If anybody remembers the IMNY Charity Party last year, it was a great place to network.

It was also my very first networking event in the industry and it is also where I met a very friendly Brian Wallace, President of NowSourcing. He is the writer of the NowSourcing blog, which is the place to be if you are interested in learning more about Digg, Mixx, Twitter, etc.

Brian also founded a new blog that is making a lot of noise: Collective-Thoughts, the collective Social Media blog who’s contributors are impressive to say the least. Brian rounded up some of my most favorite SMM people on the net; Andy Beard, Glen Allsopp, Mark Laymon, Marty Weintraub, Rose Sylvia, Shana Albert (who I nominate to make a guest appearance on the SEO-Chicks blog), Tadeusz Szewczyk (onReact), Tim Nash, and then there is Brian’s cat who is quite popular on Twitter.

Brian is really on top of his Social Media game! I often catch him online at 2:00 AM, Sphinning, Digging, and other things that can easily turn into verbs. So I asked him to share some of his expertise with me!

1. You are very active in the blogosphere. How long have you been blogging? And when did you learn that blogging became crucial to your social media status?

I’ve been blogging off and on since 2001. Blogging is an inherent factor in social media success since social media needs content to thrive. Think about it: if you post once a week, that’s 52 pieces of content. It looked to me the blogging and social media would be a huge driver about a year ago.

2. Often we see many posts about falling victim to Social Media time consumption. How often do you spend on Social Media per day?

More than I’d like to admit some days. However, I try to lead a balanced schedule, and fit social media in when time will allow. Social media can really lead to burnout, so everyone should be careful of this.

3. Why is everyone so crazy about twitter? Can it be used as a Marketing tool, or is it just social noise?

People are crazy about Twitter since it has been gaining adoption with a larger audience. A tool is only as good as its adoption. So if you look at the rise in the number of users, average time spent per user, and the number of mashup applications being developed, things start to make sense.

Regarding the noise factor: if you find specific individuals to be too noisy for your tastes, you can simply just stop following them. Some users create a company Twitter account while others keep their more personal Tweets (gosh, personal Tweets should be an oxymoron) over on their own name. Businesses can and should leverage Twitter, but as always, try to understand the community before you potentially damage your brand.

4. Digg has been retiring top diggers left and right with no remorse. Some people say Digg is cleaning itself up to get ready to be sold…What do you predict for the future of Digg? And how will it reflect on its top Diggers?

I think a better word for “retiring” would be “banning” . Many top Diggers, banned or not, are getting a bit fed up with the state of Digg these days.

My prediction is for Digg to be sold within the year, and some of the top Diggers will bail from Digg and go out to other social sites. Mixx in particular has become a Banned Digger magnet. This isn’t to say that all influential Diggers will leave, but it will likely change the landscape.

5. You launched the Social Media Ninjas Contest not too long ago… Is it really all just a popularity contest?

Much of social media is a popularity contest. Seriously though, we are about to announce the final winners, so stay tuned!

6. Everyone tries to have the most recognizable avatar. It seems like it’s all been done before. If you had to create a new avatar for yourself today, how would it look?

I’m pretty fond of the big green N, and it is recognizable. Sometimes people put too much thought into their avatar and make it too detailed and complex. Nearly all sites keep your avatar at 120×120 or less, so think about sizing issues.

If I had to make a new avatar today, I’d be sure to make something creative, colorful, and memorable – and pass it out to a few friends for feedback.

7. Feed readers are as important as breakfast nowadays, skip it in the morning and your whole day is thrown off. It is sometimes hard to find good Social Media Bloggers who share really great tips, without reading the same thing over and over and wasting time. Can you recommend a few Social Media bloggers who have changed the way you do things?

Not particularly fond of RSS, as I prefer to really get the feel for the post and the community by visiting the site directly. That being said, it is difficult through all the noise and regurgitation to see which social media bloggers are truly worth watching. Folks that truly have a unique voice that have had my attention recently are: Lyndon, Copyblogger.com, CopyBrighter, Glen (viperchill.com), Tim, and Shana (socialdesire.com). They all talk about different things that hold my interest.
However, Kathy Sierra’s blog headrush.typepad.com is probably the best of anything like this, but unfortunately she may never be posting again.

8. What is your quick advice for anyone looking to improve their social media campaigns ?

Quick advice: Don’t be stupid. Many people dive head first thinking that if they just submit their own stuff, people will automatically love it. Guess again. Understand your community before submitting a thing. Observe, take notes, ask around.

I want to thank Brian for allowing me to interview him and learn from him. You can add him on all social networks as “nowsourcing”, and I advise that you do! Follow Brian’s advice and maybe you too could be a Social Media Superstar!

After interviewing Danny Sullivan for Technology Weekly (while you have to sign up for it, it is free), I decided to create a blog post from it and scavange up bits from the internet to fill in my blanks (future of search taken from “Out of my Gord“).

Danny Sullivan is one of the best-known names in the world of internet search technology. Since first researching how search engine algorithms worked back in 1995, Danny Sullivan has remained one of the world’s foremost public authorities on search algorithms. Everyone from Google’s founders to ordinary business people have looked to him as an expert as they discovered the importance of relevant search results. His early monitoring of search engine changes, “Search Engine Watch”, developed into a large business from which he opted out in 2006 to start his own new company.

In 1995, before Google existed and there were about 40 different algorithms, Danny Sullivan was working in the area of web development. Even while the internet was still somewhat new, ecommerce had emerged on the scene and some companies were putting significant time and money into creating web versions of their offline shops. One client of Danny’s was not ranking well for a term they desired to be found for on many of the search engines. At the time, there were no tips online for people to look at and learn from. Danny spent a significant amount of time investigating what factors influenced search engine rankings, then published his seminal findings online.

Danny’s work was the first attempt to understand the complex algorithms that various search engines used, as well as divine from that how to rank well for a given term. While others within the field stumbled and guessed, Danny codified what it took to rank well. As a result of this pioneering work, he received a lot of attention and his search research became an online ‘must-read’. This attention, combined with his professional interest led him to create “Search Engine Watch” - a place where anyone could turn to and find information on how search engines were ranking sites.

As a result of his pioneering work, the founders of Google referenced his early work as they progressed with their own engine. Danny’s early work on search rankings sparked a passion within him that has followed him throughout his life to the present. Search was never something he expected to be writing about more than ten years later. When he made a recent change from Search Engine Watch to his newly created Search Engine Land, the community appreciation and ‘love’ revitalised him and kept him interested in staying involved. Since December 2006 he has been working on Search Engine Land which has quickly become the primary point of information on and about search engines and related activities.

Working further to keep in touch and on top of changes and affect change, he has gotten involved in running a series of conferences with the inagural event in London in November. Focusing on a more general basic to intermediate level, he is also trying to push more networking based on his own experiences. He has found that one of the most important things about a conference isn’t just the conference sessions – it is the exchange of knowledge and expertise that happens while people socialise. This vital knowledge exchange has spurred Danny in to changing his own conferences, adding formal networking sessions both around break times and after the day ends.

When looking to the future, Danny was asked if social search would dominate search anytime soon? “I really don’t see this happening” he adamantly commented. While he cited Maholo as probably the best example of a social search engine, he also stated that it was not threatening the existing engines. “Not even Wikipedia has all the answers”, he said, “and so I think a search engine can present different options to answer a question.” Search is evolving with the introduction of universal search, one boxes and the like and as a result nothing else seems poised to replace it.

Recently on Sphinn, a news aggregator site Danny runs, there was a suggestion that he could and should build a better search engine. And while he said he was never tempted, he also said that he felt a yearning to actually work on a search engine. He would like to be able to make changes and effect the way things get ranked rather than simply writing about it after the fact. He would love to be proactively involved. It would be a huge challenge though, he admits, citing Microsoft who are still struggling to build a better search engine.

For the future, Danny sees a greater push towards personalisation within search engines. With search having crept in to almost every facet of our lives and gadgets increasingly web-enabled with search built in, having an engine that understands what you mean when you search for “Fire London” will be indispensable. The future of search is still firmly with search engines. When asked about what search engine he would use if Google did not exist or was down for a week, he very quickly answered that Yahoo would get his search business. With the most mature and longest established crawler, it has excellent search results and so would easily be his first choice. The old ones are still the best, it seems.

It’s not a secret that the SEO-Chicks are big Dazzlin Donna stalkers (ermmm fans..), so we begged (erm asked) if we could interview her for our blog.

For those of you that don’t know who Dazzlin Donna is, shame on you! Donna Fontenot (aka Dazzlin Donna) is a SEO guru from Southern Louisiana, she has been in the SEO industry for a very long time, she runs the excellent SEO blog SEO Scoop as well as the blog Dazzlin Donna. Donna is an SEO Chick of the highest class and someone we very much look up to.

If Donna was a character from Star Wars we think she would be Princess Leia!

Here are the questions we asked Donna and her answers:

1. What do you see as the primary motivation for SEO bloggers?

In most cases, an SEO blogger establishes credibility, which leads to social networking and links, which leads to traffic. Once the blogger has credibility and traffic, she can do whatever she wants with it from there.

I originally started SEO Scoop long before social networking was a “thing”, and I started it as a reference point. Instead of constantly answering the same questions over and over again, I wanted to be able to just point to a blog post that had the answer. Turned out to not be such a great idea, because it was just as much work to find the relevant blog post, as it was to just answer the question again. But luckily, I discovered that blogging had many other advantages beyond my original plan for it, so it went from there.

2. Why is there such a celebrity cult in the SEO industry?

Is it just the SEO industry? I think human nature tends to make us seek out the celebs in any field of interest to us. What I think is even more interesting is looking at what kind of person becomes a celebrity. In the entertainment industry, one might assume it’s beauty, but of course there are millions of gorgeous beauties who never make it to celeb status. In the SEO world, is it outspokenness? Integrity? Most visible?

But if you’re looking for a reason that might be unique to SEO, it’s probably that the industry is still shrouded in mystery. We can’t simply open up the Encylopedia Brittanica to find the answers to ranking in the top 10 for our selected keywords. Instead, we begin by reading and listening to others who claim to have accomplished the goals we seek. Once we find someone who appears to have the magical answers, we wrap that person in Merlin’s cloak, put a wand in her hand, and call her a wizard. Or maybe we wrap her in a long white robe, shave her head, place her atop a high mountain, and call her a guru. Whatever status we bestow upon her, she is now an official celebrity, and we wait nearby, hoping she will look upon us favorably and throw us a magic token or a profound truth now and then that we can use for ourselves. The more tokens and words of wisdom we receive, the higher our opinion of her.

3. How can we better use social media?

Use? Or abuse? LOL, j/k. I’m not sure I have any profound answers for this question. It takes a bit of work and skill to be able to remain consistently attractive to the social hounds, and there are some that are far better at it than I. Tamar is a great example of someone who has an incredible knack for playing social media like a skilled violinist. I think everyone probably starts out by trying to use more social networks than they should, and eventually figures out that there isn’t enough time in the day to really be able to keep up with them all. Once you figure that part out, the next step is analyzing which networks are most useful to you and your topic, and focus in on those. You’ll get farther – quicker – that way. But I’d go ask this same question to Tamar, if I were you.

4. Why don’t more good-looking men wear kilts?

Silly preconceived notions of what manhood is prevents many men from doing things that would otherwise attract women to them in droves. Or at least that’s my theory, but I’m no authority on such matters.

5. With the rapid popularity of SEO, why haven’t we yet seen a major movie/sitcom/novel about it?

I remember getting all excited when Sandra Bullock starred in The Net, way back in 1995, when only a few of us (relatively speaking) had actually used the Internet. It was still a mystery to much of the world, and that’s still how SEO is. We think it is popular, and it is certainly gaining in popularity all the time, but it is still a mystery to the world at large. I’m not sure everyone would really “get it” if it were turned into a major entertainment piece just yet. Then again, it might be educational!

6. What actor would play you in a movie?

Now that’s a really tough question. I spent more time on this one question than all the rest combined, but I finally made a decision. Jodie Foster.

7. Which SEO is your Obi One Kenobi?
There isn’t one. When the SEO Dream Team meme was going around, I had a heckuva time trying to cull it down to 7, as the rules stated. There’s no way I could narrow it down to one. Instead, I’d rather expand it to include several dozen. So many people out there have strengths that I look up to and strive to emulate. To choose one would require that I place them all into a mixing machine, shake them up, and magically turn them into one SuperSEO.

8. What’s your favourite movie?

As silly as it will sound, I’ll be honest – Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. What can I say? I’m a big fan of chicks kicking butt movies.

9. What is the last thing that really made you laugh?

The look on my grandbaby’s face when she opened up a present, revealing her first “real” laptop on her second birthday. She’s already a major gadget geek, and she’s constantly trying to sneak time on any of our computers. (She’s 2, remember). When she saw her very own laptop, complete with mouse, she went wild. Totally cracked me up.

10. If you went to your last ever SEO conference, who would you hang out with and why?

I haven’t yet been to one of the women’s luncheons, and I’m jealous as all get out that I haven’t been able to attend one yet. Nothing against the guys…I love ‘em all…but I really, really want to spend an hour or two just hangin’ with all the gals. All of you inspire me every single day.

Donna, thanks very much for a great interview. You rock!!