2011 Social Media Marketing Industry Report (FREE E-Book)

SocialMedia Examiner releases the 2011 Social Media Marketing Industry as a free e-book, which I recommend for you to read.

The report covers several interesting topics, including:

• The top 10 social media questions marketers want answered
• How much time marketers invest with social media activities
• The top benefits of social media marketing and how time invested affects results
• The most used social media tools and services
  
• Marketers’ future social media plans
• Activities social media marketers are outsourcing

Here’s a short video overview:

Link to download here.

Free Full Layered Facebook GUI PSD Kit (via Smashing Magazine)

Smashing Magazine has released a free Facebook GUI PSD Kit, designed by SurgeWorks. The main idea behind the kit is to speed up the prototyping of Facebook application UIs and Facebook fan pages, thus sparing you from drawing all the comps and letting you customize all the texts, buttons and data as you need. The kit is free to use in all projects, without any restrictions.

The kit brings the Facebook vector icon and logo. Also, since the focus of this resource are the UI elements, it brings a main window with the header, menu and the chat window for you to set up your realistic mock-ups. Plus all the modal components, comment boxes, buttons, message boxes, tabs, etc. All the components are full layered, built using vectors and blending options, so that scaling and editing the objects will not be a problem.

The theme is released under Creative Commons. You can use it for all your projects for free and without any restrictions. Please link to this article if you want to spread the word. You may modify the kit as you wish.

Download the set for free!

• large preview (.png, 0.72 Mb)
• download the .zip-package (zip, 6.5 Mb)
• alternative download link (zip, 5.1 Mb)
• release on the developer’s page

FSI Language Courses

Another great FREE resource: FSI Language Courses, featuring language courses developed by the Foreign Service Institute of the United States Government and which are in the public domain.

According to the site: This site is dedicated to making these language courses freely available in an electronic format. This site is not affiliated in any way with any government entity; it is an independent, non-profit effort to foster the learning of worldwide languages. Courses here are made available through the private efforts of individuals who are donating their time and resources to provide quality materials for language learning.

15 Great Free Fonts

The Creative Project shares 15 really cool free fonts that can be used for personal and professional purposes!

Of the 15, these are the ones I like:

40 Absolutely Free Vector Packs

Found this really great resource here: 40 Absolutely Free Vector Packs!

Just thought I’d share it with you all here.

7+1 Free Or Cheap Effective Ways To Promote Your Brand Online

This is a really great resource by Dumb Little Man: 7 Free or Cheap Ways to Effectively Promote Your Business Online. I especially enjoy the fact that it provides brand and business owners tips on “where to start” as well as links to helpful resources. I’ll certainly be coming back to this resource again and again!

I highly recommend checking out all the great insights and tips on how to leverage:

Discovering CopyBlogger

I just discovered (I know, I’m slow) CopyBlogger.

I really haven’t had the luxury of delving further into his work yet, but here are the few I’ve started with. More thoughts as I plow through…

• The Authority Rules report: The 10 Rock Solid Elements of Effective Online Marketing (Free PDF!)
• Copywriting 101
• Viral Copy – Viral Marketing with Blogs (loads of great PDF reports for offline consumption!)
• How to Create Cornerstone Content That Google Loves