56 Seconds
Average time an American spends looking at a Web page.
Source: Nielsen

"In another experiment, recently conducted at Stanford University's Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media Lab, a team of researchers gave various cognitive tests to 49 people who do a lot of media multitasking and 52 people who multitask much less frequently. The heavy multitaskers performed poorly on all the tests. They were more easily distracted, had less control over their attention, and were much less able to distinguish important information from trivia."

Some of us have been saying this  over and over and over.

CHA-CHING. Right on the money. THIS is what is called community and engagement. #recognize

Other notable points:
- High engagement
- High value
- value vs potential = on point

How am I doing this? Here you go:
"MySpace on Facebook: The Beginning of Something Wonderful"
"MySpace on Facebook: How I'm Building Community"
My interview via Marketing Pilgrim

"In September 2008 at Web 2.0 Expo in New York, I shared something that many, to this day, believe to the contrary, “There is no such thing as viral marketing.”

The declaration was empathetic in its direction to those marketers who have been on the receiving end of directives instructing them to create and unleash viral content. In parallel, the statement was aimed at those decision makers who assign such projects.

Content, no matter how brilliant, creative, abstract, or controversial, is not inherently viral. Yet, we’re asked repeatedly to create viral videos, posts, and other social objects that will trigger an endless array of retweets, pages and profiles that immediately attract fans and followers accompanied by a deafening wall of sound propelled by word of mouth.

Content doesn’t make something viral; people are the primary source of powering social objects across the attention nodes that connect the human network.

Despite what appears commonsensical, we’re surprised when our brainchild doesn’t attract the views, attention, and circulation we believe it deserves.

The reality of social media is this, in the attention economy, information isn’t randomly discovered and broadly disseminated. It is strategically positioned to either appear when someone searches for a related keyword or it’s presented to someone manually and deliberately.

As individuals, we no longer find information, it finds us."

A-MEN.

SEO, keywords, optimization, la la la zzzzzzz who gives a crap...right? WRONG. Whether you are a blogger, a marketer, a PR pro or what have you, so long as you are in the Internet business -- specifically social media -- we MUST teach ourselves the basics. Otherwise, our efforts could be moot. As in wasted. As in, wtf are we spending all this time online for?

Listen. Linking well known blogs does not automatically catch Google's attention. It could actually do the opposite, as in bucket you as spam. As Internet professionals, we want to grab Google's attention, get on Google's goodside and keep Google's attention. Otherwise, your site could end up on the bottom of the list. Bottom of the list = no one can find you. There are basic methods and best practices we all should be aware of (at the very least.) And hey, don't beat yourself up if you didn't know this. The most important thing is you want to learn.

So invest a few minutes out of your day to read this post. I'm in the same industry as you, I know how much time, effort, and energy is used to post content. I'm just saying it would be a darn shame if Google wrote you off as spam (or frankly, garbage), only because you don't understand how Google's search engine works.

Read the entire piece "Perfecting Keyword Targeting & On-Page Optimization" here which I found via "Targeting Multiple Keywords vs Singular Keyword Focus" here.

[sidenote]
For the vets out there rolling their eyes: do you give yourself refreshers? I sure as heck do. I force relearning to 1. stay on my toes and 2. to try and keep everything as simple as possible for sometimes, when I am too knee deep in the daily grind it is tough not to over analyze. Thank goodness for people like Rand, who simplifies the complex.

Data compiled from Cision and Don Bates of the George Washington University’s Master’s Degree Program in Strategic Public Relations, in which they: "found reporters depend on social media sources when researching their stories – but not at the extent to transform an industry over night." via Brian Solis's Immediacy vs Accuracy piece. (Great post, highly recommended read.)

Aside from the great points Brian brings up when I look at the numbers, it greatly troubles me.  Take a look: "55% of the journalists said that social media was “important” or “somewhat important” for reporting and producing stories…"
Yet, "84% of journalists indicated that information was much less and slightly less reliable than traditional media based on the lack of fact-checking, verification and reporting standards." 

As a person who is not a journalist, I rely on journalists to bring me the most accurate, reliable news -- whether on or offline. So if journalists don't trust digital mediums, where does that leave us?

Another reason why we MUST kick up our critical thinking skills. Must.

WE may be able to amass 5,000 friends on Facebook but humans’ brains are capable of managing a maximum of only 150 friendships, a study has found.

Robin Dunbar, professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University, has conducted research revealing that while social networking sites allow us to maintain more relationships, the number of meaningful friendships is the same as it has been throughout history.

Dunbar developed a theory known as “Dunbar’s number” in the 1990s which claimed that the size of our neocortex — the part of the brain used for conscious thought and language — limits us to managing social circles of around 150 friends, no matter how sociable we are.

Dunbar derived the limit from studying social groupings in a variety of societies — from neolithic villages to modern office environments. He found that people tended to self-organise in groups of around 150 because social cohesion begins to deteriorate as groups become larger.

“There is a big sex difference though ... girls are much better at maintaining relationships just by talking to each other. Boys need to do physical stuff together.”

Dunbar’s study is due to be published later this year.

ht: @mike_elgan

The relevant point is that the company's operations had long since been sensitive to public concerns, and it could move smoothly into a media spotlight with a clear understanding of its own objectives, and without fear that the world would end if it did not win all the points in the telecast. Such an approach, in my view, is far more sophisticated than conventional public relations.

[...]

The media, after all, live on information, and "others" can influence the outcome by providing accurate material. It is a corollary, of course, that "others" have a right to keep at arm's length media agents who have a record of distorting facts to fit preconceived notions of high drama.

Circa 1981.
Blows my mind this still applies. Separately, can't get off The Atlantic. And it's all your fault, Jim Norris.

Seems rudimentary but it's pretty shocking how a lot of sites and services execute poorly. This post goes over basics (with examples):
1. size
2. shape
3. color
4. position

Word.
ht @tamar

If you believe Vanity Fair's take on it, female power users of Twitter have more in common with the movie 'Mean Girls' than with anything legitimately related to business.

(Credit: Paramount Pictures)

Yet in its February issue--yes, the one with Tiger Woods on the cover--it managed to publish one of the silliest, most superficial, and most wildly out of touch articles about Twitter that I've ever read. Called "America's Tweethearts," it discusses the phenomenon of individuals (primarily attractive women) who have amassed notable amounts of Twitter fame, or "twilebrity." (Twilebrity? Barf.)

Accompanying the article, which makes liberal use of egregiously irritating Twitter terms ("tweeple," "Twitformation Superhighway") that were likely coined by folks who blog about "your personal brand" and hand out business cards etched with "Social Media Expert" at marketing conferences, is a stylized photograph of six female "Twilebrities" identified by name and follower count. I know a few of them personally and am familiar with the rest, and I can say that they all have reputations for working hard and really "getting" the power of Twitter marketing and conversation when many people still thought that the microblogging service had about as much lasting power as the pet rock.

 

I'd like to think the whole thing is satire. I really, really would.