1. User generated, user-filtered content now is the rule, not the exception
2. The technology knowledge gap is closing
3. SEO is all but completely dead: if you do not believe me, try to find a happy healthy SEO company that has been in business for any length of time: then take a good look at how outdated their prices are!
4. By posting quality articles to the right groups on the larger social networks, and the right niche sites, ANYBODY can reach thousands or even millions of people with a few hours effort, and no money at all.
5. By posting quality articles, with proper anchor text links back to a perfectly optimized site, in the right way, you will not only rank the target website for almost any organic search words you desire, you will also garner huge amounts of traffic from the hosting site, or group.
6. You can post the same article in many places: you must however make sure that Google and the other robots know who the source is to do that.
7. Then you can split your posts: “>>>Read more about here>>” ;  similar to how you used to have to go to page whatever to read the rest of an article in the newspaper
8. You can reach everyone n the whole world online: the newspaper is less and less relevant.
9. You can feed Google much easier and less expensively than trying to fool them: get used to it: you are not smarter than them and you do not have more money!
10. The world is flat: stop trying to steal, cheat, lie, circumvent: it is time to make a contribution to society!
11. People are gregarious: the internet is not going away – it is the roar of us talking to each other.
12. Do the RIGHT THING, and you will be rewarded: we are watching you, ALL OF US!
13. AGAIN, WE ARE WATCHING YOU, YOU CANNOT GET AWAY WITH ANYTHING!
14. Here is something you will not expect: all of you know something about something: it is the thing that you love: why not do that for a living! You can, you know:
15. The new business model: A.) write about what you know form an optimized blog (website) property of your own; B.) Re-post partial articles to niche industry sites, news sites and social networks; 3.) put Google AdSense on your site and let Google put 75% of every click charge directly into your account.

Learn more about the new, “Flat world” here:

Topics include: web design, website development, and search marketing

” Upgrade current website to WordPress and add blog and iHomefinder IDX intergation….call anytime after 9am EST”

I called at 6:10 our time (9:10 EST) and asked him the question i already had an idea of the answer to:

“How did you find me?”

Of course it was a two word Google search: “ihomefinder wordpress”; which yielded this March blog post:

http://socialmediasystems.com/blog/seemless-integration-of-ihomefinder-idx-into-a-wordpress-blog/

I have been trying to explain this to people who are buying PPC and lousy leads for years, since 2001: because of ActiveRain.com, some of you are finally starting to get it.  Maybe this example will help   (PS: It is about the content!)

IdeaPals offers two $50,000 prizes for Beta Testers

IdeaPals is the evolution of an inspiration transforming into a thought, then an idea into a reality.  It is about users, and content, and websites, and humans, and machines.  It is about collaboration, in person, remotely, and from across the world.

For what would cost millions only few years ago, IdeaPals.org, the website that offers jobs, networking and even hosting social events.

Join Ideapals.org, for free social networking and free project management. Ideapals also has social network integration; you can now sync your Facebook profile or your Twitter account with IdeaPals and it’s all free!

IdeaPals.org combines the best features from Linked-In, Meetup, Basecamp, Ning, Facebook, Digg, Associated Content, Activerain, E-Lance, Rent-a-Coder. IdeaPals.org has unique features, such as a social network to encourage ideas to become reality through various project management tools. Best of all? This is all free of charge!

Bringing passionate people together to collaborate, innovate, and make money doing what they love at IdeaPals.org!

On IdeaPals, nearly everything you do earns NODs (Natural Overtures of Distinction), our currency. Whenever you have an idea, an opinion, a comment, a friend, or what we call a ‘spark’, and you share it: you get paid in NODs! With NODs, you can win a website worth $50,000, earn prestige, and recieve free marketing and promotion.

You could win a $50,000 marketing campaign and Modern Social Website for your business for just for signing up here for free!

Here is what we will give away in less than one year
Watch the clock ticking down at the left of every page at Ideapals.org!

• Completely FREE Acquia Drupal elaborate, custom website

• Complete with Branding, Graphics, Custom Functions

• A Viral, Guerilla Marketing Public Relations Campaign

• A Video in HD and Web-ready formats to promote the project, distributed to the world on multiple video sharing sites

• SEO (search engine optimization) SEM (search engine marketing)

• Premium, Dedicated, Unlimited Usage Hosting for one year on our server

• Link building and other advertising including a premium video advertisement added at the end of every episode the 56 week Crowd-Driven Series we are about to Release

• A banner and ad showing your progress as the first year winner on Ideapals.org for the next year!

There two ways to win this $50,000 Website and Marketing Campaign

1st WAY TO WIN: (Luck) BE one of the FIRST 5000 people to sign up here: Ideapals.org
Sign up and be lucky!

2ND WAY TO WIN: PARTICIPATION: (Merit) Whoever has the most *NODs wins an additional $50,000 Campaign identical to the one above!

Everything you do at IdeaPals, you will also be compensated in NODs.

*What is a NOD? It is our currency of participation and innovation: Everything you do at IdeaPals.org or MoviePals.org earns Natural Overtures of Distinction; NODs for short.

Actions you get NODs for

1. Authoring the best reply – 5 NODs

2. Commenting on Sparks (ideas), IdeaPals groups, – 5 NODs

3. Invite other people – 5 NODs each

4. When invited user registers – 50 NODs each

5. When you register if you were invited – 50 NODs

6. Moderation – Approve – 1 NOD

7. Moderation – Delete – 1 NOD

8. Moderation Response -5 NODs

9. Viewing IdeaPals Group, Spark – 1 NOD 1

10. Registering – 25 NODs

11. Posting an IdeaPals Free Group – 50 NODs

12. Posting a Spark (idea) – 10 NODs

13. Moderating a comment – 1 NOD

14. Posting a picture – 10 NODs

15. Voting up or down – 1 NOD

16. Flagging – 1 NOD

You will also have the chance to win many other prizes given away weekly and monthly to winners of our NODs contests like:

• Free websites

• Free hosting

• Free upgrades

• Free advertising

• Free video production

• Free project management

• Free cross-group marketing and many other incentives just for participating, collaborating

Visit IdeaPals.org now!

Now, as is usually the case with me, there are a million copy cats out there claiming to be experts in ‘social media marketing’, as traditional SEO becomes outdated (related article: see The slow death of SEO).

Now, since things have changed so much again, that it is time to update the list: 50 Social Media Marketing Resources you cannot  be without:

0.0 Twitter.com is all the rage – global chat with instant Google search rankings!  Hook it up with your digg.com tohappen automagically!

0.1  Ideapals.org – the best features of Linkedin, Meetup, and Basecamp – share and get ideas, find and post jobs,meet locally and online, start or expand a business, manage a project: it is all connected, and it pays in NODs (natural overtures of distinction)

1. RoboForm is still on the list: with literally hundredsof profiles, all with usernames and passwords, I honestly do not know what I would do without Roboform to keep track of them: i can even create an identity for a client and automatically fill in the details into any number of web forms for them: I use the paid version but there is also a free version for the beginner.

2. Tubemogul.com Very cool, you upload your videos to one place, and they are automatically syndicated to up to 20 others in optimized format, including Youtube and Google video!  You can track statistics about your videos and do all kinds of cool things, a must have for video bloggers.

3. Veoh.com Like TubeMogul, Veoh allows you to fill in a couple of usernames and passwords for Youtube and Google (but not as many),  but Veoh has a very robust and attractive video player which displays the video nicely on your website, and allow for channels that make it very easy to show a streaming medleyof videos that you group together.  We have had some issues with  loading slowly at times ( with  their explosive growth is size), but they are worth looking at for aesthetics, and we still use them some.  In some cases you want the videos to be hosted and played on your website streaming right from Youtube  for the sake of the rankings boost you get from the click-through traffic.

4. Realtown: Realtown is owned and fed by the owners of Real Estate Magazine (RISMedia.com), Epro, Lowes, InternetCrusade and many other established icons in the Real Estate industry.  they have just re-done their site (went live in October) with new modern social networking features, and they are about to become the forums and local news areas for RISMedia.com with their new site launch.  Any group at Realtown will rank immediately for longtail searches, just as those areas of RISMedia.com do now: I know this because I was consulted on how to insure that, and I tested it last week in my first post: it took less than an hour!  They have established a way of dividing up neighborhoods by population instead of Zip codes, and they are about to go live in the communities area.  I encourage the reader to join, join a group, heck start one, get into the Realtown store while there is room!  What they are attempting to do (the grass roots localization of the web) has been attempted before, but I believe they have the resources and the software to pull it off, and they will have the reach any minute!.

5.    Plaxo: Plaxo is kind of an online  open-social contact management hub, which recently added profiles and many modern features to its already accessible from anywhere excellent Internet based contact management application – you can import your contacts from Outlook, Linkedin, Google, Yahoo and others – then sync them with the same and your cell phone, so that you can always stay in touch with many interactive features and restore everything at will – wonderful -plugs right into my Outlook.

6.  Meetup: Social networking with the whole world at will, with actual local meet up events and clubs in person, great, I have contacted and secured businesss here and it is free.  Why re-invent the wheel, start your local leads or affinity group here: it can feed your website, and you will rank  instantly on google for the name of your profile!

14 of the 15 recomendations from last year still apply: we must have picked them well: here they are:

7.  Activerain – social networking profiles and blog for Realtors and vendors
Most people do not notice that you do not need to be a Realtor to join, you can be a vendor like me, and the profiles and blogs are not bad for Search Engine Placement link-building campaigns.

8. Alexa – Traffic and Website Statistics and Archived Information and Reviews
An Amazon.com company, we use it to get quick information about any website according to everyone who has the Alexa toolbar – which collects a wealth of information and statistics. They also archive old websites, and provide links to reviews on amazon.com.

9. Associated Content – Associated Content is a buyer and seller, syndicator of user-generated, user-filtered content
One of the most successful and well traveled sites on the web, this site is a must for branding and link building: your clout and pagerank build as an author – you can even get paid for content, although that is not what I use it for.

10. Delicious – social bookmarking, link-sharing
You install a toolbar that allows you to keep a set of favorites online where you can access them from any computer, and share them with the world, if you like, as an online resource. Excellent for traffic building and link-popularity, I recommend that you add and use the toolbar.

11. Digg.com – social bookmarking popularity-driven site:
This site is great for traffic-building for your articles and blogs, and also for link-popularity for your main site and blog: users submit, describe, review, and rank each others preferences. It is also great for getting real-time feedback on what people actually like and do not like about what you and/or others who write stuff that you read may have to say.

12. Feedburner – a feed aggregator that allows you to monitor various statistics about your feeds,
make them available in every format to your visitors, even sell advertising fed into the feed.

13. Google Adwords Keyword Tool – find out what words are searched for, and how much competition there is to rank for those words
To use it intelligently, you must understand the concept of pack mentality: we track trends in key industries like real estate and get to where the market is going first; many Realtors search daily for the same things, but they are not always each others target market – so be careful how you interpret the results from such tools.

14. Google Analytics Account – track everything through Google:
Again, it is essential that you understand that maketing is not just about what is happening right now, but also about what is changing, and what is about to happen; that being said, these are the most reliable numbers about your website, who visits it, what page they enter on, what page they exit on, and a wealth of other information.

15. Linkedin – most well-known business-to-business social networking site
Linkedin was originally for job and employment placement services – it is a very full-featured business-to-business networking site.

16.  Mybloglog.com – Blog syndication, networking, tracking, resources, and communities
Everyone with a blog should be here, and I highly recommend some of their tools, like the one that lets you see who has read this lately at the right of this page! I visit and network with them!

17. Myspace.com – the most well known social media site
If you thought is was just for kids, think again: the average age is over forty, and a profile here can be used for link-popularity and business networking, not just dating and file sharing!

18. Onlywire.com – multiple social bookmarks with one click!
It will take you a while to do this, but it wil then allow you to bookmark files in several places building traffic in one click!

19. Stumbleupon – another social bookmarking site very useful for traffic building:

20. Technorati.com – a blog, news and file sharing aggregator
Another must for bloggers: you can tag your posts and make them available to millions by keyword search

20. Yahoo Groups
One of the most underused, unknown resources: formerly Yahoo 360: MyYahoo offers a feature rich social media site for free, complete with RSS feed importation and other nice features, very use-friendly.

21. Facebook has exceeded the size MySpace already, continues to grow!

Here is a list of the Top Scoial Network Sites (From Compete.com)

A year ago, we ranked the top 25 social networking sites by monthly visits, and I was curious to see how the positions would change if we re-ranked those same sites with the most recent figures.

Some key metrics in the health of a social network revolve around the activity of the user base – visits per unique visitor and time on site. While Facebook has excelled in both areas, MySpace has remained flat or fallen off, with new hot property Twitter climbing the ranks.

MySpace is still the clear number two player in the big categories, but its trends in some key areas aren’t quite so dominatingl and, at least in those areas, they could be looking up at more than Facebook soon.

I’ll add biznik.com, stumbleupon.com…

Are you getting overwhelmed?  Why don’t you just do what you do best, and let us do the rest, for as little as $24.95?!  Visit socialmediasystems.com today!