These days it’s almost impossible to turn on the TV or read news with out seeing something about social media, social marketing, or social networking.  Sites like Facebook, which is now the most trafficked site in the US, along with Twitter, Digg, Linkedin, MySpace, Youtube, Ning, Mixx, and more are all trying to get more users to spend more time on their sites in hopes of gaining bigger position in the Internet to where they can monetize and make some money.

In fact, just last week Twitter announced it’s own monetizing strategy, which includes paid tweets from major companies.  Facebook has been doing this for years already, and the same with MySpace, but it’s the first for Twitter and assuming it’s successful, more will follow.

Most people would say that birthdays are great, although some don’t appreciate them as much as others do I suppose. It’s not that I can’t see why some people don’t like birthdays, but most are reasons of vanity or insecurity and not really justified as all around belief.

I personally like birthdays for a lot of reasons, and not just because of the presents, even though those are nice to get as well.  However, it’s nice to be acknowledged, and with the use of social sites today, there is a lot more of that. For example, sign into Facebook and I get dozens of birthday greetings from people that I had never gotten them from before. This is a nice way of connecting and feeling special. I used to be happy just getting  call or two from a friend or family member, but not I can expect to get dozens of birthday wishes over a couple of days. Greetings come in from various sites where my birthday is posted for public view.

I’ve been blogging for about two years now and I have to say that I love blogging. Blogging is one of the few things that we can all do to help each other share thoughts, gain more knowledge, and maybe make a couple of bucks.  There are so many ways to do a blog, and things to blog about that I wonder why everyone doesn’t have a blog already. In fact, I’m so happy blogging that I run 4 personal blogs, as well as half of dozen blogs for my company.  In addition, my company is seeing the value of blogging and they are letting me set up even more blogs to help generate viral marketing on the web.  Blogs can be about anytime and everything.  The best blogs are the ones that really have good content and not just some collection of random posts and articles that a person gets off another site.  True bloggers know that the only way to build an audience to put out unique original content that is thought provoking and relevant.

I’m currently putting together thoughts on a new book about social marketing.  In doing so, I’m trying to figure out if the title should be very technical sounding title for the savvy-minded, or if it should be a more common sense approach to socializing and how it relates to every day people.  The book will cover the many new emerging social networks, how they work, which ones to be one, and for what reasons, as well as it will touch on how to apply those to various strategies on the web today.

I had a couple of thoughts about the title and I’m going throw them out here. It would be nice to hear from some of you about which ones you like or if you have a suggestion of your own please feel free to write a comment.

I just got finished updating my personal website and portfolio, and I put some cool new UI features on it.  I’m ready to officially launch the new personal site and look forward to some input.  I think the effects are pretty interesting and made are strickly with CSS and Javascript features, and that should make some people think and hopefully play with it once or twice.  I personally like the fold out effect on the home page.  When the personal div opens there is an option that says “Are you done with me”, click on that option and watch the cool effect that takes effect.  None of the page effects were done with flash or animation, and were all done with CSS and Javascript, with all data still being rendered on-page for search engines.  It’s a personal goal of mine to make sure all necessary data gets indexed by the engines.  It’s not that I don’t like flash, but I like to see how much I can do without it.  I really like the fade in a fade out effects as well.  How about the slide in navigation bar.  It’s a way of keeping data out of the way, but still have it available.  I’m going to be working with more effects on the site over the next few months, so stay tuned for more fun! You can visit the new site at SalSurra.com.

Socializing with relevance makes social sites relevant.

I’ve been using social sites for the past couple of years now, and find them very useful in my daily life.  Yes, I’m one of those people that one would be called a twitter-holic, or Facebook fiend, but in truth I get more information and stay current with more things than I ever got from traditional media and networks.  In the past, the I would use newspaper and television to get my current news, but today I can use my social networks to see what things are making news at that very moment and the ones that matter most to me.  However, I find that many social sites don’t have the ability to weed out irrelevant content, but some have found ways to keep the most relevant content upfront.

In order to truly take advantage of these networks I think it’s a good idea to exchange one’s ideas freely across the networks at the same time.  What this will do is make each site more relevant by making the content the driving force for one’s social persona.  This means that because I’ve got all of my sites linked together I think twice before posting something that I don’t think is somewhat relevant or useful to the majority of people in my network, versus just socializing things because they are there.  For example, I have a Digg, account, but I’ve got my Digg feed linked up to my Friendfeed, which posts to my Twitter, and then goes to my Facebook.