Technology in the form of social media has opened up a whole new world. As earthquakes rocked Haiti and early this morning Chile, news organizations are getting their news from citizen reporters.

The world today is a much smaller place, compared to just a few years ago. And, when compared to the early 1900′s well there is just no comparison.

Twitter is a phenomenal tool when it comes to disseminating information quickly. When coupled with all the support services for uploading pictures, we can see first hand the devastation…

…Without being censored by the news media. Thinking back to years ago most news was phoned in with images and video coming later.

So has twitter and facebook really made news organizations bystanders in todays electronic world? Personally I don’t think so!

The news organizations give us the complete picture as the gather data from all sources, bringing far more than just the images and 140 characters we get in twitter.

When it’s all combined, we are becoming completely informed and just about every issue today.

And, in the future it can only get better as technology continues to improve. But, this will only happen so long as we remain free and open societies.

This was sent to me the other day and I thought it was such a truism in the way network marketers are communicating via Twitter. Watch the video and tell me if this is what is actually going on.

It’s quite interesting listening to all the chatter on Twitter everyday. It seems we have 6 million subscribers and 9 million experts on the subject of Social Media.

On of the most provocative statements I read earlier this week "Generation X and the Baby Boomers just don’t get it." I guess I fall into the baby boomer category. Personally I see just as much hype in the promotion of social media as I do in any multi-level or network marketing program.

Public Relations – Customer Relations Has Been A Lost Art!

Years ago in any small town USA, you could walk into your local mom & pop corner store and get personal service. They knew and called you by your first name, and always thanked you for your business. Back then we did not have the mega-marts and proliferation of chain stores that we do today.

The majority of todays chain stores could careless about you and I, and very little social marketing via Twitter, Facebook or any other medium will make any difference except for a small percentage of any population.

Depending on who’s statistics you believe there are anywhere from 220,141,969 or (72.5%) to a more realistic number based on user who’ve logged on within the past 30 days which Nielson Online puts it at 152, 798,460 or (50.2%) of the U.S. population.

Other studies that I’ve read indicate that out of the 50.2% that do log on, the majority are there just to check their email, so how effective is that in reaching your audience?

Customer Service begins at first contact!

The first few minutes when a customer walks in will make or break any business. This initial meeting will tell them a lot about your company! Personally I’d rather walk into a local store run by the owner, they don’t fake an interest, they are genuine and sincere, that or they are quickly out of business.

So when I see a PR tweet that states "Companies that don’t get it… see less returns, get scared and then run back to traditional methods." To me that indicates an individual trying desperately to create something that is not there! Something I would expect to find in an ad run on Google for the latest secret for only $29.95!

Ask yourself this question, "Why did Apple Inc. do so well in 2008 and Dell had decreasing revenues?" Dell sold more computers by dropping their prices, launched massive PR campaigns, so what was the cause of their decline in profit? No you cannot say it was the "economy stupid!"

Dell To close its U.S. Stores! this happened in the beginning of 2008, while Apple was opening new stores at a record pace. Apples philosophy was old school marketing at its finest. You could walk into a store, talk to a knowledgeable person with a warm friendly face.

It must be working, even Microsoft announced earlier this month February 2009, they would be opening retail stores. Now this is something I’ve felt they should have had a long time ago.

Now, granted they are going to face greater challenges, which will demand great customer service skills. Apple has an advantage here, they make the hardware and software, Microsoft does not have that luxury, so when it comes to satisfying customers wants and needs they will need people who have talent and patience.

Social Media is not a fit for every company!

If over 50% of the businesses in this country are small to home based businesses is social media marketing really effective for them. I know the social media experts will Scream a resounding yes! Yet do they really have the time or in todays economy the budget for it?

PR is not what you or your employees say about your company. It is not about how many tweets or facebook updates you make! In the end, it’s what your customers are saying about you that really counts!

Word of mouth advertising will make or break any business, just look at the outrage over Facebook’s recent terms of service changes! It’s amazing how Tweets, Blog Posts, etc… caused them to rethink their position on this, yet those same users will still post a video to youtube!

Social Media has a place in marketing, yet a tweet will not replace a great forum where you can get questions asked and answered.

What are your thoughts?

With many of the web sites out there today, you would certainly think so! I’m guessing here but it seems many have neglected this critical aspect of their web sites, blogs etc… or has social media made that totally irrelevant today?

Search engine optimization is not just for the robots it’s also your visitors that come to your site as well. With the explosion of blogs and content management systems, everyone has one today, I have my share of them.

One of the key factors in any web site is the speed in which it loads for the visitor, this is one area that as we’ve moved to blogs and CMS systems seems to have been forgotten or totally disregarded! The more sites I follow from tweets is proving this out daily.

Overload on Plugins & Modules

When we look at the number of plugins we have for WordPress as of today the list 4,245 of them. For Drupal 6 we have 3,546 modules to date and climbing. Of course we will not use all of them but those that we do use creates a performance hit on our sites with increased load times.

We could argue, that everyone is moving to high speed internet access anyway so it’s not a problem right or is it? In the early part of 2000 there where quite a few companies involved in fiber-optics networks, many of these companies failed.

The issue then was there was way to much fiber-optic cable in the ground that was not being used. Today we are possibly approaching a shortage, which could be great news in todays economy putting more people back to work to increase the supply and we do need it.

The Traffic Jam Is Here

Take a look at any major city in the United States today and what does it always have traffic issues, well maybe not today with everyone driving less. When it comes to traffic poor engineering can play a huge part in traffic flow, we have the same effect with the internet from poor to nonexistent SEO techniques.

Visit any of the major websites and many smaller sites that pull in advertising content, pictures etc… Most of the time the sites pages never fully load. Some large news services, really are atrocious, as they run multiple ad services on their sites.

Not to long ago, I visited a site that was a re-tweet. At the site the individual was going to critique some else’s website. He did bring up some relevant points about the page in question, a typical landing page. Yet his page took over 8 seconds to load fully, and was over 400kb in size and there was nothing special about the page, it had only 2 graphics on it neither of which was optimized for the web delivery.

So What Can We do?

Track it, look at the third party applications that you include within your site, does it cause performance hit? Last year I wrote about the module for Drupal Addthis Button it did seem like the perfect solution. It wasn’t until later I could often see an issue. The page would not load fully as it was waiting for addthis to load.

Now I’m not against third party applications; some of them are down right useful additions to any website. It is when they become so popular that it begins to detract from a web visitor experience we must make the difficult choice do we keep it or look for another solution.

Often we can find a solution that essentially does the same job, yet resides on our sites server, thereby preventing the third party slow down.

If you don’t have it, get the Firefox web browser, then install Firebug and Yslow plugins. With these simple free tools you can see exactly where your site is taking a performance hit! Some of it you will be able to correct, some you will not.

One area of performance that 99.9% of us will not be able to change is the “CDN” score, otherwise know as the “Content Delivery Network,” which simply is geographically dispersed content, which means the site is not dependent on sending it’s content from just one location.

While you maybe able to get a visitor to your site via social media, give them a good to great experience once they arrive there. And never over look the SEO aspect of your site, the search engines can and will drive targeted traffic to your site.

So back to the original question “Has Social Media Killed SEO?” I don’t believe so; some will ignore it to their detriment!

We knew it was coming how could anyone doubt it. The big question is what will twitter consider a company? There are many small – home based businesses using twitter to promote their services, will they now be considered a company per Twitters yet to be announced standards?

Since Sunday the 8th of February, there have been two credible articles that point to the coming changes, the first from New York Magazine and the second from TechCrunch

After all the only reason to start a social site, allow it to run for a year or more, build in the hype etc… is to eventually monetize it. Now there is nothing wrong with that at all in a capitalistic society. Many use it for what it was intended to do and that is to socialize in micro bytes or a micro-blog if you prefer.

Yet many Twammers have used it to bypass email spam and spam you directly. From reading many of the proponents of Twitter it is the neatest thing since sliced bread, especially when it comes to reaching out to people, branding yourself, and it appears social media is replacing seo.

My Thoughts On Twitter and The Articles

A commercial business will have to pay for one reason, Twitter is getting ready to run ads on the site and if you’re a business you should be able to pay to keep the competitors ads off your twitter page.

Everyone else gets served ads! And it does not matter if your using a third party application ads will be delivered to you just like tweets, unless you have a paid subscription pretty smart if you ask me!

More then likely all those fancy pages everyone has created will no doubt have to go away as that area will be replaced with paid advertising. There lies another challenge will the advertising be per click or page view? My guess is it will be per page view, it will be interesting to see just how everything develops by years end.

One of the reasons I think it will be based on per view is it is well known that most of the ads do not get clicked on, so there would be no revenue. I bring this up cause something funny happened yesterday, I got spammed by RipOffReport.com who no doubt must use a pay per view type of advertising policy.

One of the changes I see coming for the world wide web is one day the only content you may find will come from social sites. This shift takes it away from the millions of web masters who’ve generated the content that google and many others have capitalized on over the years.

Bloggers have stopped Blogging

Some of the popular blogs I used to read, note used to read stopped blogging as they switched to all forms of social media. Some of them have not posted it 6 to 8 months. Some would argue that maybe they just don’t need to anymore.

Ok well maybe not all bloggers have stopped writing. Yet, just how many websites and blogs can we keep up with? Add to that all the social sites you would have to stay current with and you could end up being a very busy person who never gets out into the sunshine.

Just the other day, I witnessed a scary thing driving down the interstate. A person driving a car at 75 mph in a 65 mph zone texting, while weaving in and out of traffic. Pretty amazing just how addicted people become to technology, yet if they keep that up they may never live to enjoy it.

With everyone jumping onto the social media bandwagon there are clear winners emerging, Twitter is one of them.

What got me to thinking about this was after reading they where exploring how to monetize it. Now I’m not faulting them for wanting to do this, after all it is a business. My concern with them following this path goes back to running adsense on my network marketing web site.

Everyone wants to monetize their sites, yet with this site even though the advertisers where relative for Google, the language used in the ads did not meet my standards. You write material, and along comes and ad that uses language like "Buying Leads Suck," Explode Your Business," or more like how to clean out your wallet.

Granted it does generate clicks, yet at the same time destroys the credibility of your site. While Google continues to try to clean it up, it appears it is almost impossible to keep up with. So when they do finally monetize it what type of ads would be showing up there? Many will say why worry about it, we have no control over it anyway!

Now For Twitter

In August 2007 Andy Beard wrote a post about Twitter Nofollow I stumbled on this doing research on nofollowing twitter links. There where lots of innuendo that this was pressure from Google to stop spammers and it maybe just the case. Matt Cutts commented on it after they added the nofollow to their bio links.

In my opinion if Google is worried about spam links from both Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook etc… would it have not been easier just to place these sites on a black list or totally devalue any link from these sites? After all social sites are being used today to bypass the search engines altogether!

There is the comparison between Wikipedia and Twitter as far as being black holes sucking in page rank, link juice and distributing it only within the their site. On the other hand Twitter is only selectively nofollowing links, if you are using any of the multitude of new applications they are getting highly relevant links from your tweets. Now the question is was this an oversight on their part or a way to reward them?

Then on the other hand when viewing the mobile view of twitter, there is a link back to your site that does not have a nofollow tag attached to it, again was this an oversight on their part. I can almost hear it no people complaining for exposing this.

With the reports of googlebot being able to crawl javascript links "some tools that are supposed to simulate googlebot indicate this is true, yet I cannot verify it is happening" a typical wordpress blog could be bleeding page rank, elevating Twitter to the status of Wikipedia as far as ranking is concerned.

When placing one of the widgets on you site, for example using the html widget with 5 of the latest tweets, you could effectively be sending 6 links back to Twitter, and if your using WordPress or another form of content management system, and have 100 pages you’ve effectively just sent 600 links offsite bleeding page rank in the process. Can you hear the sucking sound now?

Now many will argue that page rank does not matter, that is up to you to decide. In my opinion it does matter, you just cannot accurately gauge it which is as it should be. What it really comes down to is should we use the nofollow tag on our links pointing to Twitter or any social site for that matter?

Now why on earth would you want to use up all your text messages? It just did not make any sense at all to me, especially since I use the iPhone. With the iPhone there are probably no less than a dozen or so apps that deal with social networking.

I use a program called Twitterrific on the iPhone and it works great! I can check for tweets on my schedule. One of the problems with todays society is, we are all so well connected we really never have any quiet time anymore.

When setting up your Twitter account the last step is to get your phone setup to receive text messages. What they really need there is a way to turn that annoying message off. I’ve heard reports of people getting into serious financial problems with text messaging. I guess it becomes addictive.

The folks over at iconfactory.com also have a program for the Apple Mac that places Twitterrifc on your desktop, for those of you that really want to keep up to date with everything going on. Still just like email, we really do need to turn these things off if we plan on getting anything done in our lives.

When it comes to Twitter wanting to send text messages to my cell phone, I think not. I know for many individuals, they really do want that interaction and quite possibly do not have a phone that will give them that real interaction they are after.

With the iPhone now being offered at Walmart, I’m sure there will be even more of them being sold for the foreseeable future. Who knows I may one day in the future upgrade to the 3G model, yet I’m perfectly happy with my early version as many others are.

So if your an Apple fan these are two programs you’ll want to check out. Either one or both will really keep you up to date on the Social Networking craze.