The last time I was involved with search engine optimization, Alta Vista was a player. I was working on my own sites and making a killing by taking advantage of the new world of search engines. Yahoo was making its move to the top. Google wasn’t even a word at the time. Flash forward to 2007 and social media became my thing. I was able to drive great traffic with the social news sites and started really getting involved the marketing components in 2008. That’s when JD Rucker and I hooked up and started working the various social angles for clients, but he would always handle the search engine components….

A recent study by AdAge, which has been tracking such things since 2009, shows that there are over 180,000 people on Twitter who claim to be social media mavens, experts, consultants, ninjas, pros, warriors, or some other noun that’s intended to fill you with confidence about their ability to save you from the evil world of Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. This is up from 16k when they first checked. It’s challenging for businesses to keep up. The world of social media offers so much potential, so many options, and has so many people using it every day that the allure to get involved is high, but there…

While learning incredible things and meeting equally incredible people at the New Media Expo in Vegas, I ran into Triberr founder Dino Dogan. I was using Triberr a while back but stopped because it became too hard. The site used to be automated – set it and forget it. They turned it into more of a curation site and I fell of the radar as a result. Recently, I’ve rejuvenated my activity and found that if anything the curation component actually makes it better, which is why it was perfect timing to meet Dogan. For those who are not familiar, Triberr is designed to group like-minded people into “Tribes”….

One of the biggest problems faced when businesses try to use social media as a marketing tool is that there are simply too many social media sites. A day doesn’t go by when I’m not asked about this new site or that old site and whether or not they can be used is marketing. Most can. However, most simply do not have the reach to make them worthwhile. For the majority of businesses, if they stay focused on four current social sites, they’ll have the vast majority of their marketing covered. Some big sites were excluded. It’s not that Tumblr doesn’t have its place or that Foursquare is useless. It’s that the…

When a company so new and so fresh off of a cash infusion from going public starts to make cost-cutting decisions surrounding their primary product, it doesn’t bode well for the future of the company. That seems to be the direction that Zynga may be heading after shutting down 11 of their titles. According to Techcrunch: The San Francisco-based company had overextended itself. During its heyday on Facebook it built dozens of games, then aggressively launched mobile games as smartphones gained popularity. It didn’t seem like a problem when the company was preparing for a big IPO. The “big IPO”…

The automation of Twitter for businesses continues to become the norm. As microblogging, interaction, and expression get replaced by RSS feeds, Facebook feeds, and post scheduling that is all dominated by links, links, and more links, the power of Twitter is being replaced by the easy alternatives to actually, well, using the service. This is a huge mistake for most. There are some who are simply overwhelmed by social media and internet marketing in general and anything that they can check off their list with minimal or zero effort is a good thing. For those who actually want to find success on…

We were so close. A non-controversial bill,  the Video Privacy Protection Act, flew through the Senate and was sent to President Obama last week. The bill itself isn’t important; it allows people using services like Netflix to post the movies that they were watching directly from the service onto Facebook and other social media sites just as they can do now with music sites like Spotify. This is currently against the law because of legislation from 1988 when Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork’s video rental history was leaked. That’s not the important part. What was important was that a section…

Every few months, it seems that Klout makes changes to try to bring its importance to a higher level and push itself into the mainstream consciousness. Every few months, the changes that Klout makes push them further into obscurity and away from mainstream consciousness because they try too hard to appeal to the people that simply don’t care. When they do this, they reduce the very thing that could actually make them better known and talked about more often: overall usefulness. The last algorithm change seemed to set “caps” on how “influential” people could be based upon their position in the real…

One of the initial promises of the internet was realized when social media started taking hold a few years ago. Constant communication and the ability to reach out and engage with others around the globe became more than just a dream once sites like MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook opened the doors for our lives at every level to be detailed for anyone to see. The options to keep it personal are still available but so many have chosen to give access to anyone willing to take it. Lives are recorded in fine detail on social media every day. That’s nothing new. What has really been emerging in the…

In theaters, Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane’s first major motion picture Ted was a huge hit.  It combined the brash frat boy humor of Judd Apatow comedy films with the over the top toilet humor of Family Guy, and included a sexy love interest in Mila Kunis.  How could you go wrong?  This isn’t the most incredible feat of the movie Ted though, shockingly.  Ted is still gaining fans at an alarming rate. Long after leaving theaters, the Facebook page for Ted continues to gain followers as the movie’s creators continue to create new images, videos, and written content as if the page is run…