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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.

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!

Social Media websites are popping up all over the place recently.  The public is now in the drivers seat allowing Real People to talk about their real lives on the web.  New dot.coms rolling out self-publishing models for users is demanding more from web technology and website usability.  Is this a trend?  Let’s check Alexa.

Top 500 Websites The Alexa.org 10/28/07 results.  Here are the top 10:

1. Yahoo
2. Google
3. MSN
4. You Tube *
5. Live
6. MySpace *
7. FaceBook *
8. Wikipedia
9. Orkut *
10. Hi5 *

The results are interesting some old and new.  The “Social Web” constituents above cover 50% of the Top 10 suprise you?  I am sure it doesn’t.  How many of you and your friends communicate thru your MySpace page?  Ahh got ya!

Let’s get practical and see how we can use the Trend data to meet our Search Marketing objectives.  Let’s look at some rules defined by some popular authors of SMO Social Media Optimizers as old as 2006 like Rohit Bhargava describes the 5 Rules:

1. Increase your Linkability
2. Make tagging and bookmarking easy
3. Reward inbound links
4. Help your content travel
5. Encourage the mashup

Rohit has been quoted since 2006 and entered in “till we are blue in the face” blog entries. Other angles played by other SEO’s such as Cameron Olthius expanded his original works by saying:

6. Be a user resource, even if it doesnt help you.
7. Reward helpful and valuable users

Let’s add a few more:

8. Participate. Join the conversation
9. Know how to target your audience
10. Create content
11. Be Real

Number eleven is what I would emphasize the most just Be Real.   In conclusion, the trend is social media is more than a trend it is now our new best-friend.

With the advent of social media came a thousand new on-ramps to the information highway with a major benefit — giving users the ability to interact with your brand.

I admit it. I’m a social networking site junkie. I am always looking forward to that next hit. First it was friendster. Then I got into youtube. Then myspace. Then livejournal. Then facebook.

When you consider the internal capabilities of joining micro communities of groups with similar interests (the mullet review, anyone?), allowing people a little personal perspective on who you are via your profile, tagging the pictures you post, and your emoticon of the day - what you have is the ability of networking you, your services, and/or your business.

When it comes to viral marketing, my favorite is video. You can use video to push your own product or opinion, as well as share your ‘favorites’ with people by emailing them the link, or embedding the video in your own social media site profile. Even if the site you’re posting on has instituted a rel=”nofollow” to discourage higher-ranking attempts, traffic still will be sent to the intended site.

The following statistics show that over 40% of viewers of videos online follow through with some action. If you want a slice of that action, you have to be willing to put the work into creating and distributing the video. Once up, it’s a matter of measuring its success.

“eMarketer projects that by 2011, 86.6% of the US Internet population will consume online video, up from 62.8% in 2006.

In raw numbers, that means the number of viewers will rise from 114 million in 2006 to 183 million in 2011.”

With numbers like that, you can’t afford not to utilize video to your advantage.

A great example of this is when FlowCorp had OCC (Orange County Choppers) create a Flow Bike for them. With the grouping by category/topic that youtube does, it pushes tons of traffic to the flowcorp.com site. They not only have videos on youtube about their metal fabrication equipment that stand alone, but they also have videos of the OCC staff discussing the Flow Corp machines and showing the bike itself. This allows users to become educated about FlowCorp whether they are searching for metal fabrication, OCC, or custom motorcycles. They used their video pages to

1. Engage/entertain their user
2. Inform users about their product line
3. Link back to their site

With video-sharing sites giving users the ability to copy and paste embed code into various social media platforms, viral marketing is something that can and should be utilized by anyone who is serious about marketing themselves or their brand. Be creative, be funny, be informative, and get your brand out there.