Social Media Optimisation – One Man’s Journey

April 10th, 2008 David Chung

There’s an excellent article about social media marketing here written by young Tibi Puiu which outlines all of the basics in regard to this new online phenomenon.

My first experience of the Web 2.0 version of it was I came across Del.ici.ous during its infancy in 200. To be honest, I didn’t know what to make of it. I was then getting to grips with SEO and did not know where this website could fit in to my tasks. It certainly couldn’t improve my SEO directly and I was left stumped on who precisely would want to occupy their time on this site. It was until the phrase: social media marketing was first coined to me in an article in 2007 when I realised its significance as a powerful tool to draw in traffic. I immediately sort out MySpace and then Facebook. Signing on these services was easy enough but the main process of setting up a profile and then contacting people was where the attraction was.

All of a sudden, I was contacting friends about what I’m up to and joining groups and discussions about my favourite bands. My personal MySpace profile became my place to express my devotion to my football team. That then branched off into a full blown blog which I now actively write news and optimise today.

Nowadays, there are approximately over 200 different SMO applications available online ! That’s a staggering amount of personal comments, blogs, news, reviews and everything. The term Social in Social Media certainly lives up to its name.

Posted in Social Bookmarking, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimisation, Social Networking | No Comments »

Google Lets Slip On Social Bookmarking Rules

March 18th, 2008 David Chung

Interesting article today published here about Google’s attempts to curb rampant social bookmarking activity to a particular site or page. Wary of bookmarking spam, Google intends to penalise any detection of ‘un-natural linking activity’ it sees from two of the major social bookmarking sites being Digg and StumbleUpon.

Google’s spokesman, Jeff Waltz says…

“We are working on strategies to level the playing field, effectively bringing back natural search patterns enjoyed in the pre-social bookmarking days. For webmasters who use social media responsibly, this is nothing to worry about – we will be targetting mainly a small minority of prolific bookmarkers with a new algorithm that looks at linking patterns over time.

Webmasters who rely heavily on bookmarking their own sites to gain traffic will likely see a drop in pagerank before the end of 2008, and we will be working closely with two major social bookmarking sites to find a solution that will have no detremental effect on the average internet user.”

The original article appeared on Google Blog but was later taken off but the cat is out of the bag and will be implemented soon. How Google will be able to recongise the difference between a story which generate rapid buzz and a spammer is anyones guess but Google obviously sees social bookmarking as a threat to its service.

Posted in Google, Social Bookmarking | 2 Comments »