I’ve had a few friends lately who aren’t sure about the value of social media marketing, so rather than debate the merits of social media verbally, I thought I’d save the time needed to argue it repeatedly, and do my best to compile my thoughts so I could merely direct others to this posting in the future. Below are what I believe to be the 7 benefits to engaging in social media. Keep in mind, different individuals will have different objectives, and therefore will look for different benefits. Here is a summary though:

Google and Yahoo didn’t have much of a presence at the CTIA Wireless I.T. & Entertainment conference in San Francisco last week, but their startup competitors and much smaller rival AOL all did.

While Google and Yahoo have been pursuing mobile search and advertising, they’ve met resistance from mobile operators in the U.S. “Some are concerned about Google and Yahoo being stronger competitors, that they will become in effect the dumb pipe that the ISPs became,” said Greg Sterling, an analyst at Sterling Market Research and Opus Research. “I think that’s a valid fear. On a personal note, I just love that quote!

Google’s recent attempts to stomp out link selling increases the very problem Google tries to fight.

What’s Going On?

After a year long FUD campaign Google has fired off two rounds at sites it suspects of selling links.

It punishes those sites by lowering their Toolbar PageRank, a more or less fake version of Google’s calculated real PageRank. (see also Matt Cutts on PageRank).

Lowering that Toolbar PageRank has no effect on a site’s ranking and thus traffic. But as paid links are priced at PageRank, lowering that visible PageRank lowers the amount of money a site owner can make from selling links.

Its true! The image below is a link to a web site! Its not to be clicked on though … its an offline link that needs to be photographed from a mobile device to be activated. In this case, it may reside on a billboard, a poster on a telephone pole, an ad in a men’s washroom, or a tile on a train station floor. But make no mistake … it is a link to a website!

Or the Next President of the U.S of A…

Social Media is the perfect medium for spreading a really catchy concept virally. Let’s look at Stephen Colbert for example - The man is a top-notch comedian, who is also (sort of) the Greatest Living American (See proof below:)

To elaborate, Colbert recently ranked #1 on Google search results for the term “Greatest Living American”, which speaks volumes for his fan following of webmasters online. In what is essentially called a “Google Bombing” tactic, webmasters linked to ColbertNation.Com with the anchor text of “Greatest Living American” (Read more about that here)

So Google blew past it’s numbers last week but it seems it still may have a ways to go in monetizing YouTube.

Not so, for Simon Cowell. Yes, that Simon Cowell of American Idol fame.

For those of you who may not know, Cowell is also one of the judges on the UK series Britain’s Got Talent.

Enter Paul Potts. Paul who? Paul Potts. Think Pavarotti. Think phone salesman steps up to microphone, blows audience away with Turandot’s Nessum Dorma, winds up with an instant career faster than you can pour boiling water into a coffee cup and over 40 Million YouTube views. No, seriously, 40 Million YouTube views.

Further to my August 23rd post, “Yellow Pages Goes Social” I talked about how the Yellow Pages Group in Canada had launched their integration of Facebook for users who want to save and share their favorite businesses by using their link function on Facebook.com.

Darby Seiben, Senior Manager - Traffic, Distribution and eProduct Management with YellowPages.ca, posted a great update on his blog letting us know that yellowpages.ca expanded this one step further by integrating the “add to facebook” directly into the search results as well as the business profile page for every business in Canada

It’s safe to say that Digg leads the pack among the popular social news site websites. It’s not my favorite, by I do drop by often, in pursuit of the next best top 10 list.

This week, I’m reviewing Digg, by the numbers:

* Digg started out as an experiment in November 2004 by Kevin Rose, Owen Byrne, Ron Gorodetzky, and Jay Adelson. They wanted a site where “Netizens” could vote on their favorite stories of the day. All currently play an active role in the management of the site.

When I was writing my piece on “Search and the Pareto Principle” (aka the 20/80 Rule) last week, I was playing around with Sphinn (a Digg types news submission and sharing service for those in the SEO/SEM/SMM industry) and found some really interesting information that I thought might be worthwhile sharing.

Here are some of the findings as of yesterday:

1) there were 4371 profiles on Sphinn … that’s a large number of people engaging in seo/sem/smm to one degree or another

“Blogs are far easier to maintain than traditional Web sites, but they still need more effort than most bloggers are willing to supply.

This suggests that blogging is an ephemeral fad, destined to burn itself out in a year or two.”
– “Pyra Labs at the Forefront of Webblogging Phenomenon“, Hiawatha Bray, Boston Globe, March 25, 2002

Today there are hundreds of thousands of blogs — thousands of which are influential in one way or another. Top blogs like TechMeme, Engadget, Lifehacker, TechCrunch, and many others, are widely popular and influential. Other blogs like The Simple Dollar or Everyday Digital Scrapbooking are influential in a niche.