Is your business missing the boat on social media? Frankly, it depends. Social media can be an effective method for promoting your business. It can also be a massive "time suck". 

Is your business missing the boat on social media? Frankly, it depends. Social media can be an effective method for promoting your business. It can also be a massive "time suck". 

Is your business missing the boat on social media? Frankly, it depends. Social media can be an effective method for promoting your business. It can also be a massive "time suck". 

Was Carol Bartz fired because Yahoo lost the positioning battle? That is the opinion of Daniel Ambrose summarized in a MediaPost article. He states, "It lost the positioning battle, the struggle for a positive place in the minds of advertising buyers, where the bulk of Yahoo's revenue is derived.  Without a positioning that captures the imagination of the market, Yahoo ad revenue flat-lined while it grew for others"

I am suffering from a case of social media overload. Google Plus has put me over the edge. IMHO, Google has succeeded in developing a "sharing" platform that is superior to Facebook and Twitter ("sharing" is Google's terminology - after the Wave and Buzz flops, they seem to be avoiding the use of the term "social media"). However, being active on all the social media platforms is a real time eater. Further, as active social media information posters push out information across yet another platform.Google Plus will lead to further dilution of the attention to be gained from those that utilize social media gather information.

This is a guest post from Michael Chibuzor. He runs a blog providing traffic building tips. Read more of his articles at Blast4TrafficNow.net

While starting off with my internet business, one of the web traffic sources I discovered was article marketing. As a matter of fact, experts  recommend writing and publishing articles on top article directories. Honestly, when I tried this system for about 6 months, it brought in a decent amount of traffic that was somewhat targeted. My niche blogs where also able to rank pretty well on Google, sucking in traffic and generating sales ultimately. 

For bloggers, the growth of social media has been godsend. It offers a great way to promote new content and find new readers. However, for small businesses the new requirement imposed by Google and Bing that they become “social media spammers” is potentially another added cost of doing business. Quoting Aaron Wall from his SEOBook.com post, Social Spam Required by Bing and Google,

“Would you trust the local plumber to work on your house if he was posting "exciting viral content" online about how some projects went astray?

I recently became the 78,000th follower of an active collecter of Twitter followers. He followed me and I followed back. I would love to think that he is following me based on the informative value of my Tweets. But frankly, there is little chance of his reading my Tweets or him reading mine. This raises the question of whether at this point there contiues to be significant value in collecting a large number of random followers by following them with the knowledge a significant percentage will follow back? Given that only about 1% of this new Twitter connection's 78,000 followers have ever retweeted one of his messages, obviously his Tweets are mostly just digital white noise.

Conducting transactions online has become so commonplace that shoppers take online purchasing for granted and fail to take reasonable security precautions. I am constantly surprised at how many visitors to our ecommerce sites will provide their credit card numbers over the phone to an individual they know nothing about, answering the phone number listed on a website that they have only interacted with for a few minutes. It has been months since we have had a customer ask probing questions to ascertain that we really are legitimate  I certainly am not complaining about this as it certainly benefits us, just expressing my surprise.

In asking twenty-somethings about online privacy, it's pretty typical to get a response along the lines of "what privacy". Young adults that are active social media consumers and creators are so used to their information being widely distributed that they often express a lack of concern about their privacy, because they take it for granted that they don't have any.