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Time has an interesting article about a Website called the Suicide Machine. I’m linking to the article rather than to the Website because the article deserves to be read (but visit suicidemachine.org if you want to see the site).

If you’re tired of your social media content, clap your hands — the Suicide Machine promises to delete all the content in your Facebook and Twitter accounts. It will also sever all your connections.

People get tired of the social media scene. Despite reports of tremendous growth in the use of social media, I have to wonder just how many of those accounts are created solely for promoting businesses (and/or scams). I would estimate somewhere upwards of 10% of all social media accounts are robotic in nature.

I’m tempted to say “perhaps more” but that would be repetitively redundant since I had already said “upwards of”. However, that is the way social media works. People don’t think much about how they say what they say when they say it socially. Heck, if you watch Ghosthunters or Ghosthunters International with any regularity you’ll hear them abuse and misuse the pronoun “myself” at least 10 times per episode (can no one muster up the courage to say “me” or “I” any more?).

My point is that social media profiles tend to pile up. You create them and create them and create them — and when you want to walk away (which no marketer would want to do) you cannot because the process of “closing” an account is so tedious. People need closure but you cannot obtain closure in social media.

So now we have the Suicide Machine, which gives people the closure they need because social media — at its core — fails to meet one of our most basic needs: it doesn’t let us say, “Good-bye”, “fare well”, “au revoir”, “sayonara”, “adios”, etc. Social media is fly paper and it doesn’t really want to let go of you. It depends too much on including you to allow you any real freedom to come and go as you please.

So in the end, when all the real people have figured out how to leave social media, perhaps we’ll still have millions upon millions of robotic marketing accounts blindly pitching carefully targeted crap products and services to each other, and the social media metrics will show that the services are still alive and well.

Meanwhile, everyone will join Todd Friesen for drinks at the bar, and they’ll all laugh at how silly they were, thinking they could just hand their real-world lives over to a computer network.

You’ll know who your real friends are when they cross the sentinel line and risk their lives to free you from the cold, hard grasp of the machines. Until then, at least you have inflated friend and follower counts in your social media profiles.

Good luck with that.

Back in July I wrote on SEO Theory that you can use your SEO resources to help worthy non-profits. Here on Best SEO Blog that same week I asked readers to help your local charity during hard times.

Truth be told, I sometimes do absolutely nothing to help charities and people in need. Most of us are like that and we don’t condemn each other for living out our lives, keeping the needs of others on a back burner somewhere.

But there are people who live the challenge day-by-day of dealing with need or injustice. We admire them for their dedication, their hard work, and the changes they help bring about in the lives of many. And we feel some of the pain they experienced through the losses they suffered, losses which inevitably drove them to take some action.

While I cannot support every cause, every now and then I pick one and just use my sites to say something about them. There is no search engine optimization benefit in supporting a family that has lost a loved one or an organization that cares for wounded veterans, but I know I can help make a difference by using my SEO powers to help other people who are in turn helping others.

Just putting a link on your site or sites to one organization a year is better than doing nothing. And this year I suppose I’ve found myself thinking of ways to help other people more than once. This article is not just about charitable organizations, however. I want to talk about how families are making use of social media resources to share their experiences and ask people for help.

I am sure there must be many sites like this one, but this is the site I found not so long ago. It’s called Peace 4 The Missing. This is a social network someone started on Ning, which many of you are aware of. I’m not trying to shame people who use social media sites for link building, but I want to point out that someone is making a legitimate effort to use social media for a higher purpose.

I stumbled across a page about a missing girl who has now been returned home. I don’t know the whole story but I chose her to be the poster child on my network for the Peace4TheMissing network. I started running banners there a few weeks ago.

I also blogged about Celeste on two of my personal blogs, and I have shared the link to Peace4 The Missing freely. I’m glad this young lady has been restored to her family but Peace4 The Missing is still helping other families look for lost loved ones. You may know of other sites that don’t receive national media attention which could use your help. Please give it some thought. Spread the word.

You may help save a life.

Another site I have been supporting since 2006 is The Wounded Warrior Project. I actually began linking to a different Web site but the two projects had very similar goals and they merged. Although many people in the United States have opposed our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, I feel we should never forget the sacrifices our soldiers make on our behalf. Many of them come home in need of medical treatment, special prosthetics, and an understanding from friends and strangers alike.

When I first learned about the Wounded Warriors initiative I vowed I would link to the site from my personal network until our work in Iraq was done. I have continued to promote the initiative through the past three years and will not forget the service these brave men and women provide us.

It really doesn’t take much effort to remember those sites that could use your support a few times a year. Nor does it take much effort to write a post about their services and what they do. If nothing else, you’ll get a quick and easy blog post out of the effort.

Someday you may be asked to help set up a social media site for one of these causes. When that day comes, you may want to call upon your colleagues in the SEO community to help you promote the site. Or they may call upon you. Don’t hold back when that day comes. It’s worth the effort. It really is.

This article is not really about search engine optimization, but it is definitely intended for anyone in the SEO community who has the means to help out struggling non-profit organizations. Like many of you I have been aware of California’s budget crisis. In fact, other states are struggling to adjust their budgets due to revenue short-falls but California gets the most attention from the news media.

However, I haven’t been paying attention to all the little organizations that are suffering because state and local funding has suddenly dried up. That changed just this weekend.

As many of you know, I’m a big science fiction fan. Most of you may not know that actor Kevin Sorbo (”Hercules” and “Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda”) has been a spokesperson and board member for an organization called A World Fit For Kids. This special program helps find alternative interests for Los Angeles children in an effort to guide them away from joining the hundreds of street gangs that recruit new members from among the city’s younger residents.

Kevin recently made an open appeal for new 6$ donations to A World Fit For Kids. And because Kevin’s fans love to support his charitable work I heard about this appeal through the grapevine. “Hey,” I thought to myself. “I can help spread the word about this.”

In fact, I am sure there are other charities that need help, too. And perhaps their celebrity advocates are out there making similar appeals. But these appeals can only reach so far unless people in a position to do something help spread the message. Many of you are influencers in search and social media — more so than me. If you have not been helping your favorite charities find alternative funding, now is the time to take action.

Use your blogs, your Twitter accounts, your facebook pages — everything where you express your personal feelings and interests — to remind people that there are good organizations out there needing help. The taxpayers have been funding thousands of small organizations for years. Those organizations are now being cut off from state and local government funding because the money just isn’t there any more.

If you can make a difference in some community by posting a few public service announcements on your sites, why not do so? There is nothing great about The Great Recession of 2008-2009, but we can still work together to make great things happen.

What do you say?

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.

Ah, networking. The social media blitz has taken the linear baby blue columns of familiar SERPs to a new level with exciting UIs that grab at our attention in ways more contributory to live interaction. We decide collectively what’s hot and what’s not by promoting based on our natural affinities. We don’t have to slog through pages of what we asked for. We are told in a heartbeat what’s best, relevant, unbelievable, and absolutely must see. What’s important to this median is targeted buzz and being able to channel traffic in a method that allows you to maximize the value of your website regardless if you are promoting a political candidate or selling prosthetic limbs. In the human network if you can capture interest, your peers will promote your pages for you.

Mechanically you should carve out a predetermined path to funnel traffic through. Landing pages should be a baseboard. Exciting content is nothing more than a flash in the pan for a web surfer so developing quick paths to discourage bounce increases the odds that they will be lured to the reason you created the site in the first place; they may even find something compelling to link to.

Think of your site holistically. If you were a salesman you wouldn’t just walk up to someone and say, “Buy my product!” You would need to have an introduction, build rapport and credibility, introduce the consumer to the options and finally offer a solution. Sometimes there are shortcuts and sometimes there are not.

The Will it Blend site by Blendtec is a brilliant example of leveraging social media for SEO. One of many targeted buzz bits is a hilarious Chuck Norris rip where Tom Dickson, who happens to be the Founder of Blendtec, appears in a short blending an assortment of rubber dolls in the likeness of thugs and our hero, Chuck Norris. My God you would never put these rock hard rubber figurines in a new blender, but he does! The industrial blender seems to pulverize the obviously stressful load with ease. After which Chuck emerges from the rubber dust unscathed. At the conclusion of the short, while they still have our attention, we are shown where to see more crazy stuff being blended (willitblend.com) and a listing of vendors where to obtain the blender. Below the clip there are a series of similar shorts blending everything from iPhones to tiki torches. To the left we see well placed navigation that allows us quick access to the company blog for more information, or a direct link to the product lineup if we’re ready to shop.

On a social media site like Digg we are captivated by buzzwords like ‘iPhone’ or ‘Chuck Norris’ connected with the radical thought of blending or destroying them! Diggers will promote on the basis of humor while incidentally encouraging links and traffic generation to a page with access to direct sales.

I would consider the Blendtec example a shortcut because it simultaneously satisfies rapport, credibility, an option, in the form of the model used, and you are a single click away from the full product offerings. Awesome!