Biznology

Image by Pete Prodoehl via Flickr

by Frank Reed
I am not an expert in social media. I am not an expert in search marketing. I am not an expert in anything, really. I don’t like the title when applied to anyone or anything. It has been so misused, it is like the Internet marketing’s version of putting “New and Improved” on a bottle of laundry detergent. It is so overused and under defined at the same time, that the word expert has lost its real meaning. Don’t get me wrong, though. I do know some things about the industry. In fact, I am confident that I know quite a bit. But an expert? Nah.

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Image by pollyalida via Flickr

If you’ve been working on the Web for more than a couple of years, you know that predicting that the mobile Web will take off this year is always popular, and always wrong. Thus far, the mobile Web is a small niche for most businesses, but will it remain that way? I started wondering about that as I see the spate of TV commercials leading up to the Droid phone announcement by Verizon Wireless. Yesterday, Motorola and Verizon finally revealed the phone, for which of the details have been leaked for weeks, and it makes me wonder of something finally is changing in the mobile Web.

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People have been talking about social search for years, but the noise reaches a crescendo whenever Google does something–in this case, Google Labs suddenly delivering a Social Search function. How does social search change the game for search marketers?

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Image via Wikipedia

by Eva Lyford
This past week I helped a a man old enough to be my father to figure out something about Facebook that was bugging him. He wasn’t getting any replies to most of his Facebook messages. His friends and family were complaining that he wasn’t responding. What the heck was going on? After some rough Time and Motion studies I found that due to a UI issue, his replies were going to noreply@facebook.com. Gah, I hate do not reply mailboxes. Still, I have to credit the guy. A lesser soul might have given up in disgust with this setback. Instead, he got a bit of how-to knowledge transfer then he carefully redirected each misdirected message. The social imperative of responding trumped any ego-centric notion of retreating from engagement.

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Image by the tartanpodcast via Flickr

How can it be that at a moment in time when most people can’t even define social media that I can appear at a conference panel session trying to redefine social media? My take is that social media isn’t what’s changing right now–it’s how businesses are using social media that is changing the most. To learn more, check out my latest post on Search Engine Guide, “Redefining social media.”