While being hired on at StepForth Web Marketing our CEO, Ross Dunn, was interested in how someone with a background in sociology could benefit his company, specifically in understanding social media and how to market to it. Sociologists look at communities and try to dissect them as to what its participants have in common in addition to trends or commonalities within the communities.

Sociologists study society and social action by examining the groups and social institutions people form, as well as various social, religious, political, and business organizations. In essence it is the study of social interactions of people and groups. Read more…

Here’s a couple links I found interesting in my social research today

• Jeff Quipp does a great job of commentary on the current status of Digg. He combines theories on its new algorithms to a psychological approach on how it hooks new submitters.
• Arun Radhakrishnan shows us a search engine dedicated to combining social media and traditional search options. Seachles uses “search + circles” to find relevant information.

While I was whooping and hollering over the final touch down by the Giants on Super Bowl Sunday I got a twitter from Chiropractic, a fellow Twitterer obviously as ecstatic as I was. It was quite cool to connect with someone in another part of the continent excited over an event we were both watching… it was kind of surreal.

Apparently getting a Twitter or two was a very common occurence during the Super Bowl. In fact, Twitter decided to plot the spikes in Twitter traffic during the Super Bowl with some cool results. As it turned out there was a spike in traffic during every critical point within the game. Click on the chart to see the larger more revealing version. Read more…

The following were questions sent to us by readers of the StepForth SEO Newsletter and the StepForth SEO Blog. If you have a question of your own we would love to hear from you; email us your SEO question.

Question from Steve:
Information about the why’s & how-to’s of the BLOGosphere have made for a plethora of copy all over the SEO world, yet my constantly recurring question never seems to come up! And this first question always leads me to second one. (1) If your business is NOT in any way concerned with… let’s call it “journalism” (it seems that the business of StepForth would have a sizable reliance on journalistic talent), how would a company go about deploying a blog initiative and still have time to sleep more than one or two nights a week? (…there’s this business we gotta keep running!) And (2) if one were to hire one of many firms offering such a BLOG service, how would it come off as more than a thinly veiled SERP ranking initiative, when your business is not of the type where there is really any “news” to report — AND further, where the BLOG service cannot possibly be expected to have the specific knowledge needed to write usefully pertinent journalistic copy? Read more…

In the course of my day I come across a load of great articles or news posts that I often don’t have time to read. Sometimes I even do read them but forget to share the wealth. In addition, my Twitter feed is chalk full of article suggestions and tips from great minds; unfortunately I don’t do a good job of noting them yet. Here are a few links and tips I have come across today, I will try to do this more often:

• Microsoft adCenter To Power Ads On Wall Street Journal Digital Network
• Handling a Domain Name Dispute Without a Lawyer – when the big guys try to crush you with their legal teams because they don’t like your domain… what do you do? WebmasterWorld users weigh in.
• No Recession for Link Building – link building guru Eric Ward weighs in on the world of link building and how to adapt during any 2008 recession
• Free Social Media Measurement Webinar this Thursday: Jeremiah Owyang has put together a webinar “on Social Media Measurement How to Listen Effectively and Engage in the Conversation this Thursday at 12:30 EST/9:30PST with Glenn Fannick, Product Development Manager at Dow Jones.” This is likely to be a very interesting webinar which I highly recommend listening in on.
• Hey Rand, Do You Mean Siloing?: Lisa Barone wrote this great article on the theme-based approach to designing and optimizing a website (what Bruce Clay calls “content siloing”). It isn’t a new concept by any means but it is worth a read if you are unfamiliar with theme-based optimization.

On the always helpful advice of Michael Dorausch (a fellow Twitter user) I submitted my Twitter profile to the Twitter Pack Project. The Twitter Pack Project is a wiki where anyone can catalogue their Twitter address under a variety of categories:

• Packs by Topic
• Packs by Location
• Packs by Company
• Packs by Events or Meet-ups
• Packs by Identity

So what is the point? To gain more followers and network more with people of like minds. It is a great idea and I am happy that I took the time to publish my Twitter profile (www.twitter.com/rossdunn).

If you have a profile be sure to post it on the Twitter Pack Project. If you don’t have a Twitter account give Twitter a try, I have not regretted it one bit. In fact it has taken me by surprise just how good a networking tool it is and how interesting it is to follow people’s everyday discoveries as they Twitter them.

Related articles/posts:

• Twitter’s Usefulness Underscored During San Francisco Storm
• Twitter Get’s a Guide

Expect QDOS (taken from ‘kudos’) to be on the lips of many over the next year. QDOS is a method to monitor and measure your own Internet popularity and, in the longer run, help you secure your online persona from identity theft.

Currently running in Beta in the UK, QDOS is planning to launch in North America in this first quarter of 2008. So how does QDOS calculate Internet status?

Read more…

Since I signed up with Twitter I have experienced a wide array of emotion while experiencing the lives of the people I follow; sad because someone I follow was struggling with depression, frustrated due to repetitive useless tweets, and amazed and excited by the timely news I am often privy too. Obviously I prefer to be excited and amazed and today happens to be one of those days.

In this case, San Francisco and much of California is currently being rocked by a highly irregular storm that has raised severe weather alerts such as flash floods, and high surf/coastal floods. Well it just so happens that a few of the people I follow on Twitter are from this area and their tweets provide proof that Twitter (the community-based text messaging platform) has a value above my expectation. Read more…

If you have ever used Facebook then this video by the geniuses over at Train of Thought (a comedy sketch group) will surely give you a chuckle:

Today I have been busy polishing off a feature article for tomorrow’s SEO newsletter but in the midst of that I came across a few articles and posts that caught my eye:

• My Twitter friend and social networker extroardinaire Tamar Weinberg wrote a great article that shows which social media networks she networks across different social sites:
  “How Do You Network On Social Sites?“
• ResourceShelf has links to recently posted research papers by Google employees. These papers can be gems for foretelling the future of search: Recently Posted Research Papers and Biblographic Info by Googlers. Special thanks to Barry Schwartz and his helpful Tweet that brought me to this info.
• The unofficial Facebook blog (“AF”) discusses the incredible potential of social shopping heralded by Facebook’s recent Beta test of a payment system. You will be hearing a LOT more about this very soon.
• Did you know that Democrats “participate more fully in social technologies”? This is just one of the interesting nuggets found in this fascinating post by Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research: Social Profiles of Political Candidates. The posting has excellent information sourced from a Forrester research document.