When a blog becomes a community destination it is more than writers writing and readers commenting. Readers get to know the names and avatars of blog authors, and check to see what they are thinking and reading. Readers who have questions may feel that the blog’s collective expertise is available to them, and use it as a great place to refer others - a smart jump start for a business with aspirations of establishing authority.

Grow a team, grow a blog, grow a community? Of course it’s not that simple. These steps may help.

Ever wonder why some Digg submissions go hot at 25, while others don’t at 270+? Same with Stumbleupon … why do some posts do exceptionally well while others with similar numbers of thumbs ups get substantially less traffic?

One word … TRUST!

Trust plays a huge role in organic search algorithms, so why wouldn’t it in social media algorithms. After all, it makes perfect sense intuitively. Social media sites rightfully want the best content to rise to the top, so at the end of the day there are really only 2 considerations for a piece of social news/bookmarking content:

Its true! Matt McGee and I have had a long time bet who would be the last to join Twitter. Following Michael Gray’s session at SMX Social, we both saw the light and mutually agreed to join Twitter. Though in true fashion, we’ve still got to settle our bet, so we decided to each wager $250 … and merely change the terms of the contest.

Despite all the benefits of Twitter, its still a little bittersweet for me. I liken twitter to The Collective aspect of the Borg in Star Trek. A person can be easily overwhelmed with incoming information. That said … I’ve seen the light … I am now Borg. Resistance was futile!

I’m a stats junkie. I just love surveys, research papers and opinion polls, so its no accident that I enjoy sharing my finds with the our readers. I look for ways to use the information in order to assist our clients by incorporating relevant trends into our their online marketing initiatives. This is why I loved this new Burst Media Survey on consumer recall of advertising with a green message.

Essentially, the survey shows consumer recall of advertising with “green” messaging is high, with 37.1% saying they frequently recall green messaging, however they remain very skeptical about claims� made.

When you say “Local Market Strategy”, most people think of local as at the city level. In search that means Google Local, using Geographic delimiters in keywords, Local Directories, etc.

But for large enterprise sized clients, a local strategy is one for a particular country. Multi nationals typically are faced with the decision:

Are they going to have one overriding strategy for all markets

or

Are they going to have a local strategy (including different products, pricing, etc) for each market (country) that they play in.

and how this question is answered has a HUGE impact on your Search Strategy (at least it should).

At the brink of an economic recession which will forever change the way we live, how secure is your job?

OK, you know this one:

It’s a familiar graph.

But for most of us that extreme upward trend has never applied to these:

Corn

Soy

Wheat

The price of food is rising at an incredible rate.

The managing director of the Asian Development Bank puts it like this;

"We just have to accept the era of cheap food is over."

I came across Martin Hardee’s post on Sun’s Customer Experience Blog, where he’s posted a collection of Web 2.0 logos.

Here’s my list of the Top 5.

For more than 7 years now, I’ve been working with websites based on popular applications such as WordPress, Vbulletin and PHPnuke. When dealing with such popular applications, words like ‘hacking’ or ’security hole’ will become something that you’ll get use to either dealing with or worrying about.

In the last 2 years, there have been some major developing concerns. Today, Hackers are much more familiar with the importance of links and, since some may be SEO’s, are using hacking as a link building strategy or as a negative link building tactic targeting the ranking of their competitors. Regardless of the intention of the Hacker, your website’s ranking may be damaged to some degree.

So I don’t know if you recall in the past when I mentioned that I believed Live to be the branding where Microsoft planned on competing with Google.  (See Virtual Reality - Microsoft Office Live).  Well, we should look at some of the things that they are doing from the User perspective.

Nice and clean, free of advertising, and links to other Microsoft places of possible usefulness. It’s very familiar, don’t you think?  Ever seen anything like it before from any other extremely successful search engines?

If its in fact true that “actions speak louder than words”, and “problems are merely opportunities in disguise”, we should be able to read a lot into the personality and philosophy or various social communities by looking at how they behave when confronted with adversity (read scheduled maintenance).

Therefore below, find a number of ’scheduled maintenance’ pages shown by numerous social media sites. Which show the most personality? And which should be retired as boring an uncreative? Here’s the list: