Online Social Networking

At social networking sites we communicate and build relationships. We can also share websites and other content with each other.

At social bookmarking sites we primarily share websites and other content with each other and with search engines. However, we can also communicate and build relationships.

What is the difference between a social bookmarking site and a social networking site?

Our priorities. Online social bookmarking emphasizes content, while online social networking emphasizes relationships.

Benefits of Social Bookmarking Sites

If you publish a blog or own some other website, you probably want visitors, and backlinks too. Social bookmarking sites will help you in these ways.

• You share your site with the community. They visit it and rate it. You can form relationships that lead to quality backlinks for your site.
• Search engines take note that your site is bookmarked. Bookmarking is a form of recommendation. Search engines react favorably to your site’s presence in the community.

My Favorite Social Bookmarking Sites

The social bookmarking sites I use most often are StumbleUpon, Technorati, propeller, del.icio.us, Spicy Page and Digg. See the list on my sidebar and at Social Marker, a tool that streamlines the bookmark submission process.

I also use blog traffic sites, notably Entrecard and Link Referral. The latter can also be used to promote a static website. I’ve made valuable connections at Entrecard and have learned much from the blogs I visited there.

Regular participation at social networking sites will do wonders for your popularity. Reqular posting and participation at social bookmarking sites will do the same for your blogs and other websites.

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I strive to write upbeat online social networking posts. However, sometimes I have to publish a bad report.

I told you that I had found the social networking site Wowzza Disappointing. I decided to withdraw during Wowzza’s 10-day grace period, and I expected to receive a refund.

When my refund wasn’t issued after more than a week, I contacted Jim Vigilante, the site’s founder, who said that he would look into it for me.

Last week I wrote him again. This time I did not receive a reply.

If I eventually receive my refund, I’ll post a comment to this article to let you know. As of now both social networking sites, Wowzza and Zion 5, are suspect.

If you already belong to either of them, enjoy! No need to quit.

But if you haven’t joined them, you should consider taking your online social networking business elsewhere. 

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My First Effort

I launched my Online Social Networking blog on November 6, 2007 with my first post, Here We Are.

I was a blogging and search engine optimization newbie.

You might remember my earlier post, “You don’t have to get it right. You just have to get it going!” I made a plan and got started.

My strategy was to attract readers at social networking sites such as MySpace and Yuwie, and at the same time build a strong presence in the search engines.

I chose to write about social networking because of the large amount of experience I had with online social networking and social networking sites, and I selected the name of this blog and its principal keywords accordingly.

My blog took form over a period of several months with a few false starts and reversals. I kept writing week after week and networking and strategizing while waiting for my search engine marketing to kick in.

I joined MyBloglog and Entrecard to connect with other bloggers and entice them to visit my site. At Entrecard I made new friends.

One, a gentleman named Marcus Hochstadt, has helped me enormously. Not only has Marcus given me lots of encouragement, but through a contest he organized and ran on his Internet Business Guide blog, he also helped me gain more than fifty good inbound links to my blog. This helped my Google Page Rank.

Moving Up in Google

Page rank is Google’s measure of a site’s authority. It’s a major factor in Google’s determination of a site’s position in search results.

Having your site shown by Google and other search engines on page one of the results when people search for your targeted keywords is highly desirable and is the primary goal of search engine optimization.

As my credibility increased, and my page rank went from zero to one and from one to two I moved up in the search engine results and saw large increments in the number of visitors Google was sending my way each day.

I started tracking my blog’s traffic late January using Google Analytics. At that time Google was already providing me with a couple of visitors per day. The following chart shows how my results improved over time. Click on the chart to view a larger much larger version.

On a good day now I receive about 30 visitors. This will continue to grow over time, and I’ll keep you posted.

You Can Do It Too

I’m teaching a free course on blogging, search engine optimization and social media marketing. You’ll learn all the techniques I’ve discovered and how you can apply them yourself.

A wide range of social media marketing training courses is available a My Private Classroom for Marketers.

Subscribe to my newsletter at my free social media training site.

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Last November I examined the popularity of social networking sites.

In a series of four posts I examined the reasons I believed that online social networking was very relevant:

• “High Tech/High Touch” - As sterile technology increasingly impacts our lives, we crave greater and greater intimacy to offset it.
• Digital Age - Our technical capablity permits, even inspires us, to share multi-media digital files with our friends, family and colleagues that contain valuable information, memorable experiences and enjoyable entertainment.
• Communication - Online social networking sites are capable of providing us with the functionality that e-mail did in the past plus a big additional benefit, file sharing.
• Search Engine Optimization - More and more marketers are turning to social networking both to connect with users and to get free traffic. Traffic comes from within the community and, thanks to the search engines, from without as well.

On March 24th I looked at Social Networking vs. Advertising and how people tend to approach social networking with an advertising mindset. If you haven’t seen that post, I highly recommend it.

My good friend Ivo Jackson, a very gifted writer, wrote a blog post April 8, the 7 Reasons Why You Should Do More Networking Than Selling that looked at networking from another angle.

Ivo provides an excellent rationale for social networking that applies to offline as well as online social networking. These are the points she makes:

• People don’t like to be sold.
• Selling only works when people are ready to buy, and most of your network is not ready.
• People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.
• Selling yourself or your brand is easier than selling your product or service.
• The law of averages is real - long term success is relative to the size of your network.
• If you help people get what they want, you will eventually get what you want.
• If you expect a great harvest, you must first plant some seeds.

Visit Ivo’s blog and read the complete article.

I wish to add just one point that I made in my March 24th post. Networking allows you to determine what people really want so that you can customize your offer to them.

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History Repeating Itself

Pay It Forward for Profits, a quasi downline club pretending to be a funded proposal, collapsed last year. I hoped people would learn a lesson from it.

Members were funneled into marginal programs such as GDI and Empowerism for the sake of the income streams they provided — and perhaps too because the Pay It Forward founders had a prior interest in those programs. Members had sought to promote their primary businesses when joining PIF4P, but that idea typically got lost in the shuffle.

As Diane Hochman teaches in My Private Classroom webinars, marketing systems are simply not sustainable. They implode once a large enough number of users adopt or tout the system.

Rather than develop or teach systems and shortcuts, Diane Hochman and I teach key leadership skills and offer excellent social media marketing training.

After all, isn’t it better to invest a few months to develop strong marketing and communication skills that will serve us a lifetime than to invest the same effort in a system that might make us a few fast bucks if we’re lucky?

It’s not good to rely solely on a marketing system to build a business, but when the system itself is the product, as was the case with Pay It Forward for Profits, then the ultimate end comes quickly, usually within a year or two, and the program is completely wiped out.

Unfortunately most people don’t learn. They blame their result on bad luck or external circumstances and jump on one of the next bandwagons to come along.

As Alexander Pope said, “Hope springs eternal in the human breast,” and new marketing schemes appear every week.

Caution Recommended

What’s astonishing about The Spiderweb Marketing System is how closely it resembles Pay It Forward. When I signed up and looked inside, I could hardly believe my eyes. There was GDI front and center, just as it was in PIF4P.

That’s where the automated blogs are set up. Global Domains is the first paid component of this free system.

Hmm. Did I just say that?

I guess the system isn’t free. Users buy overpriced web services for $10 per month from GDI in order to use The SpiderWeb Marketing System.

When you get to the Direct Matches* sign up, you really can sign up for free. However, if you do, you won’t be able to implement the Direct Matches piece of the traffic system — better pay another $10 per month for that. I think I’m beginning to see a pattern here.

Ever hear of bait-and-switch?

Sorry. Let’s call it upsell.

There are multiple income streams — some pretty good. And there’s no made-up story about funded proposals like with Pay It Forward for Profits — also good. However, I wish they were up front about the cost. Spider Web is not a free system.

Many people will join Spider looking for multiple streams of income, but instead they’ll find themselves saddled down with multiple streams of outgo.

Oh, there is one other thing. In addition to clogging the Direct Matches MyMail system with spammy messages, The SpiderWeb Marketing System is a proponent and proliferator of automated blogs.

An automated blog is a system generated blog. The system creates the blog and pumps posts into the blogosphere faster than you can say “global warming”.

I just though of a name for this new phenomenon, it’s a blog infestation.

Okay. Needs some work. Give me some time. I’ll think of a better one.

All kidding aside, I can’t understand why somebody would want to spend hours spamming members at Direct Matches and Yuwie while polluting the blogosphere on auto-pilot.

There’s a moral issue too which I hope to discuss in detail in a future post. For now, consider this. When somebody visits a blog, they assume that it’s the journal of a real live person — not the fiction of a computer program. How can this type of impersonation be right?

Kimball Roundy, creator of the Spider System, has given us something interesting to watch. We’ll get to see how Google and the other search engines cope with his quasi-blogs and how visitors react to them as well. We’ll also get to see if automated blogs are really scalable and if a substantial numbers of people actually make money with them.

Meanwhile please be careful. If you see a low hanging spider web, duck!

Speaking of ducks, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it’s a duck. I wish we could still say that about a blog.

*Direct Matches happens to be one of my favorite social networking sites. Too bad it’s going to be overrun yet again with spammers. I was so relieved when Pay It Forward fell by the wayside. Now I’ll have to put up with another wave of spamming for a year or so until The Spider Web Marketing System runs its course.

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Seth Godin’s Web 2.0 Traffic Watch List

My interest in social media has evolved substantially over the past year.

My love for online social networking and social networking sites is not something new, but my love for blogging and appreciation for social bookmarking, content sharing and article submission sites certainly are.

Through my conference calls I now provide social media marketing training in addition to seminars on search engine marketing and using social networking sites.

As I mentioned in my recent post, Social Networking Site Catalog, “I launched this blog to share my passion for online social networking and my experiences at social networking sites.  I never intended to assemble a catalog. There are already too many good ones out there.” 

One of the world’s top marketers and author of marketing books, Seth Godin, provides a catalog of 952 top social media sites, Seth Godin’s Web 2.0 Traffic Watch List. It will help you know what’s hot and what’s not.

Here are the top ten as I write this post.

1. youtube.com
2. myspace.com
3. orkut.com
4. en.wikipedia.org
5. ebay.com
6. facebook.com
7. fotolog.com
8. flickr.com
9. friendster.com
10. photobucket.com

Put content in the right places, and you will attract other users and search engines like a magnet. If you’re into marketing, that’s exactly what you want.

For more about social media marketing come to my tele-seminars and consider joining Diane Hochman and me at My Private Classroom for Marketers. We’ll help you, but rather than spoon feed you, we’ll “teach you how to fish”.

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One of the social networking sites I’ve used recently is Zion 5.

I’m writing this post to let you know that the site’s founder Darren Merrett did not pay me my Pro commission for March despite several attempts to contact him late April.

I think it’s fine to use the site as a free member or even as a Pro Member as long as you don’t care about your commissions.

If there are new developments, I will let you know.

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Mashable Catalog of Social Networking Sites

I launched this blog to share my passion for online social networking and my experiences at social networking sites.  I never intended to assemble a catalog. There are already too many good ones out there.

Consider the Mashable list of 350+ social networking sites arranged by category with a brief description of each site. It’s very well done.

Or consider the Go2Web20 complete Web 2.0 social media directory. What an undertaking!

I will from time to time point you to such lists and meta-sites to stimulate your interest and facilitate your research.

You can also find helpful information and resources on the sidebar of this blog.

I will continue to focus on writing thought-provoking articles and sharing my ideas about social media marketing, social networking sites and personal development.

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Tonight Diane Hochman speaking on a free My Private Classroom webinar revealed the top seven Internet screw-ups of the average marketer.

My favorite was following the flock.

Facebook is hot. Very hot. There are scores of top networkers on the Facebook scene.

Is that where you want to be? Do you want to follow the flock to Facebook in the hope of successfully competing with some of the world’s greatest networkers?

You might be successful. But instead, why not carve out a niche for yourself somewhere else? There are hundreds of social networking sites. Why not lead the flock instead of following?

Whenever everybody zigs, be a leader and zag. If they zag, you zig.

Diane made a number of other excellent points. Then she summed up her insightful and inspiring talk with the following advice. Above all, you should use common sense and be yourself.

For an invitation to the next free My Private Classroom webinar, complete the subscription form on my Social Networking Project site devoted to online social networking and social media marketing training.

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What is Wowzza?

From my perspective Wowzza is thousands of networkers running around like chickens with their heads cut off — quite a messy sight — or should I say site?

The situation became so messy that site founder Jim Vigilante felt compelled to axe the site’s top feature, sending direct messages to all contacts in one fell swoop. Members were bombarded by spam in their in-boxes and the latest greatest pre-launches. Something had to be done. Now members are limited to 50 bulk mail messages per day.

Incidentally Wowzza is extremely slow, but I’m sure that this problem will eventually be addressed and corrected.

Let me remind you of my earlier post, Online Social Networking Entering New Phase, in which I said, “Use social networking sites to network, to make new friends, to make new business contacts, and to make deals. Do not use them only to get paid by them. If you want to make money, doing business through these sites has much more potential than creating income streams from the sites themselves.”

I also said, “Join, use and refer people to sites that you enjoy, that offer the services you want, and that attract the types of people you wish to network with.

“Do not join sites because you are impressed by their hyped-up revenue sharing plan. Avoid paid membership sites unless they are the only ones that provide the services you require and attract the clientele you seek.”

Since I believe that there’s nothing particularly unique about Wowzza, I’m not going to pay $32.95 for the privilege of getting other people to do the same, just to make a buck.

In case you’re not already receiving enough spam or you’re desperate to get information on the pre-launch du jour, Wowzza may be just the social networking site for you.

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On April 4 in Building a List with Online Social Networking I discussed the role of online social networking in permission-based marketing.

When you add a friend at one of the social networking sites, you are adding that person to your list, and at the same time you’re adding yourself to his or her list. It’s reciprocal list building.

You’ll readily agree that a tiny list is not likely to get you far. Right?

You must build a large list. But how large? And do you focus on quantity or quality?

Whether you have 100 or 500 or 5,000 people on your friends list, you aren’t going to be able to have a regular intimate dialog with all of them. So why opt for smaller rather than larger?

In Stan Relihan’s interview with Ron Bates, the most connected networker on LinkedIn with around 40,000 direct connections, Ron answers the question quite succinctly. He says that “there is quality in quantity”.

In other words, the larger your list, the more people there will be who are just the ones you’re looking to meet. Some relationships will remain superficial while others will become strong friendships.

Ron also discusses the importance in business today of what he refers to as an “additive online presence”. Before somebody does business with you they’re likely to Google you to see what comes up. That’s your online presence.  Each place you network, post an article or bookmark a site adds to that presence. This you may recall is a subject we touched on last month in Social Networking Sites: Your Web Presence and is frequently discussed at My Private Classroom for Marketers.

I encourage you to listen to Stan’s interview with Ron Bates and Stan’s other online social networking podcasts. You’ll find loads of gems.

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My tongue in cheek April Fools post Alphabet Wars was right on. Owners of social networking sites are increasingly facing tough naming choices that strain the 26-letter alphabet.

One of the newest players on the online social networking scene is Wowzza. The name tells us little more than that perhaps somebody’s keyboard tends to stick on the letter z.  Why another social networking site? What’s different about this site?

Wowzza is an exclusive members-only site, not a free social networking site like MySpace, Facebook or Yuwie. All members are premium members.

Founder Jim Vigilante’s aim is to attract serious marketers and entrepreneurs. Jim is also playing up the referral income potential of Wowzza’s 3×9 forced matrix payout.

In an upcoming post I’ll explain why I am not networking at Wowzza.

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