social media. omg.

 

There are more than 300 million people on Facebook, and an increasing number of them would rather get one good opinion from a friend than thousands from a search engine.

There's quite a battle going on over the future of the Internet, and it's not between Google's Goliath and Yahoo-Microsoft's David. It's between Google and Facebook. Bigger still, it's the battle between traditional search with all of its impersonal algorithms and social media with its warmer and more humanized exchanges. Social Media is vying with traditional search as the next primary source of information for people using the Web.

What is Social Media, really?

Social media is the sea of social networks, micro-blogs, bookmarking and video sharing sites in which you think you would easily drown. But you don't. The waters are strewn with life rings. Social network sites like Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and others allow registered users to socialize on private, password-protected parts of the Web that in some cases behave as virtual Internets unto themselves.

There are also the bookmarking, news and voting sites like Delicious, Reddit, Yahoo Buzz, StumbleUpon, and Digg (roll your mouse over the Share button in the upper right corner of this page). These bookmarking, or sharing, sites are places where you can save useful pages, tag them, share them with friends and colleagues and find them easily later. (Hint hint.)

Here's a list of the types of social media sites.

I'm on Facebook and Twitter. Now what?

Now what? Make friends. And interact with them. The more you do, the more enhanced your overall online experience will be. Because of several new initiatives, you’ll begin to see a Web tailored to your interests and responding to whatever it is you have to say.

At the heart of this revolution is something called behavioral targeting: the use of profile information to deliver customized ads. More and more as you surf the web, the ads you see become specifically tailored to the things you like, and unwanted advertisers begin to fall away.

Facebook users share 4 billion pieces of personal information a month, and all of that information is stored on about 45,000 servers. All private. All protected. And almost all of it inaccessible by search engines. (Take a look at Fred Vogelstein's article "The Great Wall of Facebook, Wired, Jul 2009.)

Profile information is perhaps the most sensitive information on the Web, and using it inappropriately spells disaster. Facebook has already learned this the hard way, with Beacon and with an attempt to change their user agreement. But in the process, they learned that users of social media have claimed a part of the Web for themselves. Several new initiatives, like Facebook’s Connect and Open Stream and Google’s Wave, allow social sites to serve customized ads to users without crossing the line.

You're going to see ads wherever you go online. With behavioral targeting, the ads you see actually mean something to you, perhaps ads for things you might regularly purchase online, like printer cartridges or pet medications. Or surfboard wax. Looks like surfing is the grooviest it's been since the Beach Boys.

 

SOCIAL MEDIA OPTIMIZATION

GOOGLE vs. FACEBOOK

and just for the fun of it...

1,340,000 PERCENT