Why?  Because you are connecting to all of this as my connection:

My Network of Trusted Professionals:

You are at the center of your network. Your connections can introduce you to 10,250,500+ professionals — here’s how your network breaks down:
Your Connections Your trusted friends and colleagues	1,808
Two degrees away Friends of friends; each connected to one of your connections	386,900+
Three degrees away Reach these users through a friend and one of their friends	9,861,700+
Total users you can contact through an Introduction	10,250,500+

14,793 new people in your network since October 10

The LinkedIn Network

My sweet partner asked me this this morning.  My answer: “No”.

Apple will decline quickly now, just as they did last time, and for the same reasons: only a very few people in the world have the gift of vision: just naturally being able to know what is coming.  There is no substitute:  Steve could see where things were going and get there first, and he had the authority and the ability and the drive and the thick skin to do it.

Goodbye to you,  Steve – my last apple device was a competitor to the 386; my next computer was a 486 – but I will never forget Steve, and what he taught the world about the value of one very good man.

Have a good rest Steve: your legacy will never die, and I will never forget you.  Goodbye to you, CRT screens, SEO, static websites, phones that only talk, printed books, and the past!

Hello to the brave new world that you helped to usher in.  Thank you.  You continue to inspire me!

Rothman Guide to Guerrilla Marketing with Social Media

Table of Contents

2011 Rothman Guide to Social Media Guerrilla Marketing Agency

1. Introduction
2. 2011 Rothman Guide Chapter I – The Guerrilla Marketing Checklist
3. 2011 Rothman Guide | Aggregation of Content | CMS Considerations
4. Awesome Power | Marketing with Real Content 101
5. Art and Science Harmony | Self Fulfilling Prophecy
6. Minute Quiz | Find out if you need a technical adviser
7. 2011 Head Smacking Marketing Mistakes that Most People Make
8. Blueprint for a Viral Marketing Campaign
9. Automatic Distribution | The Creative Revolution | Google Tightens
10. Put a Client on Top of Google | Step-by-step How to Guide
11. 100 Faces in Common | New work-at-home-professional Lifestyle | E-Zine
12. Last Sunday as I lay dieing in the hospital..reality writing…
13. 2011 Changes in the way people live and work – at home
14. 2011 New Online Business Model | Lean-Independent-Fast-Techie Professionals
15. Massa dun wup me no mo | He sells me health care | Modern Slavery
16. 1 Blueprint | Social Media Agency | uplog.org defined
17. 1rst Edition: B2B Home Business Network News – Email Marketing
18. Sizzle 101 | 10 ways to be yourself and make it count
19. 2011 Blog Posting SEO Guide| 1 in the World according to Google
20. 2011 Blogging for a living | Complete how to Guide
21. Amazing Alliance | Business to Business Barter in Media
22. Google Algorithms Explained in Plain English
23. Determine Your Havingness Level
24. 1 Nano-second First Impression | One photograph can make a website
25. A Subtle Approach to Audience Building Online
26. A Model for Social Media Advertising | Exclusive Online Agency
27. 2 Help Google – You ask Google
28. 2011 Marketing Toollkit – Net Extractor – ibuzzPro – mail server – PHPList
29. As you stand there completely naked talking to me…
30. Viral Video Production and Online Promotion a Must
31. Agency Services Rant | Satisfaction Guaranteed
32. 101 Becoming the Media | Washington DC Political News Blog
33. Democracy Online | AZ DUI Handbook | DUI Attorneys Arizona Example
34. 1-2-trim-the-fat-3-4-search-for-that
35. Are Real Estate Agents People or Sheeple?!
36. 101 | Invisible-Ware | The Hidden Layers
37. How to use Free Classifieds to Power a Community
38. 0+0=0 | I am on top of Google – where are the sales
39. About walking away from conflicts of interests in advertising agency
40. When the water is low – the stumps will show
41. 101 – How to make money from a website
42. 101 The value of long term planning for online marketing
43. Google+ and +1 – Welcome to the new playing field – popularity trumps everything
44. 200 Green jobs in the middle of nowhere – ANYWHERE – the future that will save all of US
45. 2011 Internet Lead Generation Model – Internet Real Estate 101
46. The human tribe is connecting online – the basic chemistry of Social Media
47. Book of Life – bookmarks on Google Maps?
48. 2011 Rothman Selling System for Social Media Advertising Agency Updated – Becoming the Local Media
49. 101 Why Social Media Marketing Works
50. Education and Politics – Formula for Corruption and Class Warfare
51. Cold calling script to sell UpLog.org local advertising to any local business
52. 101 How to Cash-flow a Community Blog and Provide a Value to Advertisers
53. Perceptions and Realities 101 | The art and science of self-fulfilling prophecy
54. Internet Gold – the rush is on – get your picks and shovels here.
55. All the leads I need come daily from Google+ and linkedin.com

more soon

What if I told you that your ability to imagine is the ability to create – same-same?!

What if I could take you through your own logic to prove this fact beyond a shadow of denial of belief, according to you?!

I decided to do some research to back up my views on this topic:  from http://bible.cc/john/14-12.htm:

Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father.

- http://kingjbible.com/john/14.htm

This was not exactly what I was looking for LOL…but it brings up a good point:

This is very different from the way I perceived this scene in my mind the first time.  Since every one of us perceives things differently, we each live in a completely different reality: and, to a certain extent, reality is affected by suggestion and perception.  Proof:

• With one notable exception (Beam me up, Scotti), everything that was imagined and was dazzling in the original Star Trek series has come about.
• Now that distribution is automatic,
• and everybody can have a voice (the Internet)
• and we can actually keep it all straight and keep up with relationships with that many people: IE:Social Media (Google+  - really!)
• we have no more excuses!
• Everything you do or say or think is being recorded, including the fact that you are here reading this right now!
• Oooops!

There is more than one way to deliver a message!

Class dismissed!  

There is nothing wrong with the concept that every child should have an equal chance – it is the American way.  I was underprivileged as an orphan; I lived in foster homes and group homes, went through the system, survived, excelled, became an emancipated minor at 17.  I survived in spite of the system, not because of it. Whenever there is a budget that big, an unstoppable mandate for funding, and politics: these all add up to a formula for corruption. (thanks to http://americasnextimpactsite.com/2011/08/04/higheredreform/ for this image.)

RIP

Accountability is absent, as indicated by the widespread fraud on the tests that have finally been mandated to measure teachers and schools.

The goal all along: to level the playing field of underprivileged children, a noble plan, but lets evaluate the results:

• Rampant corruption
• Over-powerful unions
• Public schools are terrible compared to their private counterparts, we have widened the gap not narrowed it.
• Private schools, with their high price tags, are still the best

Our democratic socialist republic is in trouble: we need to  re-evaluate our results:

• Public education is not efficient
• Public education is not as good
• Public education is more expensive
• Public education is funded by political football, very unhealthy

My groundbreaking idea?  End public education as we know it, put it out for bids, put the schools up for sale top the highest qualified bidder; and put the Government in the governing, role not management.  Your thoughts?  lets be realistic: the material is outdated, inundated with political propaganda, not that good, really?!  If not for an 18 month scholarship to a private school (the Midland school in Los Olivos, CA) where I received a college English education in the 9th grade, I would not have the education that I have acquired: I have managed to become very educated without a formal college education, more common that you know these days.

The over-educated, under-challenged elite could complain about my lack of attention to convention, my lack of loyalty to coloring between the lines; the fact that they did not get a chance to put me on sedatives before I could get this far; the fact that they cannot control me!  OH DARN!  Your thoughts?

Shameless plug, the best education available about social media is up-to-date, and it is free:

Rothman Guide to Guerrilla Marketing with Social Media

About Us . Join us! . Subscribe

Worldwide spending on internet advertising will total $65.2 billion in 2008, or nearly 10% of all ad spend across all media, and grow 15-20% a year to reach $106.6 billion in 2011, or 13.6% of total ad spend, according to IDC’s Digital Marketplace Model and Forecast.

The United States will lead the world in both total advertising spending and online ad spending throughout the forecast period, with expenditures in 2011of more than $265 billion and $45 billion, respectively, IDC projects (via BtoB).  Top real estate social media portals according to Google include Inman, Mashable,  Linkedin:

“By the end of the forecast period, spending for internet advertising will trail direct mail – the third-largest form of advertising – by more than $30 billion, while spending on TV and print ads will each be nearly twice as great as for online ads,” said John Gantz, chief research officer at IDC.

Nevertheless, the long-term opportunity for internet advertising is evident in terms of per capita spending, he said: “Total advertising revenues equate to more than $105 per inhabitant of the planet, while internet advertising revenues are less than $50 per active internet user.”

Among the key findings:

• Keyword (search) ads will remain the dominant type of internet advertising throughout the forecast period, capturing more than one-third of annual online ad spending worldwide.
• Display ads will be the next largest type of internet advertising, capturing more than 20% of worldwide spending annually through 2011, followed by classified ads with nearly 19% of all online ad spending per year.
• Spending in both categories will be pressured by rich media ads, which are expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of more than 50% during the 2007-2011 forecast period.

“Marketers already recognize that online advertising must be incorporated into any comprehensive ad strategy. This will continue to drive growth in online ad spending well beyond the forecast period,” said Karsten Weide, program director, Digital Media and Entertainment.

“However, there is still a lot of experimentation underway within the category as marketers seek the optimal mix of ad types to reach their target audience. This will fuel spending for all types of online ads.”

Additional highlights from IDC’s Digital Marketplace Model and Forecast:

• Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the Middle East and Africa (MEA) will experience the fastest growth in Internet ad spending during the forecast period with a CAGR of 42.1% for CEE and 29.8% for MEA. Online advertising in Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) will also experience dramatic growth with a 2007-2011 CAGR of 25.4%.
• Internet advertising will make the greatest gains relative to total ad spending in Western Europe, where online ad spending will capture 18.2% of total ad spending in 2011. This compares with a 16.3% share for online ad spending in Japan and 14.6% in the United States.
• More than $5 billion will be spent worldwide in 2008 in each of the top four categories of online ads – adult content and gambling, information, electronics, and computing. These will continue to be the leading categories in 2011.

Top 10 Mobile Websites

About the report: IDC’s Digital Marketplace Model and Forecast provides worldwide and regional data for a wide range of internet categories and activities. Traditional Web 1.0 categories include internet users, devices using the internet, internet buyers, and B2C and B2B eCommerce. Web 2.0 categories look more closely at what internet users are doing online, with breakouts by activity and gender. The database also includes a detailed look at online advertising spending worldwide. Forecast data for the 2008-2012 period is supplemented by historical data from 2006 and 2007. The Web 1.0 categories include detailed information on more than 40 individual countries.

With hundreds of billions of dollars changing hands based on popularity of websites, it is time to take the science of social media marketing, and it’s game changing effects on society, business, lifestyle, culture, economics, and the human race in general seriously! Make no mistake: this is violently disruptive technology, and it is changing everything: but some things never change, and they are still underneath it all:

• Humans are tribal – we are connected to, and dependent on each other: a solitary human is sad.
• We thrive on, covet, desire and need the attention, feedback, affection, and encouragement of each other.

In times past, these things came from the family, the neighborhood, the church, the schools..

However, changes in technology, travel, communications, and government in recent years have merged us into one big ‘mash-up’ society – diverse to the limits of all of our open mindedness, challenging to the most progressive among us to even keep up with it all!

These are actually the very same trends that drive the explosive growth of social media:

• This mobile, ‘mash-up’ society no longer works and lives where they were born, creating a lack of connection and continuity
• Families are now mash-ups; creating a void where a loving consistent family of peers once provided stability and support and affinity and love
• People are isolated, less connected by way of geography, creed, religion, location – more diversified in the global discussion

These gaps, naturally, are being filled by some of the very same technology that helped them to evolve; the global discussion, global clearing house, global tribe, if you will – is online now:

• The missing family connection, dinner table discussion, family picture night is on Facebook.com.
• The B2B networking breakfast is at linkedin.com.
• The global clearing house for all the information in the world (IE the library) is Google

Some remain the same, some things change: but the motivation, and our basic nature remains:

• We need and thrive on; live for the approval, attention, love, and recognition of each other.
• We live for that recognition, that interaction with our own kind.
• We have our own individual identities which we are constantly discovering and remodeling – this requires feedback.
• We crave affinity with like-minded humans – like groups and ‘circles’ – so that we can explore the above.

Think about it: all society, all progress, everything that makes us ‘human’, has to do with a sense of purpose for something, or someone larger than ones’ self. It is what separates us from the animals, and from nature itself: that free will, and that ever-insatiable need for each other, and for change, and for growth, and for recognition. It is also what drives a social media community, and the Internet itself.

>>>more from the guide here>>>

Intuitive, handy, easy to use..even the way they rolled it out was so fair to allow us power players to invite 100,000 and instantly establish ourselves correctly, perfect!

But I doubt that many of you realize what this really means:

• Everybody is connected like a hive
• Everything is traceable
• Google knows everything
• We are all watching

• The popularity of your page, and how long people spend on it will determine it’s rankings.
• Your personal popularity on the web, or the popularity of your cause, will power your rankings
• Your URL, DOES NOT MATTER TO GOOGLE, they have better ways of ranking a page
• Your friends, contacts, clients, relatives, employees, customers are HUMAN CAPITAL, the more you have, the greater your power, your sphere of influence.
• It is actually a new form of government: Meritocracy – on Google, whomever does the most work of building the Internet, has the most power.

Reprinted form Chris Brogan’s Post:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/118320665823821681206/posts/hULgiykTub8

Data provided by Google Search. Special thanks to +Paul Allen.

And, as usual, you are ahead of the curve, because you have been reading the

2011 Rothman Guide to Guerrilla Marketing with Social Media

Link to

Google+ and +1 – Welcome to the new playing field – popularity trumps everything

 

This article is long overdue: nobody gets this:

• Does it occur to you that everybody occasionally has to buy and sell autos, rentals, equipment, services, timeshares, motor homes, real estate and the like?
• Does it occur to you that these people are potential customers for you, whomever you are, and whatever you sell: and that this usually happens locally for several reasons: and that e-bay and Amazon auto-trader and sites like that cost money?
• Does it occur to you that these people all have addresses, and the autos have years, makes, models, equipment, and that this is all data?

Then why is it so hard to explain to people how a free classifieds service with robust options, can provide ever increasing traffic and leads generation forever for a local blog, and feed a community site traffic, money, leads, advertisers, B2B leads and B2C leads, members, participants, bloggers, data, traffic and sales.

I always get this:

Duh…how we going to make money by giving away free ads duhh….?

The answer actually is, although I do not say it: this person will not compete with me or mine in this lifetime.   Thank God for the rest of them; makes it easy on us.  Just think about it for a while: when was the last time you read a newspaper?  How big did the classified section used to be?  what keeps happening to all the free classified sites, hmmm!?

Everybody can communicate with everybody for free at the same time. The world is flat. Let us, in our usual guerrilla tradition, examine the ways that we can exploit the cavernous market gaps that are emerging:

1. Distribution is out of control: wide open. Result: 0 censorship, anybody; ANYBODY can be heard. Emphasis now shifts to exactly what you have to say. Say something!
2. I new era of accountability is on the way: privacy: gone. Crime: does not pay – you will get caught. Your reputation – EVERYTHING. Manage it!
3. THE MAN cannot control the airways: this will gradually educate, free, and level (make fair) the world playing field. The real book of life, the actual truth of what is happening is being written and archived online by us: PARTICIPATE!
4. CLAIM YOUR VOICE: The greatest gold rush of all time is taking place online right now: billions are being quietly made as small companies are being formed to grab a market share and then turned to public cash-rich monsters: start a nice community now!
5. A website is now a replacement, literally, for building, employees, office machines, overhead…it can cash flow from day one: cash flow your marketing! Websites are advertising!
6. Take a stand: by combining what you love with what you do for a living, you can achieve true happiness: pick a cause: turn your marketing into a cause!
7. Call it ahead of time: anybody can “Monday morning quarterback” a lucky break and act like they accomplished something: but to call it ahead of time is credible: establish yourself as an expert!
8. Get other people to say so: you only need ask to get compliments when you are good and earnest and willing to work. Ask for these endorsements: then thank those who give them to you loudly and publicly, feed them business with complimentary articles – show the world what it is like to be your friend!
9. Be consistent – the Internet is the new tribe: we have moved from Television (one way communication) to New Media – AL LEVELS OF COMMUNICATION AT THE SAME TIME: so establish a reliable pattern and distribution locations for your content to allow those who would follow and/or join you to follow.
10. Beat your own drum – love yourself, it is contagious, we will all join in!

• Actuary

• Financial adviser

• Financial analyst

• Logistician

• Meeting planner

• Public relations specialist

• Sales manager

• Training specialist

Notice that these are all things that can be done from home now with modern web-conferencing technology: more specifically: you must be all these things for yourself to be in any business: making you look a little like the guy above. Fortunately, these days, like the occupations above: all these things can be done by one man with a computer. The ways this changes everything are enormous, endless:

• It is no longer necessary for people to work at the same place, or even at the same time.
• International collaboration and commerce is free.
• Distribution of some services and information is not only free, it is automatic.
• People can work and live in an environment best suited to them, at any time of day or night, without traveling.

You see the saving solution this time will be what it always is: technology. Technology will clean up the environment, free us from traveling for ours in rush hour traffic, and make our lives even better in the near future. The time to plan where you fit into this new independent world of independent workers is now. I can give you all the tools you need to enter the career of your choice in this new high-tech world: a website, training, support, the rest of us as your production and sales team: but only you can make the decision to decide what it is that you are really meant to do for the rest of us as your purpose: and to get started! Make it today!

The fact is: we would rather hear from each other than the main stream press, as indicated by the fact that You Tube is the second biggest search engine, bigger than all the networks combined.

What has changed in 2011?

• “The Man” no longer can edit, control, or even tax the airwaves
• A press release is a blog post on any well optimized blog
• Nobody reads the “Press” because is it low quality, manufactured, out of date, yesterdays news
• Any idiot, correct or not, can be heard if he is popular!

When I was growing up people would say:

That is no longer true. Now: I can show anyone with a mind and a personality and a command of the language how to have a very loud voice by themselves, and potentially an even louder voice as part of a group: even to ROAR as part of a niche team.

I have students and workers and clients all over the world, because I can. What I have been predicting for years has come about in the middle east: the Internet has educated the world.

Ladies and Gentleman we are living in a time of the greatest individual freedom, access to information, and ability to be heard in the history of the world:

• Wherever you are, if you have a connection, you have a voice
• If you are popular, Google will sell the ads and give you 75% of the money, you need no other business plan
• If you have something to offer that anybody wants, you are in business
• Cost of entry lowest ever
• Competitive advantage has shifted from size to speed
• New is in, old is moldy
• Fortunes are Changing hands, age-old conventions are being changed

Opportunities for profit abound in the new marketplace shakeout – the media has moved online. Billions of dollars per year of advertising dollars and ridiculous amounts of power and influence are in flux. In our lifetimes, we will see more equality and freedom, in politics, and in business: a more level playing field than ever before. This new marketplace will favor early adopters and innovators. The cost of entry, a website, or even a part of a team website; the potential reward: gosh!

With Google saying just days ago that they are tightening up on “Content Farms” that distribute original low quality content, now is the time to re-evaluate your entire internet strategy: are you making your online decisions with “pack mentality?”

1. Did you plan your advertising based on what a lot of people in your industry have been doing, eliminating any competitive advantage or innovative advantage that you may have been able to manufacture?
2. Do you get advice from competitors, forgetting the special interests of the source?
3. What is better about you?
4. What is smarter about you?
5. What is more high-tech tan the other guy?
6. How are you nicer?
7. Are you doing what everyone else you compete with is doing?
8. Do you like to fight?!

Automatic distribution is brutally fast: there is no substitute for actual speed and creativity in real time in this marketplace. If you understand what this means to the creative (and not necessarily born into money) among us, it will inspire you!

>>>from the 2011 Rothman Guide to Guerrilla Marketing free online e-book>>>

Subscribe here

The prediction (calling it ahead of time) – 12-21-2010

http://socialmediasystems.com/blog/2011-marketing-update-planning-checklist/ Everything starts with a plan: if you do not know where you are going, you cannot get there. As you read the above article, you will realize that not one little detail of this was an accident. With God-like power, we did it on purpose. If you succeed a great deal of it will be ‘on-purpose’, and giving thanks will not hurt one thing either: all luck is bad, ya know, all good comes from above.!

The self-fulfilling prophecy – 12-27-2010

http://socialmediasystems.com/blog/179usd-and-no-payments-ever-with-1-post-per-week-uplog-org-play-2-pay-model/ To begin to build buzz ahead of time, and to share the vision: we now start only six days later to tell the same people we are successful already in our own eyes: maybe they peek now, maybe they wait still. We share our vision and how it is unfolding, nobody really understands yet, but we are busy recruiting early adopters, manufacturing shining examples in real time: we begin to build a 50+ person sales force at the same time in 60 days flat, one salesperson at a time.

The blast – 1-1-2011

http://socialmediasystems.com/blog/1-hot-new-proffession-for-2011-earn-6-figures-as-a-professional-blogger-this-year/ Now a few early recruits and early adopters (great IQ test BTW) are beginning to believe: it is time to prove it: Declaration of success and strong cash flow: we send the self fulfilling prophecy out to the world, calling our success ahead of time, in real time: we show the numbers, the actual mega-trend market gap we are addressing: 50 visitors per day and growing to Uplog.org from just one of these posts all by itself at Associated Content.com , one of many places we post.

Declaration of success and strong cash flow:

http://socialmediasystems.com/blog/anatomy-of-a-succesful-social-media-launch-3-weeks-at-uplog-org/ The numbers are still very small here: but they hit the target perfectly: we do a huge blast to an old mailing list of subscribers and past clients about 3000 triple opt-in past clients and readers, competitors… This results in weeks of head over heals sales, feedback, training, and on the fly software troubleshooting ….then this:

The Numbers:

• 74 active Blogs
• 330 active real participating members
• 3980 optimized unique in all the world pages in Google’s primary cash
• One of the top 4 in the world for ‘internet advertising business opportunity‘ target search
• 1 ‘social media advertising agency‘ in the world
• Wildly profitable
• Supporting several people
• Agents recruiting agents
• Leads for agents logging themselves in
• 60 days flat from start-up

And, as you can see from the above, we can do it on purpose, over and over again. We can target any group, any market, any industry, any group.. it is less expensive and more effective than any other form of advertising, and it is more ethical also! Now do you get it?! >>>from the 2011 Rothman Guide to Guerrilla Marketing free online e-book>>> Subscribe here

Funny: Hasn’t changed one bit from last year:

1. Assuming we care about any intro

2. Not optimizing

3. Not enough information on website.

4. No referencing or no links to other areas when referencing.

5. No social media optimization or the ability to consume and share content on major social media sites

6. Too much text, not enough images or video.

7. Only having 100% commercial content

8. Not being niche enough

9. Internal Pages are not structured to target any keywords so they’re invisible.

10. Not updating often enough.

11. No call to action

12. No visual separation or a way to make the call to action stand out.

13. Website doesn’t look good / load on common browsers and resolutions.

14. No internal blogging and social media features,…the list goes on – it is a specialty.

http://socialmediasystems.com/blog/2011-marketing-update-planning-checklist/

The self-fulfilling prophecy – 12-27-2010

http://socialmediasystems.com/blog/179usd-and-no-payments-ever-with-1-post-per-week-uplog-org-play-2-pay-model/

The blast – 1-1-2011

http://socialmediasystems.com/blog/1-hot-new-proffession-for-2011-earn-6-figures-as-a-professional-blogger-this-year/

Declaration of success and strong cash flow:

http://socialmediasystems.com/blog/anatomy-of-a-succesful-social-media-launch-3-weeks-at-uplog-org/

Now do you get it?

Join me!

1 Hot New Profession For 2011 | Earn 6 Figures As A Professional Blogger This Year

Now we are officially announcing the old advertising agency model to  be outdated: we are offering full agency services to even the smallest of businesses  for 10% – or even nothing at all with our “Play-2-Pay” model where the client barters for printing, advertising websites and more with is own services and real content production about the niche market or locality thus addressed.

Our own agency group is two weeks old here, over 60 members already…

Considering that we only have one for each city and state, the newly engineered Google map showing the cities and states that are spoken for is going so fast we had to automate it!

Imagine what will happen next week when all the people in the first meeting of the Diggers| Facebookers | Tweeters group this week carry out the plan for the first articles promoting each other!!

This is going so well that I have decided to through fuel on the fire:  join the affiliate program and spread our banners around at least on your site, and for the first 100 affiliate log-ins at our new Agency site at Uplog.org, you will get 20% referrals instead of the normal 15% .

Seriously, Ladies and Gentleman: ask yourselves these questions:

• What is there to stop a bunch of us advertisers from becoming our own lead generators, ,our own media?  Nothing!
• What incentive does a traditional agency have to tell you that?  None at all!

“Social Media: Customer satisfaction with social media sites is poor (70) as the industry enters the Index for the first time.  It has the lowest industry aggregate score of any of the e-business or e-retail industries measured by the ACSI. Wikipedia leads the social media industry with a score of 77, which is 14 points above industry giant Facebook.com (64), a surprisingly low performer given its market presence.”

I will add my 2 cents here: it is very difficult to a get a site that tries to do too many things to work for the average consumer: the simpler the interface, the better.   (This Moviepals.org example  combines over 200 advanced features for collaborative video production and distribution with a clean and simply graphic user interface)

The dilemma, for social network website design company like us, is to provide more and more features, which once were expensive, for free; and still to maintain a simple interface that allows the gradual adaptation  that supports  the learning curve of the visitors:  if it is easy to get started, the visitors will eventually learn about the more advanced features: it is like what we used to call a “puppy dog close” in copy machine sales:  in this case it is a “puppy dog learning curve” that is the rule online: example:

“How much is that puppy dog in the window?”

“I’ll check, would you like to hold him while I see?”

It is a good idea if it takes a while to look up the price (in our case, to charge anything at all), because by the time the clerk returns, the prospect has bonded with the dog: exactly like a free user does with an anonymous profile on an online online dating site, and like all of us did with a search box named Google, and with ‘friends’ on Myspace.com and Facebook.com, etc.

However, as the application grows, the user interface becomes more and more busy, and that makes it intimidating to new users:

More from the Report:

“News and Information Sites: Customer satisfaction with news and information sites stays even this year at 74.  The big news in this industry is the debut of FoxNews.com at the top of the heap with a score of 82, which is five points above nearest competitor USA Today.com (77).  CNN.com brings up the rear (73).”

LOL  (for you non-techies that means ‘laughing out loud’):  I personally watch Fox News often online, and the interface is great and the news is accurate in my humble opinion: again a result of the gradual shift of power from the top-down architecture of the main stream media, to the “Meritocracy” of user-generated, user-filtered content sites that are more and more important as sources of news, and that have increasing influence and reach: this trend is a parabolic curve:

“Portals and Search Engines: Customer satisfaction with portals and search engines dives 7% to 77 this year and is driven largely by a 7% decline for Google (down six points to 80). “

Again, Google keeps adding features, making the interface more and more complicated, and creating more and more opportunities for non tech-savvy consumers to be dissatisfied if they have not already learned the interface – which, BTW, I find to be completely intuitive and easy to navigate in spite if it’s robust depth.

“Bing was measured for the first time this year, and it makes a strong first showing with a score of 77, second only to Google.”

This may be the biggest thing to watch in the report: Bing is gaining back market share, and the search engine and browser wars will not be over any time soon!

You can download the study here:
http://www.foreseeresults.com/research-white-papers/ACSI-e-business-repo
rt-2010.shtml

CC: The Author of the study, Larry Freed, President & CEO for ForeSeeResults.com, can be reached through Daniel Rosenberg, Social Media Specialist at ForeSeeResults.com

Thanks to them for sending me this report, which is available in PDF format by email: Daniel.Rosenberg@ForeSeeResults.com

BTW, our latest attempts at integrating over 200 functions (and still having a user friendly ‘graphic user interface’ called a GUI) is here:

Moviepals Open Cinema Collaborative Video