We’re on the tools beat again this morning. Last week we looked at a McKinsey survey of business executives who showed their growing fondness for social networking and, in particular, video sharing. Today, we look a bit deeper into the latter phenomenon to show just how companies are deploying video to position themselves.

A bit of bad news on the job front for SEO specialists. According to a new piece of jobs data, veterans in the field of search engine optimization are finding a relative decline in demand for their services. What’s in demand? Mobile app developers and social media channel specialists.

A few months ago, big brands and publishers were scrambling to create a Google+ presence. Six months in, has all that trouble yet begun to pay off in greater traffic and daily interaction with fans? A new study, looking at the UK’s daily newspapers market, has some insights.

Last week I was asked to deliver a presentation on social SEO and what Google’s search formula tweaks now mean for brands and organizations looking to boost their visibility. This is a rapidly evolving issue, but there are some enduring points here that all organizations (and journalists too!) should keep in mind. Hopefully this guide will help you.

That’s the finding of a new piece of research from digital marketing specialists at Web Liquid who calculate that posts with photos consistently generate the biggest response from the online public. And the worst? The plain old link.

Our SEO expert Andrew Shotland recently went on a patent dive, scouring the fine print of a dense patent application looking for insights into how Google ranks your site’s URL in Google Maps. The answer: incoming links are key, but not just any old links.

So how does a company that doesn’t really publish anything except a list of business names, addresses & phone numbers attract links? Well, one way is to do it with data.

President Barack Obama kicked off his 2012 re-election campaign last week on — where else? — Twitter and Facebook signifying the continued importance of social media in the U.S. presidential elections. Obama has plenty of Facebook and Twitter followers ready to back his campaign a second time around. But where the Obama Facebook account works as a source of inspiration for digitally minded politicians, the Obama campaign this time round falls well short of the rousing “Yes we can!” spirit we’ve seen from his camp in the past.

We’ve given a fair bit of attention here to Google’s new algorithm changes, which reward high-quality sites while punishing the so-called content farms that cut and paste what’s in the news. Last night, Google unveiled the second and final (for now) phase of the “high quality” roll-out that will impact all English-language searches around the world. For anybody who publishes content to the web, the changes are BIG.

When Sequoia Capital, Google Ventures and Salesforce.com invested $32 million in Hubspot, the deal made history. This is the first time this trio has ever teamed up to invest in the same company. What exactly is the big attraction?