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and Tech Geek at Heart

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Content Aggregators are Killing Content Creators

September 23, 2009

This is a guest post from Josh Schnell, founder of Macgasm.net and web developer.

Somewhere down the line, an exploitation has to occur in order for a financial profit to be realized. This is no less true for the world of social networks. Networks like Digg, FriendFeed, and Facebook are seeing huge growths in value, but the little guys, the ones actually providing the meat and potatoes for those operations, rarely see a nickel.

Let’s be honest for a second here. The major “Web 2.0″ and social networking technologies that have been created in the last several years have been a major boon for consumers and web users. They’ve aggregated the entire Internet into what’s cool and what’s not so cool. When searching for new and interesting websites, it is much preferable to visit a website on a friend’s recommendation than it is to use classic search engines. I’m not disputing the relevancy or success of these technologies to the average internet user. The problem as I see it is from a content creator paradigm, where the content creators are the ones footing the bills for bandwidth usage, paying the writers, and putting tears and sweat into their content so that it becomes sellable.

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Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2008

January 5, 2009

Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2008

Today is my birthday, and I decided to give you all a gift that few of you have been highly anticipating for a few months now. My most popular post on this site — probably by far — was last year’s Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2007 compilation. I spent about 3 days (and nights) on it (without sleep) and I was quite happy with the turnout. This year, I began starting to write this compilation in the first week of December. The collection begins with posts that start in January of 2008 and have been collected and shared in the last 12 months. Like last year, I’ve grouped them into different categories and written short descriptions on each post. There’s no order to the posts; I’ve used my bookmarks and a variety of social sites and peer recommendations to create this list. I hope this year’s list surpasses last year’s. Let me know how I did in the comments. ;)

Here’s how this works: In the Internet Marketing Best Posts “series,” I take posts that are typically timeless — they’re not confined to a specific event or news occurrence — they’re valuable for the long haul in terms of Internet Marketing and creative strategy. Hopefully, you’ll see that these posts are still relevant in a few years down the road.

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The Ultimate Social Media Etiquette Handbook

December 10, 2008

Hi Bing visitors! Like this post? Hire me for social media consulting.

Social media mimics real relationships — in many cases. Would you do the following within real face-to-face relationships?

  • Jump on the friendship bandwagon without properly introducing yourself?
  • Consistently talk about yourself and promote only yourself without regard for those around you?
  • Randomly approach a friend you barely talk to and simply ask for favors — repeatedly?
  • Introduce yourself to another person as “Pink House Gardening?”

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you may need a refresher course on social media etiquette — and perhaps real-life etiquette also. Here are some egregious sins that you must not perform on social media sites. Avoid these violations and learn how to manage and maintain online relationships on a variety of popular social media sites.

Facebook

  • Adding users as friends without proper introductions. If you’re looking to make friends, tell people who you are. Don’t assume they know you — especially if they, well, don’t.
  • Abuse application invites and consistently invite friends to participate in vampire games. Many call this spam.
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What Traits Define a Social Media Marketer?

July 8, 2008

With many individuals finding great success with social media (and as an aside, a basic understanding of search engine optimization), they immediately consider themselves social media marketers and consultants (as well as seasoned SEOs) and offer to sell their promotional services. What skills, though, do successful social media marketers have that put these individuals above the average (or addicted) social media user, and better yet, above the traditional marketer? I asked several social media consultants, bloggers, marketers, search engine optimizers, and social media addicts about what they considered to be essential skills and characteristics of the most efficient and results-driven social media consultants. In the many paragraphs that follow, learn from many of the experts and hear what they consider success when using social media to engage with consumers about products and services.

Maki, Internet Marketing and Social Media Blogger: The main characteristic [social media marketers] need to have is a genuine curiosity/interest in social media, particularly on how it influences human relationships and business practices. This is not just standard required job skills but rather a deep interest that pervades one’s day to day life. One needs to constantly be informed of the latest technologies while striving always to learn and improve one’s knowledge levels. In order to do well when marketing, one should have tactical knowledge and ideally, first-hand experience of the specific social media platform. This will help a great deal in planning and managing successful marketing campaigns.

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Confessions and Reflections of a [Former] Digg Addict

May 9, 2008

As many of you know, I took off my Digg hat and put it on the shelf on January 28th after algorithmic changes at Digg made it extremely tough for me to appreciate the social news site that used to give you somewhat of a “high” for getting your stories front-paged.

In the subsequent months, many people did not follow in my lead. In fact, most of them had already left. In the past few weeks, however, even Digg’s other top users are seeing that Digg is becoming more difficult of a social news site to enjoy, and after stepping away from Digg for awhile, I have some thoughts and reflections on how it was and possibly how it should be.

Let me start off by saying that I am still a top Digg user (#42) even though I haven’t submitted in 3 months. As a top Digg submitter, it worked like this: at first, people noticed my heavy community involvement and my participation, and consequently, my submitted stories easily front-paged.

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