Establishing a strong Social Media Profile necessarily means establishing networks of (professional) friends/relationships online (aka online professional relationships … OPR) that can be called upon to help you when needed. In some cases, your goal will be to befriend individuals that are influencers in a given sphere; when needed you can count upon them to use their powerful sites and networks to drive traffic and/or business to your site. In yet other cases, your goal maybe to enlist your network to stumble or digg particlar articles. Your effectiveness at each of these efforts is a function of the strength of your OPRs … since many require different levels of trust given the potential risk to the OPR. And yes, risks do exist! Accordingly, the remainder of this post will discuss our SEP interpretation of the stages of online professional relationships, and what OPR efforts can be expected at different stages.

So here you stand, a virtual newby to the world of social media, and it appears that you have the monumental task before you of scaling this towering mountain called developing a professional network online … developing your social media profile. But where do you begin … “my god this mountain is high” you think to yourself. There are so many possible paths up the mountain.

Imagine finally answering the question; is our collective social consciousness a better predictor of the actual outcome of future events than our own personal guesstimates? Well, imagine no more. Enter ZiiTrend - the Social Prediction Community, a site that endeavors to answer that question for us, and provide us with the collective social probabilities of the occurrence of certain events. Hat tip to Profy.com for bringing it to my attention via their blog.

Online Reputation Management, and the accompanying Issue Resolution Process seems to be a very hot topic of late. There is much debate about the approaches to use in varied situations. That said, I thought I’d take a stab at trying to add some clarity to the process by creating a model to guide the decision making process. As it happens, I was so impressed with SEOMoz’s How to Handle a Google Penalty flowchart, that it occurred perhaps one should also be created in this situation … voila!

Google’s online Powerpoint clone is live. Those who regularly receive PPT files filled with images of cute animals will be thrilled. Right…

If you decide to use Google Presentations it’s good to keep something in mind which also applies to PowerPoint:

Do not put what you say on the screen

Australian research shows that the brain is limited in what in can process how. If the exact same information comes to us in verbal and written form at the same time, our brain sort of phases out.

Today was a big day!  Well for me anyhow.  Just to give you a little background a big part of my job is to not only to strategize off page SEO campaigns that support all of the onpage SEO efforts for SEP’s clients, but to report on all of these efforts. 
Traffic, engagement, conversion, authority all easy…links oh those blessed one way natural links this is what we are all really after, this is hard! 
In the past the only way I knew to track the inbound links that were created by an off page campaign was using some special syntax in queries that our SEP Wis walks me through every time (I do not pretend to fully understand). 
Along with this I would also try and use AltaVista.  But AltaVista seems to report the highest number of inbound links but as I have found out not all links are visible. (go figure).   Another tool was Technorati; Technorati is good for finding fresh links to a given site very quickly.
But in general, the overall numbers of results are estimated at the very start, and this can become misleading. Not all results are reachable from the search engines, so a false illusion can be given.  Until today!!
SEP’s Wis has found out a simple traceable and free method that will stream line all of this.  Google Alerts.  Yes Google Alerts are not new but here is what is new setup your alert to report on “link: www.acme.com” this will let you know what new one way links are being created! It also works for the crawlers with using “site: www.acme.com”.

I just received this email from Yahoo!

Dear Yahoo! Photos user,

For some time now, we’ve supported two great photo sharing services: Yahoo! Photos and Flickr. But even good things come to an end, and we’ve decided to close Yahoo! Photos to focus all our efforts on Flickr — the award-winning photo sharing community that TIME Magazine has called “completely addictive.”

We will officially close Yahoo! Photos on Thursday, September 20, 2007, at 9 p.m. PDT. Until then, we are offering you the opportunity to move to another photo sharing service (Flickr, KODAK Gallery, Shutterfly, Snapfish, or Photobucket). We’re making the transfer real simple, and with a couple clicks we’ll automatically move your photos to Flickr or wherever you want them.

The beauty of social networks is that they engage users and facilitate enjoyable forums to discuss a variety of topics.

One of the significant trends of social networks is that they are beginning to develop a distinct local flavour. Facebook
alone has over 1 million members from Toronto.

With this level of engagement it’s tough for traditional local print media to ignore, particularly the Yellow Pages, who have among the most complete local online business listings around. So when will Yellow Pages become social? According to Darby Seiben, Senior Manager - Traffic, Distribution and eProduct Management with YellowPages.ca, they already have.

Despite the fact del.icio.us has been around for quite a while I really didn’t fully understand its popularity. I saw del.icio.us as a facebook/myspace for bookmarks. This all changed when I started blogging.

I’ve always been a news hound and pour through tons of articles from a variety of sources covering dozens of subjects. After taking a closer look, I quickly found out that del.icio.us makes it easy to store them all in one place and, if tagged properly, access them from any computer in an organized and timely fashion as I needed them.

The most popular question I’ve been asked by co-workers, associates and friends upon my arrival has been “why did you leave the Yellow Pages?”. The question doesn’t appear ominous until you consider the smug look on their faces. Immediately, I know what they’re thinking. They’ve read Bill Gates’ now infamous quote “Yellow Pages usage among people below 50 will drop to near zero in the next five years.” Their perception is that I jumped from a sinking ship. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

It reminds me of a scene in Monty Python’s “Holy Grail”….…