WSI Digital Marketing Consultant – We Simplify the Internet

It’s getting easier and easier to throw stones at big companies these days (not to mention our government). We’re still sore from the recent financial collapse and now Google and Facebook have to start making moves that threaten what some would call our innate rights to personal privacy.

Excuse me if I’m sounding cynical or militant, but I woke up to a couple pieces of news that set me off this morning.

First was the announcement by Market Samurai that they had lost the functionality of some key features of their service because of recent changes made by Google. Market Samurai provides keyword and search based data for internet marketing purposes, and they are not alone. Many other companies also do the same thing, and have also been impacted by the recent changes. In fact, the business of gathering, sorting, filtering and providing search data culled from the likes of Google, Yahoo!, Bing, et al, represents a rather large industry. And I can’t help think that while Google is fully aware of this, they are also a bit upset that someone else has figured out a way to monetize their services in a way that they don’t make a dime from.

Again, sorry for sounding cynical, but now get this…

The second thing that hit me this morning was the following article on the Washington Post Blog…
Google’s no-opt-out privacy changes and the end of the anonymous Internet

If you don’t feel like clicking off to read another article before you finish reading this one, here’s a short quote…

Google announced Tuesday its plans to integrate data from all its services with your profile for logged-in Google+ users. As usual, they sounded chipper about it: “We can provide reminders that you’re going to be late for a meeting based on your location, your calendar and an understanding of what the traffic is like that day.”

In other words, they are going to start tracking, predicting and attempting to influence as many of your daily activities as they possibly can – whether you like it or not. Call me a prude, but I find that to be just a little bit invasive, not to mention presumptuous.

And let’s not forget about Facebook’s recent IPA announcement. Now that they’ve captured more than 800 million active users (securing their place as the third largest nation in the world, between India and the United States) along with all the demographic information those users have freely shared about themselves, Facebook has now decided to get serious about making money. They’ve sucked us in with their cute and free offerings of group sharing, picture galleries, status updates and now they are after our cash!

Okay, okay, I hear you thinking, “This guy’s nuts!” But the point to be made here is about our personal privacy. I don’t think anyone who has created a profile, joined a group or posted a video ever consciously thought to themselves, “I would really like this huge company to know a lot more about me.” But we’ve got these two massive companies who now have the power to not only track, but also predict our behavior with fairly reasonable accuracy. And, the fact is that we freely gave them that power.

Now, I’m not saying any of this is good or bad. But is it what we really wanted or intended?

I’m not going to bore you with yet another definition of Social Media. You can find millions of different answers to this question all over the internet. For example, just try Wikipedia. And then while you’re at it, you could also find more answers at YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, Squidoo, Vimeo, Bebo, Technorati. And of course, there are many, many more out there.

So why am I bothering to address this already well worn subject? Well, because yesterday I had an epiphany. I realized that most of the definitions of Social Media that you find are really quite narrow in focus and are missing the big picture; I realized that the ‘new’ answer to the tired old question, “What is Social Media?”, is…

“The Internet.”

That’s right. That’s it. The Internet is Social Media and Social Media is The Internet! Epiphany!

Think about it. In 2008, Google announced that they had indexed more than 1 trillion unique URLs. That’s an awful lot of web pages. And certainly, that number has grown since then, right? So, what’s going on? Why do so many people, business and organizations want to have a presence on the internet? Are people creating trillions of pages of content on the internet just so it can all be ignored? Silly question, right?

I think we can all agree that the whole point of putting anything on the internet is so that other people can see it, read it, watch or hear it and then… interact with it, do something, say something, download, give, take, buy, copy, share, talk about, write about, respond to, make a phone call, take some kind of action in response to what someone has created and put there on the internet for us.

In fact, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that everyone who puts something on the internet does so because they want to get some kind of response from other people. Because if not, it’s like going to a party and passively deciding not to talk to or interact with anyone. And what’s the point of that?

People interacting with and responding to each other is social activity. Taking any type of action in response to anything found on the internet is the same thing. At the most basic level, it’s one person responding to something that another person has done. It just happens to take place on the internet. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube, either. If it’s on the internet, it’s Social Media.

I hope this has given you some food for thought. If you are only just thinking about doing something on the internet, or if you have already made your mark, think about the kinds of responses that you would like from other people. Then come up with your own ways to encourage and facilitate those types of responses.

As always, please feel free to post a comment, below. Or contact us directly with any questions or for any help developing your own interactive online presence.

Google is reaching out from beyond the stoic boundries of it’s search engine to test the playful waters of online social interaction. Have you seen it yet? It’s the Google +1 Button. Similar to the way we are able to “like” or “digg” our favorite people, places and things through the multitudes of other online social sites, you can now “+1″ your favorite things on behalf of Google. The new +1 Button is only showing up in selected areas, so far. But soon it wll apparently begin showing up for everyone with a free public Google profile.

So let’s get started with the questions that are bound to start popping up with regard to this new feature.

• If I have a public Google profile and I like to +1 lots of different things, should I be concerned about my privacy?
• If I want my website to show up in Google’s search results, should I launch a massive social media campaign to get as many people as possible to +1 my website?
• If my website currently shows up on the first page of Google, will it get knocked down when people start +1′ing other websites?

So, there’s a start. What questions do you have about Google +1? Feel free to post a reply, below, with your questions and we’ll get them all sorted out right here.