MySpace

With more than 41 million subscribers in its nearly seven-year existence, professional networking site LinkedIn is grabbing the social media headlines these days right along with Facebook and Twitter. In his keynote presentation at last week's DM Days New York Conference & Expo, Mike Gamson, LinkedIn's vice president of corporate solutions, revealed some of the secrets to his company's success, as well as tactics other direct marketers can use to make Web 2.0 more than just a buzzword.

Like many marketers, the Spiegel Brands catalogs — Newport News, Shape FX, Carabella, A.B. Lambdin, as well as its namesake title — slowly are feeling their way around the emerging social media space. During a roundtable session at the April 15 Hudson Valley Direct Marketing Association event in Greenwich, Conn., Spiegel's marketing manager, Amy Heir, explained how she took a modest $100-a-day budget to invest in social media marketing and ran with it.