Welcome back to our  roundup of top content on social media and online marketing – we filter the noise so you don’t have to!

How to trend on Twitter…for all the wrong reasons

Web agency SapientNitro released what amounts to a hymn to “I’m so cool” employee smugness onto YouTube. The result probably wasn’t exactly what they were hoping for.  Econsultancy takes up the story here.

Facebook Events function improved

Use Facebook Events to spread the word about promotions or open days? They’ve just added a map facility to the Events function – great if you’re inviting new customers who haven’t visited you before.

More Twitter viral spam

Another new spam Direct Messsage is doing the rounds this week, although hopefully it’ll be less appealing to most business users than the previous ones about negative blogs! If you get a message along the lines of “I know who has a crush on you – click here” – just don’t. You might also want to let the sender know that their account has been compromised.

Google + and SEO

We wrote in the last roundup that we suspected G+’s main expansion strategy to be based on effectively coercing businesses to use it for the search engine benefits, but our friends at The Fountain Partnership have expanded on this with an excellent article on how an active Google Plus page can boost your PPC campaign.

Very interesting, as it suggests that for some businesses, a strategy based on increasing visibility of your G+ purely for SEO reasons may make sense.

Other articles well worth a look for the small business marketer:

Are you marketing with YouTube? Maybe you uploaded a few experimental videos, got disillusioned when they failed to go viral, and abandoned them? If so, there’s a good piece here about injecting new marketing life into old YouTube videos.

For many businesses, increased visibility on Google and other search engines is one of the key benefits of developing a social media presence. It’s good to have at least a working knowledge of other aspects of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), and the old days where keyword stuffing and link farming were all that was required are long gone. This great roundup of 6 best practises for modern SEO from Mashable is required reading for anyone marketing online – even if you can’t do it all, it’s good to be aware of the various aspects and changes.

The Fun section:

Meanwhile, this video was going super viral all over Twitter and the nation’s inboxes. It really is irresistible, especially if you’ve ever owned or walked a dog with tendencies to disappear into the hunt zone!