It seems like years ago now that I moved into my own apartment and started looking at cable and Internet options. In actuality it was only two months ago. When I discovered that Verizon Fios was available in my location, I automatically went online to activate an account and schedule an installation. I wanted the fastest Internet possible!

The online activation was simple and easy to use. In about five minutes I put in my information and scheduled a date. One second later I got what I thought was a confirmation email. The email lacked any sort of number or code however. I called customer service to alert them about my order and their neglect on confirmation numbers. The customer service rep explained that sometimes ‘the system‘ takes 24 hrs to send a number and I might get the email tomorrow. I hate phone calls like this.

These sort of phone calls continued for a few weeks and I started to get really upset. I had to steal crappy internet at home and it was not fun! So I started expressing my Fios related sorrows on Twitter. Within a few minutes, I received a DM from the Fios twitter guy. Finally! We talked for a bit on Twitter (see pictures) and I got a call from a few new Fios people who helped me and got my Fios installed on A Sunday morning. Now I have the fastest internet evar!

The morale of the story is that if this Verizon Fios employee was not monitoring Twitter for brand mentions, my anger would have left me to some serious brand bashing. Instead of writing this nice blog post that includes a link to the Verizon Fios site.. I would have posted a negative blog post, continued to tweet about how awful they were, and possibly participated in forum bashing. Not that I have a huge voice but I’m louder than just a regular chick, because I’m and SEO chick!!

Being a geek rarely means going out there and hitting the vibrant social scene around London, Toronto, New York, Paris, Tokyo, Auckland or any of the other cities of the world. Usually it means going to a “networking” event at a conference and drinking until it doesn’t hurt quite so much anymore. Well, funnily enough it’s conference season now that the weather has turned even rainier (how can anyone tell…?).

So what’s up and on for conference goers? TONS! In fact, there is so much going on, I’ve pared it back a bit and focused on the place I spend most of my life in – London. My underpants have yet to host a conference, being a single event, single attendee kind of venue. So what’s up and on in London town, you might ask, *BESIDES* SMX London and the great LondonSEO? Plenty!

While an actual social event, it is for geeks to roam free with others of our kind at the London GeekDinner with Carsonified and with those crazy folks at Carsonified being the focus, you can guarantee geeky goodness all around! Suw Charman, one of the strongest voices of social media, is giving a day seminar on Making Social Tools Ubiquitous

The Social Networking Conference London 2008 features a host of great speakers including me! I’ll be talking on “The Dark Side of Social Media” examining what went wrong, why and how to avoid it. It is at the Millennium Gloucester Hotel Kensington and Conference Centre which seems to be close to a tube station *phew*. Of course the main event of the week will be ad:tech - now into it’s third year in London, it’s a great place to catch up with the latest technology It’s a firm favourite on the conference calendar and I think there are both free and paid tickets available depending on what speakers you wish to see. I’m so sure there will be parties around this!

BarCamp London is almost impossible to get in to and this time it is being held at eBay. This popular weekend event attracts people from all over the world and is absolutely a must-do but it’s almost impossible to get tickets so I’ve never done it Social Media Marketing in Black + White is a half day covering everything you need to know about social media but didn’t know to ask. Short, sweet and to the point.

Starting off October with a bang is Unicom’s Social Tools Conference which will feature information about all sorts of tools and how they can be used in business. I’ll be speaking on Brand Reputation Management giving tips on how and wht to monitor and why. All that good stuff. It’s two days packed with information and good food. Last time it was near a Hotel Chocolat so added bonus! There is usually an evening social which is free for non-attendees so there’s a good looking prospect for getting geekily social

SocialMediaCamp London works like a barcamp in that you register for free then get there on the day and volunteer to give a session. I’m hoping to give one but no promises as I’ll have a busy month! But why not go and volunteer yourself? It’ll be an excellent geeky social. Just after the weekend, book yourself in to Widget Web Expo because everybody loves a good widget and here you’ll get everything you need to know about what you need to do to create a widget.

Future of Web Apps is going to be what everyone is going to be at and talking about. Everyone was buzzing about this and Future of Web Design and now it’s finally back in London! Be quick about signing up for tickets though – they regularly sell out and you don’t want to be left behind. There are always great parties associated with a fully paid-up ticket to this event so make sure you have your social calendar to hand once you’ve bought your ticket.

a4uexpo - Affiliate Marketing Conference & Exhibition 2008 is a somewhat niche conference that is always a blast. Given the buzz around last year, it would be a crime to miss this one. With networking, parties, chill-out lounges and a great set of people from all over, including SEO, this is a worthwhile ticket to buy. They also sell a pure networking pass! I’ll be speaking on purely SEO stuff, as will other speakers so there will be lots of everyone who attends. Check out the 2.5 days of networking & learning for less than the price of SMX London.

Linux Expo and Mac Expo are currently FREE to sign up for and always boast a hoast of interesting booths to play with new technology at. Extending to include a weekend day (Sat) to ensure us geeks who can’t justify it as a work thing can go, I highly recommend this to everyone!

Of course, the event that everyone is waiting for is SMX London with added LondonSEO goodness! With excellent sessions aimed at an intermediate level (for the most part – some beginner stuff too!), SMX London has firmly entrenched itself as a must-attend conference on the conference calendar.

Late in the year coming on Dec 2-4 is the Online Information show with IMS. This year, there is a social media stream and with free admission to the expo and many seminars, it’s well worth the day out.

Go get work to give you some training and book those tickets. Remember always to have a plan to make sure you get the most out of the conference experience. Oh and remember to say hi if you see me. Introduce yourself and I might even share some chocolate with you!

Sometimes, you cannot help but pity the poor people who come up with terrible marketing campaigns. I actually feel pretty bad for the people at Me.dium.com whose promotional video is nothing short of horrifying. Their software doesn’t appear to be bad, but the team in charge of approving that video should be fired. It’s supposed to be a parody and it’s supposed to be corny, but it’s the worst viral fail I’ve seen since P. Diddy thought you had to buy YouTube channels. I warn you: watching the video may induce the need to shoot yourself in the face. Of coure, this horrific car wreck of a campaign did act as linkbait in a way, as so many people linked to its awfulness. Notice that I’ve nofollowed my Me.dium.com link.

Technically, this was a viral marketing failure as opposed to linkbait, but it got me thinking about what does and what does not constitute link-worthy content.

Things That Could Be Linkbait

1. Sordid email and IM transcripts. Politicians know this quite well. It happens to them all the time, usually involving someone of or under the age of seventeen. It happened to the mayor of the town I lived in in 2005. Nothing so exciting had ever happened to Spokane, Washington and nothing as exciting has happened since. Here is an example of something that would be linkbait were it not for the big black rectangle in the middle of the good bits.

   

   If you can get your hands on someone’s email exchanges, or care to publish your own, and they’ve talked about anything other than who’s managing the company’s H3 tags or whether the loos on the second floor are still broken, people will love it.

2. Screenshots of epic stupidity. I’d not recommend adding the picture to StumbleUpon, Reddit, Digg etc as simply a picture. You decrease the likelihood that people will link to it and increase the likelihood that they’ll just steal it. When I had a neat picture to put on Digg, I linked to the post rather than the picture. This way, it received scores of comments and was reproduced less / linked to more. But I digress. Posting pictures (and video, for that matter) of humanity at its worst will always get some attention.
3. AnonyBlogging. The SEO industry has been catching on to this lately, but it’s been around for a while. It comes in two forms: We have both SEO Hack and Slightly Shady SEO, neither of whom will tell the majority of us who they actually are. Then we have one-off ranters like SEO Bitch on Shoemoney’s blog, and anonymousblogger from today’s helping of YOUmoz. Plenty of people like to speculate who SEO Bitch and anonymousblogger really are, which only adds to the buzz and links. I must, at this point, go on a tangent and point out the funny thing that happened when I was lazy and searched for “SEO Bitch on Shoemoney’s blog” in order to find the post. Yes, I’m aware it wasn’t a good search phrase.

   

   That is indeed Matt Inman’s SEOmoz member profile. The problem with this approach is that it’s often hard for writers - especially good ones - to disguise their style. It’s almost as hard as faking an accent, and anyone who’s heard my botched up AustrAmeriKiwi voice will attest to how tough that is.

4. All things really fucking random. This is a perfect example where the bait and switch could be used. For some reason, we like domains with very little content. Silly little sites that usually serve no purpose whatsoever. We love them. We link to them. We Stumble them like they provided valuable content. They inform us of very important information such as whether or not it’s Christmas and show us dumb pictures. No, it’s not funny, is it? Then how in fuck does it have a PageRank of five? Milk it for what it’s worth and 301 it to somewhere else. Keep the cat if you’re concerned about ethics. (There is more content on this domain than just the cat, but the cat alone has 59,425 inlinks.)
5. Clever Photoshopping. A perfect example of a marriage of three things geeky, this image combines zombies, Twitter and Photoshop. There’s only one thing better than presenting people with one thing they like: cleverly combining multiple elements into one display of awesome.

But you’re SEOs and you knew that. How about some things that are definitively not linkbait?

1. Long dumb lists of stupid “did you know” facts. What in hell were they thinking? Let me list the fails:
   • White text on black background. I have 20/20 vision and can see from Seattle to Japan and I have trouble reading that.
   • Page as long as The Last Samurai. The last time I read a document that long, it was a text-only paper and it was for a sociology class that I didn’t want to take and which proved to be an utter waste of time.
   • Massive area of white black space at the bottom of the page for no reason.
   • Exists as the dillionth “did you know” list on the Internet. The Internet has had enough.
   • Anti-fail: The last “fact” is lovely, true or not.
2. Video of other people’s fireworks. Fireworks can be wonderful. The fireworks in Seattle from Gasworks Park this Independence Day were a thoroughly professional work of art. I could feel the sound-waves through my feet on my concrete patio. The way the sound echoed off Capitol Hill was amazing. But on a shitty video, reproduced on YouTube, the noise is fantastically annoying. Exception to the rule: Fireworks fuck-ups. Seattle’s New Year’s Eve display was positively painful. I had the pleasure of watching one of the biggest cockups in fireworks history take place out of both my living room window and on television.
3. Reproducing this. Again. And again. This too. Although it’s still funny.
4. Posts bitching about being asked to present a receipt upon leaving Circuit City. I understand. We’re honest adults who bought unnecessary sound-canceling headphones during our lunch break because it finally dawned on us that iPod headphones are crap. The security guard likely saw us at the check out, purchasing said headphones. The security guard may well have even seen the cashier hand us our receipt. But for Christ’s sake, is it really a human rights violation to show the dude the receipt as we walk out? Is it worth giving him the satisfaction of causing us a world of shit? If it is, I seriously suggest getting a hobby aside from blogging. The internet is rife with posts like this. Just show him the fucking piece of paper. He’s a Circuit City security guard, for Christ’s sake. Give him something to do. Surely you have some veal to eat or something.
5. Everything on this list. This is quite possibly the most wonderful thing Wikipedia has ever done.

I’ve been to two search marketing conferences in the past month and asked the crowd the same question at each show. The question was about a real-life example of the bait ‘n switch. There are a few different levels of bait ‘n switch and you’ll come across differing opinions as to which are ethical and which aren’t.

Level One
Popular content is moved via a redirect from its original location to another location on the same site. The content doesn’t change. This barely counts.

Level Two
Popular content is moved via a redirect from its original location to a different site. The content doesn’t change.

Level Three
Popular content is moved via a redirect from its original location to another location on the same site. The content is noticeably different.

Level Four
Popular content is moved via a redirect from its original location to a different site. The content is noticeably different.

By noticeably different, I mean that it no longer represents the content to which hundreds or thousands of independent websites originally linked. As linkers, we take this risk whenever we link to something that we don’t control; however, there is an inherent understanding that people won’t change the content and “force” us to link to something which we didn’t intend.

When the content doesn’t change, I don’t see anything wrong with changing its location. Within reason (commercial reasons included), moving content around makes little difference. Sometimes, a corporate website isn’t the place for linkbait or viral content, but once a social media campaign is complete, the content can be moved to a place on a company’s premier site. The Lenovo Tapes are a good example of this: originally displayed on a separate domain and purposefully disguised as being amateur, the page was eventually moved to Lenovo’s UK site. Sticklers for web etiquette still mightn’t like this, especially if they have a problem linking to corporate domains. However, I see no problem with this type of tactic and if you do, you should avoid linking to anything, ever.

Stickier situations come about when the content changes. If Lenovo had 301 redirected their linkbait to a products page, the situation would be entirely different. I fell for such a tactic recently and it was about this situation that I posed my question to two SMX crowds this April.

Last year, I was writing away at SEOmoz, as I’m prone to do, and I came across a benign but amusing piece of linkbait from a Floridian limousine company. They were featuring pictures of beached limos. Limos that have tried to drive over steep hills in towns like San Francisco and have become high-centred. Nice. Limousines are obscene. Who doesn’t find beached limos funny?

I linked to the linkbait. I used their most important keyword, “limousines”, in my anchor text. I was perfectly aware that the content was developed with links in mind, but being an SEO and having created similar commercially-minded content, I didn’t have a problem throwing them a followed link. Good on them; they topped Reddit and gave a few thousand people a giggle. Much later, I wanted to use this example in a presentation to highlight how boring businesses with mediocre websites can take advantage of social media. I went back to my own post to find the limousine company’s link.

I ended up at the Miami limousine rentals page, undoubtedly the company’s most profitable market.

Is that okay? Would I feel fine about doing this myself? Should I remove my link at SEOmoz? I felt that I should; however, I forgot to actually do it. I was distracted, probably by something shiny. The link was never removed and never nofollowed. I have the tab open to do it right now, but as per usual, I’m in the middle of a glass of Pinot and will probably forget again. Anyway.

I posed the question to the crowd at SMX Sydney: should I remove the link? Eighty percent of the crowd raised their hands. What an honest bunch of convicts. Either that, or they were just trying to impress us. I flew back to the U.S. and did nothing. A week later, at SMX Social Media in Long Beach, I asked the crowd the same question. Eight people put up their hands. The L.A. crowd didn’t see anything wrong with a 301 redirect being used in this way.

What do you think? I will probably amend the post to nofollow the link and add a note about how the content has changed. Personally, I wouldn’t use a redirect in this way: to me, a 301 should really indicate that a piece of content has moved permanently; doing this changes the content entirely. And it’s not like I’m the most morally upstanding member of society, either. Isn’t that right, Julie?

We had a discussion - one that ended up being around 250 comments in length - at SEOmoz last month about the ethics of widget-bait. Rightly or wrongly, a former colleague of mine is suffering from Google’s crackdown on such practices. How tough would it be for a search engine to recognise the bait ‘n switch and devalue its worth?

I have just decided that every SEO Chicks post I write will conclude with my most entertaining piece of Gmail Adsense from the recent past, as I was quite pleased with that particular post. Here is today’s offering: I always enjoy humour in my email advertising, especially of the self-deprecating variety.

Until next time!

This week I noticed a lot of great things happen in the social media space. Many yummy, tasty social media treats! Since Tuesday, different Ice Cream franchises have been offering special discounts or free ice cream through the Blogosphere, Facebook, and Twitter.

• Tuesday, April 29th= The Annual International Free Cone Day @ Ben & Jerry’s. - It was pretty impressive to me that Ben & Jerry’s bought a Facebook gift to be distributed as the free gift of the day.

Additionally, they did a great job at outreach as I spent the day seeing millions of pictures of the lines that were circling around the block for ice-cream. I looked at massive amounts of Twitter posts where people tweeted the participated location and the wait time. With all of the social effort put into this campaign, it was a huge success. But in other Ice-Cream regards, it seems like Ben & Jerry’s knows what they are doing.

• Weds, April 30th = Baskin Robbin’s 31 Cent Scoop Night- Not as impressive as Ben & Jerry’s campaign but still took a decent Facebook initiative. It’s Event Page has over 350,000 RSVPS (maybe’s, not attending, and attendees). That is a huge amount of engagement. They are also donating funds to a Fire Fighters charity and only having the promotion for 5 hours.

• Thursday, May 1st= Carvel launches it’s new Drink Flavors with Free Drinks.- This campaign was not executed too well. While, yes I found the event listed on Facebook, it was realy nowhere else. I did find a bunch of boring PR about the new flavors they are promoting, but no creative, no engaging interactive applications, nothing. Their website is not too helpful either, it does have a call out on the homepage, but the CTA links to basically nothing. Seems like Carvel was not completely prepared to launch this campaign but decided to jump on the bandwagon of Ice Cream promotions week.

I hope everyone has enjoyed their Ice Cream treats this week!

In case you are living under a rock….

Twitter is just another one of those social platforms that you didn’t want to grow attached to but knew you would. It has become unavoidable at this point. If you don’t tweet, I bet at least five of your Facebook friends have synched up their Tweets to their status update. It’s gotten to the point where even my friends who aren’t within the internet marketing industry (all 5 of them) have a Twitter account, whether they know how to use it or not doesn’t really matter. I doubt they will sign up for Pownce and the whole point of any of these wastes of time are for them to exist for the masses.

I have noticed that it all breaks down to 3 different types of Twitter users:

1.There is the Twitter user that tweets all of the time. This is the person who just tweets nonsense once an hour. You read their tweets but might form an opinion on them just based off of the value of their update. Maybe they are humorous and you appreciate the smile it gives you or maybe its just random crap that doesn’t even flow and becomes annoying. Sometimes these people also converse with each other too much, they should be instant messaging each other. If you know these people you might want or not want to follow them.

2.Then there is the marketer twitter user. This twitter account might be owned by a blog, a news source, or a blogger. The updates might be fed by a bot and are on a schedule. The only purpose of these tweets are to inform you when they add new content to their site. This has become really useful because I don’t always have a chance to read my reader and I am updated about blogs I read through a second source.

3.Finally there is the tweeter that I favor the most which is a great combination of the two. This person tweets things that come to mind, links to things that they like, links to things they are marketing (whether it be a personal brand or a client) tastefully. I’d like to think I am this kind of tweeter. Donna, also does a great job of this.

There are still many people who are well recognized in the industry who don’t like Twitter and choose not to use it ….like Lisa. In my opinion it is not as necessary to use Twitter as it is to use Facebook. You can simply use Twitter scanners like Terraminds (which has been on the fritz lately) or Tweetscan for market research. I have had huge success from using these tools.

Just like any other social media trend, micro-blogging has to be used on a schedule. Some tweeters update once and hour or more and this can be really annoying if you are running a Twitter api like I do. It can be super distracting if your api uses sounds and your computer just tweets all day, but of course you can control this. However I like it because it makes me feel like I am working in a park somewhere with birds……

Keeping tweets to a regular 5 to 10 time basis keeps your followers familiar with you and the types of updates you are doing. Likewise you don’t want to be updating with links at heavy work flow hours because chances are nobody will click them.

Another thing to keep in mind is tweeting during or at conferences. This is how Twitter became popular. During conferences Twitter goes crazy with updates and can be really distracting if you are not attending but helpful if you are looking for links with info about the conference. Because of SWSW and SES NY. I have turned my Twitter sounds off because it is just too annoying.

Nevertheless you can chose to be the Twitter user you want to be for whatever purpose you are doing it. But as with any social content platform; know your audience, be present, and be consistent.

If you are new to Twitter, there is a special language spoke, please refer to the Twitter Glossary beforehand.

PS: Color wars are happening now at Twitter. Here is a great video that explains what this is…

If there was one thing most semi-literate, half-awake people always liked about Facebook, it was the clean air and the tidy sidewalks. You knew that you could let your kids out after six and their bikes wouldn’t get stolen. The city council was pretty strict about how you couldn’t park your nasty, rotting car in the drive, and any graffiti was always dealt with in a timely manner. There were no closed buildings with boarded up windows and most people respected each other’s property, aside from the odd character-art wall post. Lately, Facebook has changed and I’m not willing the blame the Developers’ Platform and Applications entirely. Just this week, I went to write on a friend’s wall, and I saw this:

What. The Hell. Is that. Ringtones? In a Facebook wall post? If you’ve ever laid eyes on a profile that includes the Super Wall, Fun Wall, Advanced Wall or any other sort of non-conformist, MySpacey bulletin board, you’ll have seen this crap:

However, the entry on my friend’s wall was not posted via an externally-developed application, most of which specialise in the distribution of idiotic pictures. The ghastly ringtone advertisement - which signifies so much more than just an annoying piece of spam - was left on a Facebook mainstay that has been fiercely protected from abuse. A few days later, I came across another spammy entry on a regular Facebook wall.

These posts have all the hallmarks of automated spam and none of the traits of copied-and-pasted messages. The terrible grammar. The inconsistent punctuation and bad spelling. The use of the number zero in place of “o.” A redirected URL that ends up at the vomit-inducing Sleektones.net. No link for you, not even with a nofollow. These messages were also “posted by” twenty-one year old college students, and although there are problems with the U.S. education system, I find it hard to believe that anyone who’d made it past the third grade would believe “free” was actually two words.

If I’d seen this on a SuperAdvancedFun Wall, I would not have looked twice. Those applications seem to have been developed and spread for and by people who miss the gaudiness of MySpace. However, Facebook has held on to early adopters and utter snobs like me by maintaining its initial structure and dignity in the face of mass development. Despite the main structural changes in layout, I can hold on to the clean, tidy profile I liked so much three years ago. They’ve done especially well in this regard.

That’s what keeps people like me around, and whilst it would take many more fails on Facebook’s behalf until I left it, I fear the day my wall falls victim to ringtone ads. I’m not bothered by the copied and pasted wall art: Although I delete any images like the one below, they are a far cry from automated annoyances.

On Facebook’s potential-laden yet neglected blog, Paul Jeffries recently wrote about application spam and what Facebook is doing to combat the problem. However, letting in the masses and having them create applications has allowed a slew of undesirable things to infiltrate a once-pristine community. Jeffries’ blog post addresses applications that require a user to invite friends to also use it before they’re granted access.

I’d go as far as regulating how pushy applications can be in requiring (tricking?) people into adding them to their accounts. Clicking on any one of the applications’ links in the image below brings up the application’s Add page. Whilst I agree that “Forward” and “Write on [blank's] Wall” should require a user to add the application, the “click here to read full post” link is just trickery. I’m also fairly sure that there is no full post.

How should Facebook go about achieving the balance between pleasing its users who like its tight regulations, and catering to the people who want to forward yellow smiley-faces and messages about how the name of one’s crush will appear on the screen if they re-post this message twenty times in the next eight minutes?

I don’t know what exactly is going on with the ringtone spam and various other questionable messages I’ve seen posted on Facebook walls but neglected to capture. I did, however, feel a touch of sadness when I saw those messages, as if I’d learned that yet another nice area of town had gone to ruin. Have spammers and phishers finally begun the slow take-over of Facebook, as they did MySpace?

No, I don’t have to add the applications I find annoying, but after seeing spam creep onto Facebook’s regular wall and after being nearly tricked by other sneaky applications, I believe Facebook should consider tightening up their community before housing prices drop even further and people consider finding out what AOL plans to do with Bebo.

Yep, just because I’m feeling a bit controversial today (yes that IS one hormonal privilege extended almost exclusively to us - the fairer sex), I’ve decided to pose a discussion question.

Actually, my other reason is because the initial answer to the question is by none other than Mr Godin… so you see I just couldn’t resist.






The Question:

“Social Networking sites are incredibly popular - what are the benefits of this new medium, and is it set to continue to rise in popularity?”

The Answer:

“Social Networks - if you try to glue a brand on top of a social network, you get a meatball sundae. Once again, the networks make it easiest for those who actually have something to say.”

My View:

I’ve come around to respect social networking sites as a good marketing tool - although not very targeted. Steph has had a lot to do with that - thank you :o) I can totally see it as a tool in my marketing toolbox. But I, as I think most of you, believe that it can’t work in isolation - hence Seth’s response. I also don’t believe that any single technique in marketing should exist in isolation.

Your View:

Well, this is the bit where I’d like to hear your views on the question above - just a little bit of healthy discussion…

The response and question are taken from an interesting interview with Seth Godin that I got from Wordracker’s site. The interview precedes a very exciting moment in my life… ok, I’m not THAT sad… but I’m excited… The release of Seth’s new book “Meatball Sundae“. Will get me it ASAP.

Anyway, here’s the article, and please let me know what your thoughts are.

Figuring Out The Words - The Seth Godin Interview >>

P.S. Not sure about Seth in a chef’s hat…?

P.P.S. A good quote that’ll get some heads nodding:

“SEO is not a black art. It’s often clients who want shortcuts rather than hard work that are the problem. The best SEO is great content and if you don’t create that you won’t get search engine traffic.”

�����������������

Not another blog post about Mixx!! Haven’t we established that it is just a waste of time? That is what some well respected folks are saying. Yet people are still mixxing away, the numbers all around are going up slowly but surely. But it still has not killed Digg, like it was promised to do.

But watch out… these new features are pretty intimidating!

Today I logged into Mixx, and I had 4 new messages!!

You now have the ability to send messages to fellow Mixxers, showing their user name and avatar, and the option to send to all. Even send a message to entire groups. You can opt-in and out of e-mail notifications, and conversation threads. I have already seen a lot of “Woo-Hoo’s” and “This is so much better than Digg” threads. But many people are foreseeing this function abused.

What do I love about Mixx you ask?

• The ability to reach the right target.
• Posting to groups with interested eyes.
• The Mixx staff is helpful and actually listens to feedback.
• My peers use it and talk about it.

Why should you use Mixx?

• To be a conversation starter.
• To have yet another tool to spread your personality around to your peers.
• To research an audience.
• You can invest 5 minutes on Mixx instead of pointlessly Tweeting.
• You will be ready and ahead of the crowd if Mixx does end up being the big, bad Digg Killer.
• Super smart chick blogger, Tamar, is the new podcaster at the Mixxingbowl.com and if she is talking about it, it must be cool!

Are you better off avoiding it and chalking it up to just another social news site? Sure, why not?

If Social News is not your forte chances are you can get much more work done by avoiding it all together . But in my opinion it is important to know how these sites work whether you are utilizing it or not.

Since writing a few blog posts about the benefits of using Facebook for marketing, I have been asked; “Well, how do you do it?” There are no secrets to using Facebook, unless you are running illegal scripts. Depending on the reasons and types of markets you might be dealing with on Facebook, it’s really quite simple to utilize the social network as a marketing tool.

“Don’t hate on Facebook.” Give it a chance before you decide to curse it to hell as an annoying social site that is a waste of time. If you STILL aren’t using Facebook for yourself, you won’t be able to understand how to use it for anyone else.

Create your “internet marketer” profile. I prefer when people give it their own personal touch. Add some (and only some) albums of cool pictures for me to see what you are like. Myself among many others are dying to judge you. This sounds a lot worse than it actually is.

By now, you probably already know over 100 people on Facebook. Whether they are your actually friends, or authors of the blogs you read. The #1 Simple Step of Social Media Success is to connect with these people, according to Chris Winfield. Facebook makes it really easy for you, and separates these people into networks, and clubs. You already know who you should be conversing with. In most cases, networking professionals will accept your friend request.

Some of these people, you might not have gotten a chance to talk to at the latest convention and now you are looking at mobile uploads of their children. This really is a wonderful tool.

Here are 10 reasons why you should STILL be using Facebook as a Marketing Professional:

1. Join all the groups that relate to you & add connections: Start conversations with people you look up to in the industry. Possibly gain a friend request or two hundred.
2. Promote your blog or other blogs you are promoting on your profile, using BlogFriends. You spent hours perfecting the perfect blog post, now everyone knows.
3. Draw attention to yourself quickly: Upload a new album, post a note, poke people (occasionally), comment on everyone’s stuff. Being popular on Facebook can easily transfer over to real life.
4. Set up real life connections: Introduce yourself to your Facebook friends. Start a relationship. These people are also voters on Social News sites, and blog writers, and good people to know.
5. Research information for clients & Gain Knowledge: Dive head first into groups and read what people are saying about your clients. Excellent for those who are practicing Reputation Management. Read forums, participate, research, and get to work!
6. Network before big events: With SMX West coming up, there are tons of groups to join. See who will be there. Set up a meeting with these people by sending them a message on Facebook, or just simply join the group so people will know you will be there as well. Look at their profile, if they have recent news, you will have a conversation starter at the convention.
7. Update your Status: I hate to say it but those people who tie in their Twitter with their Facebook status are super helpful. If you become a regular status updater, people will always take interest in whatever your doing. It’s like reality TV. *Congratulations to Glen Allsopp who just PASSED HIS DRIVING TEST! 38m ago*
8. Applications Help: It’s true that many applications are annoying. But the Stumble Upon application is awesome! It shows on your profile and news feed what you are Stumbling, so this way everyone else knows, and will also stumble if they are interested.
9. Facebook is Improving: The ever changing controls are sometimes annoying but helpful. You can edit your preferences in the news feeds and see what you want to see. You can also control what people see about you with privacy and security settings.
10. Facebook Profiles Rank- If clients are looking you up, they might like the fact that your profile comes up (but they might not). In this case, it works the same as LinkedIn. So make sure to keep it as Professional as the business you run. *For example: While hiring, I did a search and found a possible employee Facebook page and lets just say they weren’t hired based on the profile picture alone. This could have totally worked in their favor, if I saw a nice clean page with nice comments from Coworkers, friends, a link to their blog, etc.

So… Why Not? It’s totally up to you how you want to use it. If you choose not to use Facebook, then don’t. If you just want to use to it watch what everyone else is doing, that is fine too. You don’t have to add every application, or give drinks to your Top Friends. You can totally make what you want of it.
I hope that this post helps people who are still “Hating” and helps them find success with Facebook conversations, like I have in many ways.

If you have any other reasons or ideas why Marketing Professionals should STILL be using Facebook, please let me know!