Inbound marketing is a strategy used by marketers to be found by customers.

It is typically earned by posting informative information on blogs and other various online social media sources. Much like I have done above, except typically you are trying to gain customers.

In the United States, reports Tom Grisafi from Business Insider, “social media steps up where traditional media falls short.”  As traditional media shut down in observance of President’s day today, “social media was working overtime Monday morning to keep traders and investors on top of turbulent economic and political developments that could dominate markets for the remainder of the abridged work week.”

Today, social media had the spotlight because President’s Day caused traditional media to shut down.  But the fact that social media was so effectively used in the absence of traditional media raises the question of how necessary conventional forms of reporting are in the face of Twitter and other surging powers of social media.  Could social media replace “The News” as we know it today?  Even if the answer is no, the fact that social media is capable of sustaining communication between business entities during a lack of traditional media speaks to its potential in the business world.  How can your company utilize social media to effectively communicate to consumers, clients, and other businesses?

Flickr! This new device is an innovative way to spice up marketing for a business. Flickr is a social media photo sharing site and business are taking advantage of its unique niche. A business owner could use Flickr in conjunction with a blog by linking photos to their Flickr account. By uploading photos of the product with a quick description the owner can link the two sites together. This creates more traffic to the site from the Flickr users and also links buyers with a neat social network. All around, this is another great channel for businesses to use to keep their marketing fun and cutting-edge, while reaching a different audience of customers.

I read a certain tech blog called Gizmodo and so do a multitude of other people. Recently Gizmodo updated their interface, which I’m sorry to say, made Gizmodo much harder to use. The site is now divided into two side-by-side panes (one for viewing an article and one for navigating through articles) which make scrolling basically non-existent and finding interesting articles more of a task than a pleasure. If Gizmodo does not alter their new interface, I’m afraid they are going to lose at least one reader, if not many more.

Tumblr is one of the fastest growing blogs on the web and a very       successful business. As of today, it is adding a quarter of a billion pageviews per week and in November of 2010 it was given a valuation of $135 million.

Based on this, one would expect founder and CEO David Karp to be a successful entrepreneur with previous business experience. In actuality, he was a high school drop-out who wanted something that did not exist. At the time, most blogs were very formal, only allowing people to post in certain ways. Even other sites like Facebook and YouTube limit what you can share and in what format. David Karp created Tumblr to change all of that.

Moral of the story: The best business ideas stem from problems you have experienced or a want that you have for something that does not exist. You don’t have to be a genius, you just have to do it.

To learn more about David Karp, Tumblr, and why he started it, watch this interview at techcrunch.com