Social media is an ever evolving part of internet marketing. There are thousands and tens of thousands of social networks out there with sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Digg being some of the bigger players. A lot of companies want to just run head first into social media without having any sort of plan. One of the first steps someone should take is to learn the lingo. Twitter is the best one to use as an example since there are things like URL shorteners, hash tags and tweets.

Before jumping into a social network, or maybe even signing up, start running through the public timeline. See how people are structuring their messages and pick out things that aren’t familiar. If you quickly scan Twitter, you’ll see messages with things like this:

• # – Hash tag, used for tracking and other things
• bit.ly or ow.ly – Examples of URL or link shorteners, allows you to fit a longer URL in your tweets
• FollowFriday – used to tell your followers about people on Twitter you find useful
• @ – Use this followed by someones handle or username to reply to them
• RT – Stands for Retweet, passing on or forwarding someone else’s tweet

These are just a handful of unique things to Twitter. If a scan had be done, someone could pick these out and find out what they mean so they use them properly. It would be embarrassing for something to jump in and start tweeting to then use the lingo wrong and look silly. Something as simple as saying “FridayFollow” when the correct terminology is “FollowFriday” can put egg on someone’s face and let everyone on Twitter know they’re a newbie.

I read Shoemoney’s post within this last week and I honesty didn’t get into the debate about 95% of SEO’s being “the used car salesmen” of search engine marketing (SEM). But then yesterday his podcast with Danny Sullivan about 95% of SEO’s being “shady” and it really got me thinking about the real definition of an SEO and what their value should be. Ultimately Danny and Shoe made really good point, and I understand Shoe position.

What value do we truly offer as SEO’s or SEM’s? Danny talked a lot about new things coming in and kind of branching off SEO like reputation management, social media, etc. and I think they are viable SEO activities but at the same time, I feel they shouldn’t be used to “razzle and dazzle” but rather compliment the basics such as the title tags, building out content, and link building. The more and more I learn about SEO, true link building is an art and not such an easy one. I mean, people are building out great content and getting links back, but I think there are some elements to link building that can be tougher than just content creation.

I think this podcast was awesome and more real discussions like this should take place between people in the industry! Thanks Shoe and Danny!