeared in your friends' News Feeds anyway, are now given special promotion by way of a Facebook ad that appears on the right-hand side of the homepage. The ad will display your friend's name, photo, a picture and link to the relevant Facebook Page or application, plus any likes and comments.

As Apple faces a class action lawsuit where it's being accused of sharing users' personal information with advertising networks without their consent, the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) is now stepping in with plans to develop a set of mobile privacy guidelines for the industry.

The new guidelines will complement the group's existing Global Code of Conduct, and will attempt to address the growing need for marketers and consumers to have a "transparent, accepted understanding," in its words, as to how information on a mobile device is collected and what's being done with it.