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I went looking for a list of social media sites the other day. I had specific criteria. I was looking for sites that let you create a profile that says something about you, a page with substantial content. Most social media sites seem to be focused on allowing people to create lists of links. There were social media sites for news feeds, blog feeds, bookmarks — but darned few sites that let you create a detailed individual profile page.

Almost any Web forum will let you do that. Some blogging sites will let you do that. Some older sites like Suite101 let you create detailed profiles. But in today’s social media world, your “profile” is your contribution. If there is an “About me” page, it’s very Spartan.

You can find sites like LinkedIn, ZoomInfo, TypeKey, and Yahoo! — where you sign up, create a profile page, and then you get to play with their services. But these are not really social media sites so much as Personal Media sites. No one in the SEO industry talks about Personal Media because it’s so 1998 (which was when Personal Media began to take off).

Nonetheless, Personal Media sites are where the self-promotional action occurs. And a lot of people are now trying to promote themselves these days. Twitter may be cute but it doesn’t really tell people anything about you.

In my quest for Personal Media profile resources, I came across this list of Social Media sites from April 2007. There are now many dead domains in the list.

One has to ask why it is that so many Personal Media sites have survived well into the age of Social Media when so many Social Media sites didn’t make the cut? One obvious answer is that the Personal Media shakeout occurred years ago, whereas we’re still at the height of Social Media frenzy and therefore SM sites are coming and going pretty quickly.

But I think there is more to it than that. It seems to me that Personal Media sites offer a more robust user experience. They are not built on the concept of you creating content for their advertising (or resale), but rather on you using their advertising-supported services. The distinction is subtle enough that some sites (like Newsvine) have been able to blend the Personal Media concept with the Social Media concept.

Does the Newsvine hybrid model work well enough to sustain itself into the next generation of Web content production, or will it fail during the era of Social Media? All of these sites meet different needs, and I think the long-term needs that are met most consistently will determine who survives and who falls by the wayside. Clearly, the Personal Media sites are meeting long-term needs. But which Social Media and Hybrid Media sites will be able to match that longevity?

For a search optimizer, these questions are important because they help us evaluate the resources we are pounding into the Social Media scape. We need to understand the long-term return on investment as well as the short-term return on investment. For example, in the realm of personal reputation management, do you want to be continually filling out new profile forms or is it enough that you can create 5 or 10 fairly unique but informative profile pages that help people learn more about you and still ensure that your search results are not dominated by childish nonsense?

Also, have you been using your personal profile pages to practice linking out to other sites you feel are useful? If you create your own domain and use it as a hub for your personal profile pages (a perfectly reasonable practice), you can still use your personal profile pages to link back to your personal domain and also to other sites you want to promote.

But if you list all your social media bookmark pages on your personal domain, are you really telling people anything useful? Do you really want to draw attention to your self-promotional DIGGs, Sphinns, and other link spam?

The sites that you use AND promote through your own personal resources are more likely to have staying power — because at some fundamental level we all want to promote good quality sites, while we refrain from linking to the sites that we just use for links. That unvoiced distinction between these sites and those sites probably explains why so many Social Media sites have died out since April 2007.

Let it be your guide in selecting Social Media resources to develop for your long-term use and strategy.