April 2, 2010

Social Media is taking off among the youth but also within all communities as the popularity of these sites increases. People frequent these new doorways to the internet. As they share their interests and day-to-day happenings with each other, people are flocking to these sites. One can communicate with hundreds or even thousands of friends in a few keystrokes.

Never has the world seen such a network that literally has the power to engage the human spirit so effectively. We may see entire governments overthrown by these sites one day. When it comes to likes and dislikes, everyone is not the of same vein and debate is natural. Entire communities of folks interested in topics that range the gamut, daily communicate on the internet to share information and links to interesting sites.

The power of this raw force of networking has been seen in the city of Philadelphia of late, as in other parts of the country. So called, “Flash Mobs,” are appearing and causing disruption, damage and problems across the city of Philadelphia. Youth that are looking for action and are able to communicate by way of their hand-held devices on the networking sites and gather in mass to disrupt a given area of the city at will.

This is about the power of these sites and that people can communicate with each other in real time. It is no mystery that the sites more fluid in nature like Facebook and Twitter are more poplar to people looking to engage. How can a business harness the power of these sites to increase sales?

These sites like Facebook and Twitter use a global “nofollow” attribute in their “robots.txt” and generally links are considered dead to the machines that crawl the web. My opinion is that they are picked up and crawled anyway by big search. There is some debate about this. The links on many of these fluid sites that use the global “nofollow” designation do not, however get indexed in the search engines. Some sites linked to these sites are indexed by search engines. Take “Digg,” for instance and sites like it that allow spider crawling. These are prime real estate for well written articles and links to interesting sites. Again content reigns supreme and the same link bait ideas are attractive to the social networking folks that share an interest in your good or service.

As stated before, big search will continue to harness the happenings on these social sites so that the search engines remain valid in the internet experience. The power being wielded by these sites has unleashed an attraction to them by Google, Yahoo and Bing. Although the chaff that is known as spam is always going to be prevalent, the social sites are working hard to prevent it and the human element is heavily employed to cancel out the spam artisans. Take “Slashdot” for an example as it marks articles as spam until they are voted upwards by readers to raise them to a page of higher ranking.

So, we must ask if the social sites are helping the quality of big search or are they becoming entities all their own and threatening big search. I think the latter, but as long as people need a place to search for items on the internet, the search engine will remain viable. Google and Yahoo and Bing may be reduced in their ability to garner revenue from pay-per-click listings as copywriting will take on a role that will empower businesses to convey their messages in other ways. One thing is for sure and that is that the old linking schemes are dying a slow death right before our eyes. Another is that quality in site copy will rise to a level of significance never seen before.