Whether you’re Digging, Stumbling, or just Twittering around, understanding why you should participate can be a challenge in itself, but if you’re new to all this, and you’ve simply been hearing that “you have to get into Web 2.0” then you can consider this a primer.

Other than using just a limited few of the networks, I never dug into “social marketing” much until the summer of 2007, and after just a few months, I began to understand more clearly about the difference between social networking participation and exploitation.

Why Participate?
The benefit comes in several different forms, and every one of these networks could hold some potential value if you’re willing to play the game.

For the Traffic
The traffic driven to your website from these social networks is typically of lower quality, and it doesn’t convert well.

Most of the visitors that come to your site won’t buy your product or your service, they won’t sign up for your mailing list, and they’re only going to put their eyeballs on your page for a few brief seconds. The vast majority will probably never come back.

If this sounds unappealing, you have to remember that links drive rankings. Your ultimate goal is to create content that WILL peak the interest of these people and will cause them to not only vote and comment, but perhaps even write about your piece of content elsewhere, which gets you a link.

A good piece of content can garner dozens, hundreds or even thousands of permanent inbound links, which appear on sites and blogs all over the web, that they never would have seen if they had not found you through that community.

For the Visibility & Branding
Appearing frequently as a participant in these networks adds to your name recognition and company branding. The more you participate, the more your name, your comments, and your profile get viewed and looked at, and the more others are made aware of your presence.

As you become more visible in these networks, people will check out what you’ve got to say, and they’ll look at your profiles and web properties more often, increasing your credibility and visibility.

You could Digg and Stumble all day for a month, and very few people would probably know your name, but a small commitment to certain other communities could have a big payback. In some communities, it really doesn’t take that all that much effort to become a big fish in a small pond.

For the Link Juice
Most of the larger communities have “no followed” their links, meaning that they don’t pass any actual ranking value beyond the traffic they might bring.

The nofollow tag was put into place primarily for comments on blogs, but in an attempt to curb the exploitation, it carried over to these Web 2.0 networks, so today the vast majority do not pass link juice.

However, some of the smaller communities have not bought into the whole “nofollow” thing, and some have even removed the nofollow tag it in an attempt to gain more participation and more users.

Many of these services do quietly pass their share of link juice, and some are even following links in the comments too. No, I’m not going to name them here, and instead will subscribe to the school of STFU.

How to begin:
In order to build you a good foundation for your future, you should…

• Join the networks – Yes, join as many as you can stand – If you don’t pon’t poke around wasting time in them and you can get this over with methodically, in just a couple of hours.
• Devote less than five minutes to each network you joined to explore and determine how much value there might be in each network. Just because it appears useless doesn’t mean it is.
• Participate in the networks DAILY for a week – spend less than three minutes per network – Set a timer, and stick to a routine
• When evaluating, see what’s on the front page and at the top of the category and hot topic pages.
• How many votes does it take to get to the front page, or to other “hot” cection pages, and how can you appleal to the users of this community to help you get there?
• Try to estimate the demographic / guess the maturity level of the average participant by what’s popular. Is stuff blowing up, are you surrounded by lots of drug references and pornography? If so, then keep in mind that this alone doesn’t mean you can’t participate, it just means you’re going to have to be more creative.
• To “participate” means to vote up headlines of interest, and even leave occasional comments when you’re so moved. Do NOT submit your own content. that is exploitation, not participation.
• Being the first commentor on something that’s getting hot can often be a good thing, and commenting is absolutely necessary in order to establish you as a real person. You’re a real person, that really has an opinion, and is actually appearing to take an interest in these people’s stuff. You’re becoming a part of the community.
• Total time invested per network should be under five minutes per week per network – HOWEVER – Time spent reading stuff that you’re actually interested in is not included, so be warned
• Besides voting, ADD new content to the networks, which is not your own. As you view the content of others, find things on their sites that have not been submitted before and submit them. The golden rule applies here, and if you treat others the way you wish to be treated – i.e. submit their content and write something nice. You will find that it comes back to you in spades.
• Take advantage of automation tools to help you with the task of voting, and even submitting new content of others. Some can take the 20 second manual task of voting on an item and replicate it to dozens of networks that you choose, under your own account. This turns a 20 – 30 minute job into a simple button push, and there’s nothing “evil” about efficiency. OnlyWire is pretty good for this, and the Social Submitter inside Blogger Apps even allows you to vary your comments from network to network.
• After you establish yourself in a community, and you’ve established some relationships, and you’ve commented on the submissions and articles of others, and you’ve had seen others comment on yours, then, and only then, should you consider introducing your own content to the network, and I believe the the proper way to do that is to get someone else to submit it in the first place.

Join, Vote, Comment to Participate, and THEN Submit
The best way to trick the social networking sites , trick the search engines, and trick the world into believing that you’re a real person, is to actually BE ONE. Any company or “social network marketing service” that tells you otherwise, really does not have your best long term interest at heart.

The post Web 2.0 101 – A Primer appeared first on SEMpdx.

“Of course, there are exceptions to the rule, but usually early adopters tend to exert greater and greater influence on the network over time. Which means it’s like a little social pyramid scheme: if you’re late, you’re screwed.”

Largely without knowing it, David Brooks, my second-favorite columnist behind Thomas Friedman, authored an incredibly insightful corollary to Mashable’s theory, encouraging me to put together a hodgepodge of thoughts I’ve meant to get down in writing for some time now.

The Cachet of Being an Early Discarder

I’ll try to sum up Brooks’ terrific piece in just a few lines:

“In the first place, …aximum status goes to the Gladwellian heroes who occupy the convergence points of the Internet infosystem — Web sites like Pitchfork for music, Gizmodo for gadgets, Bookforum for ideas, etc. “

“Second, in order to cement your status in the cultural elite, you want to be already sick of everything no one else has even heard of.”

If you know Brooks, you’ll know his style is often outrageously tongue-in-cheek, as above. But frequently, the reason his tongue there in the first place is to feel around the oversized grain of truth embedded in his cheek.

Even Google Isn’t Above the Brooks Corollary

Pure online companies seem to me to be qualitatively different from offline companies that dominated the 20^th century. Companies like GE, GM, and P&G spent billions on advertising to establish themselves as trusted brands over the last hundred years. Their revenues were, and still are, largely based on recurring purchases from customers who visit the store and continued to spend money on their products because they were familiar with them.

By comparison, in the 21^st Century, Big G has simply built the best mousetrap. Google, like the other successful offline companies, has spent pennies on branding compared to successful offline companies. And its revenues aren’t based on a consumer “product;” rather, on its ever-increasing share of searches.

Then there’s the social aspect of Google. Remember when Google first came out, back in the late 1990’s? I was a freshman in college, still using a conglomeration of AltaVista, Yahoo, and HotBot to do my searching. All of a sudden I heard about this new site called Google from one of my friends. I felt like a loser for never having heard of it, and my buddy Daniel got a little high from enlightening a rube like myself on the wonders of that fantastically plain search interface. Brooks is spot-on with thesis #1 about the status bump of knowing about something cool that your peers don’t.

In the 21^st century, all that branding and familiarity just aren’t that important. In fact, it’s more than a little thrilling to try out a brand new website or a brand new service that our web-savvy peers are talking about.

So what’s the difference between the offline business model and the online business model? Online revenue models are predominantly based on either subscriptions or advertising—neither of which requires any substantial investment from consumers. Apart from e-commerce, the largest consumer “spending” in most web financial models isn’t money—it’s time.

The userbase is of critical importance—the more people invest into a particular app or a particular network, the less likely they are to leave. Google clearly recognizes this; it’s why they have their hands in so many unprofitable, user-oriented cookie jars (Calendar, Gmail, Reader, etc.)—bundling services like these keeps users addicted to their search service as their default homepage.

Frankly, Google still owns the rights to the best mousetrap. But that doesn’t stop people from trying out new services; look no further than the hype around Cuil just in the last month. Now of course Cuil is in some ways a terrible example because it was such a phenomenal let-down. But imagine if it HAD been able to return decent results? Even with ALL of my commitment to Google products (all three of the above, and many, many more), I’d have switched in a heartbeat, for my search needs at least, to stay ahead of the “cool” curve.

In summary, it was far more costly for traditional offline companies to establish themselves as a trusted brand in the 20^th century, but they stood far less risk of being discarded for an unknown upstart.

A Cautionary Tale for Mark Zuckerberg, Biz Stone and Others

I’ve had several discussions with friends about why Mark Zuckerberg refused to sell Facebook, even at a gaudy billion-dollar valuation. My friends’ arguments usually run along the lines of the following: Mark feels he has created the next Google, with an idea that only comes around once in a lifetime (and that may very well be the case).

My “advice” to Zuckerberg has always been to take the money and run.

Why? In our increasingly ADD world, the marketers and the folks who are so critical to the growth in popularity of a particular website are often the first to leave it. As Brooks would say, not only is there incredible cachet for the web’s elite to dismiss Facebook as “SOOOO 2007” but as Mashable would say, there is the importance of being at the rise of the next wave, rather than at its crest. Even social networking zealots only have so much time to devote to one particular interest, or at most a handful of platforms.

One thing hasn’t changed since the original dot-com bubble burst in 2000. It’s hard to grow, and even maintain, a userbase once you’ve reached a certain level. The web is a graveyard of ill-fated plays in a high-stakes, web 2.0 game of Scrabble. “Akimbo.” “Kiko.” “Friendster.” Heck, even Scrabulous lost a huge chunk of its user base after being acquired by a more corporate entity!

I have a lot of friends on Facebook, so I still use it occasionally. But if even 15 or 20% of them all of a sudden find some new hot service, as with Google, I’ll switch in a snap. I said earlier that time investment in a particular platform is critical. In comparison to the commitment to something like a Gmail address or a Google Calendar, the commitment to a Facebook profile is minuscule—what does it take to setup, maybe 45 minutes?

I want to get on that next wave, not ride the existing one. I barely made it onto the crest of the Twitter wave, and I won’t make that mistake again when “the next big one” comes along.

Speaking of Twitter, it remains to be seen whether that platform will be able to keep pace with competitors and quasi-competitors like Plurk, Pownce, and Friendfeed, among others. Perhaps it will innovate beyond its current utility. Even though it pales in comparison to Facebook’s multi-billion-dollar payoff, $100 million is an awful lot of money. Especially when your service hasn’t been a model of reliability to-date and you haven’t made a nickel in profits yet.

Zuckerberg, Stone, all of these high-level web entrepreneurs are brilliant. I have no doubt they could come up with even more amazing ideas in the next few years. And frankly, serial entrepreneurship matches the serial mindset of the web generation far better than the big brand mentality of previous generations.

So Mark, Biz, know that I’m rooting for both of your platforms. I think they’re incredibly rich and fun to use today. But don’t complain when my friends and I find something else to gush over in 2009.

David Mihm runs a one-man firm focusing on web design in Portland, OR and is a noted authority on Local SEO. He writes frequently about Local SEO topics at his blog, Mihmorandum.

The post The Brooks Corollary of Social Networking Theory appeared first on SEMpdx.

I just managed to stumble across it again, through a mention at Christian Mezeis blog, and it turns out that the video was available on You Tube where it has had over 4 million views already.

With that many views, some of you have likely seen it, but I still think it’s pretty impressive, and for those of you who haven’t, give it a look – it’s under 5 minutes…

The post Web 2.0 Clearly Defined by Video appeared first on SEMpdx.