So you can’t shell out big bucks for some fancy web designer or SEO superstar. So what? You can still spiff up that dusty blog with some affordable (and by affordable, we mean free) tools that easily can be found and downloaded. From videos to new themes, the web is filled with blogging delights that are yours for the taking. Here are four of our favorite free blog fixer-uppers.

1. Invite your blog to the corporate mixer: Take your blog where it can be seen by your peers over at LinkedIn. Your blog can be fondled and forwarded by all of your networking schmoozer friends when it appears in their LinkedIn updates. WordPress, LinkedIn and Blog Link are two great complimentary apps that get your blog seen by important eyes.
2. Plug in New Plugins: Beef up your Blogger BlogSpot with some nifty add-ons. Google’s blogging platform takes a beating by Internet snobs for being too cheap and cheesy looking. Whatever. It’s free and it can look fabulous with free Google-supported widgets. BloggerPlugins.org is your destination for BlogSpot therapy with oodles of cool widgets and new blog gadgets.
3. Putting the Woo in WordPress: For WordPress Bloggers, it’s all about the theme. Sure, we’d all like to be able to afford a fancy custom theme – but for those of us who can’t, there is free help. Woo Themes has dozens of awesome and not overused themes for WordPress. Some, like the totally sleek Morning After theme, are completely free. Woo hoo!
4. Give it a Touch of Video: If you’re too busy to produce your own videos but would like to post videos on your blog, we have your solution. Community Video has a rock star collection of public domain and free videos ripe and ready to be picked and placed on your blog. Some of the films are pretty random, others are surprisingly beautiful – and all of them are free.

We live in reuse-and-recycle times, so it seems silly to spend millions on your Super Bowl commercial only to have it air once or twice to beer-swigging football fans. But thanks to YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, the Super Bowl ads of today will be seen and re-seen if the brands behind them get their way.

Budweiser, the go-to for clever beer commercials for the past several years, is using social media this year to give its fans a sneak peek at the company’s Super Bowl spots. Bud is challenging viewers to guess the plot of its ads with clues on Facebook. Will it be the brand’s Clydesdales who stomp their way into sports fans’ hearts again this year, or will it be a new wacky Wild West outlaw? Bud is hoping people will “like” the stunt enough to find out.

And Volkswagen is returning to the Super Bowl after a nine-year hiatus. The German car maker will debut two new spots during the game, but VeeDubs is keeping up the Super Bowl part long after the game is over. Morning-after viewings of favorite Super Bowl commercials have become a media tradition, and Volkswagen is mixing it up by premiering two more new spots the day after the game to capitalize on the heavy viewing audience to be had on YouTube.

Marketers are hoping that this year’s Super Bowl is the most tweeted about event ever. So in order to make that happen, brands are featuring Twitter and tweet speak on their much-watched commercials. Audi, for example, will feature hashtags at the end of its commercials in order to inspire tweeps to discuss the company. Teleflora, E-trade and others also are integrating Twitter and other social media sites again in their Super Bowl campaigns.

So which commercial will live on in social media lore? Which campaign already has a leg up by using social media to stir up interest? And which commercial do you hope will be absent from the game this year (cough, GoDaddy.com, cough, cough)? Tell us in comments section below!

A few months back, we pondered the relevance and importance of budding search engine Blekko. Blekko, in case you haven’t heard, is a social media- and user-created search engine. It allows users to eliminate the gunk they don’t want to look at in their searches while empowering them to “like” and “tag” the sites they search for the most. While there is little question that Blekko is a good idea, the question remains: Will anybody show up to the party?

Thus far whether anybody shows up has been of little concern to the site as Blekko has simply progressed and continued to run smoothly. The unofficial company motto has been “we’re just doing our thing and doing it well.” Yet even the hippest tech dorks clamor for an A-list backer, and that’s exactly what Blekko got when Ashton Kutcher showed up at their door. Kutcher announced on Monday that he was investing $200,000 in Blekko. Suddenly the guy who made Twitter a household name was giving his stamp of coolness to this upstart search engine.

All this is good news for marketers and small businesses. As we speculated before, the marketing power and potential of Blekko truly is unlimited. If Blekko takes off, thanks in part to Herr Kutcher’s additional funding, small businesses trying to get on the map will finally have a shot. Is it going to single-handedly take down Google and AdWords? Hellz to the no. But what Blekko can do is create a search engine unlike any other search product out there. For example, when we used it for a client, we were able to knock out defunct sites which have similar names. What’s more, we could “like” similar sites in their industry, creating a profile for our client that supports other small businesses. Now our client can link their Twitter and Facebook pages directly to Blekko, which plays up the element of social search and its growing importance in SEO. Pretty cool”¦ and the whole endeavor for our client took less than ten minutes.

While we won’t be running to see his new film or copying some of his fashion looks, we can’t help but agree with Kutcher on this Blekko thing.

Don’t believe the hype. Social media marketing need not be an arduous or painstaking process. We at Brandsplat have whipped up a list of fast social media marketing tricks that even the busiest budding entrepreneur can implement without hiring an army of assistants.

1.) Give it Away Now: Hosting product or service giveaways on your Facebook page or via Twitter is kind of a no-brainer that requires not a lot of time. Use your respective social media pages to promote your contest, to hold your contest and to publicize the winner of your contest. Speed trivia, which awards the first correct respondent with free goodies from your business, is one of the simplest social media contests to throw. Giveaways like these encourage creativity on your part and involvement on your audience’s part. Create clever questions, post them and wait for your fans to battle for the free swag. You and clients both win big.

2.) Be Good Johnny: Partnering with your favorite cause or non-profit is the ultimate warm and fuzzy social media coup, jam-packed with goodwill and good business. Using your page to promote causes close to your heart doesn’t take tons of effort. Sponsoring events and different fund-raisers with non-profits is a snap online. Tweet the dates of your fundraisers to followers while posting the details and photos of the event on Facebook.

3.) Slow and Steady Wins the Race: A social media presence takes time to build; it won’t happen overnight, but that doesn’t mean it needs to take all of your time and become a source of day-long stress. We at Brandsplat find that to begin with, an hour to 90 minutes a day spent on social media marketing can, over time, transform a brand’s social media presence. The best part of it is that the bulk of your social media marketing can be done in advance or while you’re working on something else (like catching up on episodes of True Blood or munching on dinner).

Primarily, we should all remember the “social” aspect of social media marketing. This should be fun. If you find social media marketing strategies that you’re currently using to be time-consuming and far from fun, ditch them. Because if you’re not enjoying it, then chances are your clients aren’t, either.

In the world of online and social media marketing, one creative and highly-praised move can erase all of your previous blunders. Take The Gap, for example. Just two months ago, the company was slaughtered, skewered and smoked on social media sites for their new logo. The reaction to the bland logo was as if the company had just announced they would start murdering little old ladies in their store windows. The company called the famously-butchered logo “a more contemporary, modern expression.” Facebookers were not having it, and they took to the company’s page to express their hatred for the logo. Gap buckled and changed back to the old one. Logo-gate seemed like it was the undoing for a company that had seen a steady slump in sales over the past decade.

But this was all before Project Reindeer.

Project Reindeer is the latest social media campaign by The Gap, and judging by the reaction it’s been getting, all is forgiven. The campaign gives a group of sassy reindeer control over what discounts Gap shoppers can receive every day leading up until Christmas. Reindeer Chloe, for example, won the deal of the day yesterday, so social media followers of Project Reindeer received any accessory at Gap for $5 bucks. The success of the project relies heavily on Twitter hashtags crafted for each of the reindeer while the Gap Facebook page announces the reindeer of the day.

It’s certainly a clever idea, even though like most Gap social media contests and specials, it is a little confusing and exhausting. Our take: By the time you’ve finished reading all of the layers of a Gap social media special, you could have printed off a coupon and driven to the store. In fact, shopaholics were ruffled earlier this year due to a confusing Facebook pages promotion. And while the company scored huge with Groupon, many complained that campaign was difficult to locate.

Not that the glitches matter much. We like seeing beleaguered brands take a fall and then re-emerge victorious. So Gap fits that bill nicely. Also, Gap should be applauded for taking risks and for trying every avenue social media has to offer.

After shoveling stuffing and cranberry sauce into our collective faces, the Thanksgiving ritual long has dictated that we waddle off to the mall the following day and face the crowds for deals on crap that our loved ones probably don’t really want. Does anybody actually enjoy the Black Friday tradition? Clearly someone does; but in these creative technical and financial times, the whole concept of Black Friday seems a tad tired. So, thankfully, Small Business Saturday has arrived.

The brainchild of American Express and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Small Business Saturday is definitely strategic but you can’t argue with the motives behind it. On the campaign trail in 2008, we heard everybody running for president blather on about the importance of small businesses and saving local-grown companies. The government hasn’t exactly hopped in to save the day, but small businesses have found a way to stay afloat using social media marketing and other homespun techniques.

American Express is rewarding this ingenuity. The credit card company is giving 100,000 cardholders who register their cards and use it on Small Business Saturday a $25 statement credit for shopping at local businesses that accept American Express. AmEx is sweetening the deal for shop owners too by giving away $100 of free Facebook advertising to 10,000 business owners who sign up at facebook.com/smallbusinesssaturday.

Facebook has joined in on the promotion by donating $500,000 in Facebook credits for these small business owners to use in the future. Business owners can find free downloadable marketing materials online to promote the event. And to give the promotion a truly holiday spirit of giving, American Express is donating $1 for every person who “˜likes’ Small Business Saturday on Facebook to Girls Inc.

American Express naturally has a full-throttle ad campaign in the wings to support Small Business Saturday. And it will certainly need it. Small Business Saturday is an idea whose time has come – but that doesn’t mean it will be an easy sell to the throngs of cash-strapped folks looking for bargains. As usual, changing our preprogrammed minds takes a lot of time and love for local companies won’t happen overnight. Small Business Saturday is at least a step in the right direction.

Although there are folks determined to turn Twitter into some kind of platform to discuss serious issues, the majority of Twitter users and marketers try to keep it light and fun. In fact, sponsored games – those which use Twitter as a channel to stir up good times while promoting their brands – have been on the rise over the last several months.

From scavenger hunts to trivia, businesses are challenging their followers to engage in good, old-fashioned social media silliness. Concert tickets, free airfare from JetBlue, boxing swag from Floyd Mayweather and books have been given away over the last few months to Twitter users who are game enough to play along. Now Jeep has come up with an awesome Twitter-based puzzle that not only challenges game enthusiasts but also puts Twitter fanatics to task against the clock.

Jeep Puzzle invites followers to create a mosaic using profiles from the old version of Twitter. Tweeps who follow Jeep Puzzle are directed to collect profiles that in reality are just puzzle pieces. How users follow the images and in what order determines whether or not they solve the puzzle. Jeep Puzzle players who have solved the puzzle – or think that they have – race against one another to have their puzzles verified by Jeep. Winners are announced via Twitter and other puzzles are released as play continues. Puzzle masters, or those who are the first to complete the mosaics, get all kinds of goodies from Jeep.

There are ten puzzles in all; so far, response to the promotion has been enthusiastic. Jeep Puzzle is a limited time promotion that started at the end of October and ends in a few days. The hashtag #jeeppuzzle has started trending and popping up in news feeds, which is a sign of Twitter marketing success.

The success and innovation of Jeep Puzzle is another example of how the automotive industry has hopped into social media marketing headfirst. Brands like Ford, GM and Jeep now are getting major attention by tuning into social media and in the process creating marketing models any size company can use. And the great thing about social media marketing games is that everybody can play.

About a year ago, everyone from Mashable’s Pete Cashmore to The New York Times declared Foursquare the next big thing in social media. Keyboards clacked around the globe dishing the possibilities of how Foursquare’s location-based network could potentially promote the heck out of small businesses and struggling non-profits. Still, we had our doubts about Foursquare. Really, how powerful could a site possibly be that hands out imaginary badges and awards users with goofy titles?

Turns out, pretty darn powerful. A year later, companies big and small have joined the Foursquare game – and we’ve only seen the beginning of how strong Foursquare promotion can be. For further evidence of big-time Foursquare promotions, just look up in the sky.

Conan O’Brien and his team know his fan base consists of heavy users of social media. They’ve marketed his new TBS show shamelessly using every social media outlet available. So when news of a giant orange Conan blimp that awards Foursquare users with special badges hit this week, we weren’t surprised that fans of the big redhead started buzzing at a deafening volume. How the promotion works is pretty standard Foursquare stuff: spot the Conan blimp, which currently is travelling along the East Coast for an entire month, check in with Foursquare and unlock a special Conan badge. Team Coco has a live cam that tracks the blimp’s whereabouts on a continuously-updated map.

The Foursquare promo has crossed over into other social media, too. O’Brien’s Twitter account is tweeting special clues where to spot the blimp next. So far, the giant blimp has earned its keep. News of the Conan blimp has hit local TV stations and newspapers as well as message boards since taking off at the beginning of the month.

While the giant orange blimp isn’t exactly everybody’s cup of tea (and could be Exhibit A in the trial of whether social media marketing is out of control), it cannot be denied that O’Brien & Co. is employing Foursquare promotion in a totally original way.

As I left a matinee of The Social Network on Sunday, I admit it: The first thing I wanted to do is check my Facebook. Whether or not the film’s intention is to hold the mirror up to our collective obsession with ourselves by showing the ruthless narcissistic nature of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, it is impossible to ignore that we are a society that seeks recognition. We clamor for comments about the pictures we’ve posted. We relentlessly check if anybody noticed how brilliantly written our status is. In short, we are all desperately seeking to be “Like” d.

Social media marketing and traditional advertising are tapping into this “please notice me” desire with campaigns that put the consumer front and center. Cosmopolitan magazine, which was launched for this nation’s original “Me Generation,” turned its readers into cover girls last week. Using Facebook Connect, Cosmo invited readers to upload profile pictures. The photos were then integrated into video and depicted Cosmo lovers as the stars of the campaign. Randomly-selected photos of Facebook followers were projected on a giant Times Square billboard. It’s a wise social media move from the Hearst Magazine publication, especially considering its goal has always been to inspire women to talk about themselves.

24-7 Creative is another campaign – this one from computer manufacturer HP – that has aspiring artistic types vying to be noticed. The online community associated with the campaign does more than just pat users on the back. It awards creative types who submit videos a big prize: Videos selected by a jury will be presented on YouTube and at Guggenheim museums worldwide. While 24-7 Creative offers unique opportunities for artists to get noticed, it is certainly a campaign from HP, a company that has been marketing its left-brain computers to right-brain types for years.

While all of this navel gazing seems a tad silly, it does signal a positive change in the way big companies market. Social media marketing, now more than ever, is demanding two-way conversations and interactions from consumers. Businesses that believe they don’t have to spotlight their customers are truly living in an atmosphere of old school, 1980s corporate narcissism and undoubtedly will be left behind. Should everybody be a TV star or have an album or have their blog turned into a book? Probably not, but we can’t deny that we as consumers want to be noticed. And, hey, maybe if we’re really egomaniacal, our lives will end up being a blockbuster movie.

Oh, Doc Martens. Memories of clove cigarettes, plaid bondage pants and sneaking out to Love and Rockets concerts come to mind just from typing the brand’s name. It is hard to believe the company behind the shoes and boots synonymous with punk rock and alternative hipsters is celebrating its 50th birthday this year. Although the days of Black Flag and the Buzzcocks may be long gone, Dr. Martens are here to stay – and the long-lasting brand is using social media marketing to celebrate this milestone while introducing the next generation of teenage cool kids to its line of products.

50.drmartens.com is a recently-launched website which promotes the anniversary, but on first glance, you wouldn’t know it! It looks more like a too-hip-for-words music blog – but then that’s the whole point. The company has released a CD as part of the birthday festivities, featuring 10 bands doing 10 covers of cult classic songs. The Ravonettes, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and The Duke Spirit are a few of the bands on the compilation. They tackle beloved tracks by acts like Jeff Buckley, Sham 69 and The Runaways. As party favors, Dr. Martens is giving out free MP3s of selected songs on the album. The YouTube-centric site also has videos for most of the songs as well as an awesome history of Dr. Martens in a mini-movie. Articles on up-and-coming bands and style trends also are featured on the site to give it a magazine flavor that transcends the normal product website. Still, the boots and shoes remain the stars of the site, as each section wisely plugs the products worn by the artists on the CD.

Dr. Martens 50 Facebook Page, the cross-promotional hub for the celebration, not only plugs the CD but offers fans a chance to win boots featured in the music videos. And a designated YouTube channel has been set up for the brand, while the company’s Twitter account provides late-breaking news of Dr. Martens events and giveaways.

Being from an, ahem, certain generation, we at Brandsplat applaud Dr. Martens for bridging the gap between the old scene that put it on the map and the new media that will keep it in the hearts of angsty youth for decades to come.