A broad book, its contents revolve around how to get prospects to find you through blogs, search engines and social media. Halligan and Shah also discuss converting customers and how to apply that to your business and web site.

The short first chapter explains what has changed in marketing, and how online technologies effected the change. The first part of the book provides little value with its brief coverage of your web site as a marketing hub and creating a remarkable strategy. Really, these first chapters set the tone for the rest of the book in that its contents are wide and shallow.

The bulk of the book rightfully focuses on “Getting Found,” with 100 pages devoted to the topic out of the book’s roughly 200. Despite that much coverage, it’s still elementary stuff. The section on converting customers only lasts for three chapters, and it needs more material than the five chapters of “Make Better Decisions.”

The “Make Better Decisions” section included a whole chapter devoted to picking a PR agency and another on how to hire the right people for your marketing team. The advice given on how to find marketers who are digital citizens, however, is outdated. For example, the suggestion to hire people based on their web reach recommends looking at how many followers they have in Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Most of us know that raw follower numbers have little value, with so many low quality users who know how to rack up the numbers.

The authors are also behind the Website Grader and Twitter Grader web sites, which they mention so frequently that at times it reads like a promotion. This book really is just a primer: You won’t glean anything new if you know the basics of search engine optimization, such as the difference between organic and paid listings, and you already know how to use social media tools and connect those tools with your business and web site. ”Inbound Marketing” does a good job for those who don’t have a clue about how to use social media for business and want to understand the bigger picture.

Have you read “Inbound Marketing?” Please share what you think in the comments.

The new edition of the book isn’t just a rehash of old content. Scott has extensively rewritten the book, updating it to accurately reflect the latest opportunities to connect with buyers online. When the first edition came out, Twitter didn’t exist and Facebook was still very limited — you needed a .edu email address to sign up. Scott has also pulled in new examples, many of which came from people who used his book to effectively market their projects online.

The book weighs in at 279 pages and is clearly written for individuals who already spend some time online but who want to take their marketing effort to the next level. I’d recommend against skimming the book, though. There is a lot of information to digest, and while Scott breaks things up with lists and even boxed conclusions that draw attention, it’s important to actually read through everything in the book. If you particularly need information on a certain topic, like how to create an online media room or how to write persuasive web content, you can start with that chapter and then move on to the rest of the book.

The book makes for an ideal guide for web workers: Scott mentions readers of the first edition who have used the techniques he writes about for everything from landing a new job to raising donations for a non-profit. You can easily apply the techniques to your work no matter what kind of web work you do.

Even if you already have a copy of the first edition of “The New Rules of Marketing and PR,” it’s worth taking a look at the new edition. If you’re just getting started with marketing anything on your web, from yourself to your web site to a product, you should read this book from cover to cover. “The New Rules of Marketing and PR” is published by Wiley and is priced at $19.95.

Have you read either edition of this book? Let us know what you think of it in the comments.

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Ping.fm, a service that allows you to easily update a host of social networking and social media profiles all at once, seeks to resolve the headache of needing to log into multiple accounts to send the same message to different groups of friends and contacts all over the Internet.

While for some Ping.fm may just be a nice little time-saving utility, for social media and online marketing professionals, this service may well be a killer app.

Ping.fm currently supports more than 30 services, including microblogging platforms such as Twitter, Plurk and Jaiku, social networking web sites such as Facebook and Multiply, instant messaging applications such as GTalk Status and AIM Status, and most of the popular blogging platforms. Once you’ve set up a Ping.fm account and added your credentials for the services you use for social networking and social media purposes, you’re ready to return to your Ping.fm dashboard to send messages out to all of your profiles at once.

Adding your various social networks can be a little clunky simply because you need to have all of your various usernames, passwords and network keys at your disposal, but Ping.fm does a pretty good job of making the process as seamless as possible.

On the dashboard page, you can send out messages, or “pings,” to your selected services. The default setting sends your message to all of your services, but you can also filter profiles by “micro-blogs” or “statuses.” This is a nice feature, giving you the ability to parse your messages into groups, but I must admit that I don’t entirely understand which services fall into which categories (is FriendFeed a “micro-blog” or a “status”, for instance?). A character counter also lets you know the size of your ping, which is vitally important for squeezing your message in under Twitter’s 140-characters-per-tweet limit, for example. And a “Record Video” link allows you to stream a video recording directly through Ping.fm.

A nice feature is the ability to send out messages through Ping.fm “from” multiple locations. A huge array of “Services/Tools” on the dashboard allow you to set up your Ping.fm account so that you can ping via email, SMS, instant message, Facebook app, iPhone app, desktop app, and so on. This serves up enormous flexibility in allowing you to send a single message from anywhere and distribute your message to a large number of profile destinations quickly and easily.

The potential downsides to using Ping.fm are overlap and not engaging with individual social media and social networking communities as they are intended. Overlap comes in the form of having many of the same friends, colleagues and contacts on multiple services; sending them the same message “over and over again” on multiple profiles might only serve to annoy. Additionally, social media and social networking sites are meant to be two-way communications platforms, not one-way broadcasting mechanisms. If people perceive you as being someone who is broadcasting marketing messages and not interested in engaging with individual communities or, even worse, spamming communities with marketing messages and links, that can seriously damage your ability to effectively utilize social media for whatever purpose –- developing relationships, promoting a product or service, burnishing your professional reputation, and so on -– you had in the first place.

Overall, Ping.fm looks to be a simple (in a good way), effective, and easy-to-use service to communicate to multiple online communities quickly.

What do you think of Ping.fm?

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