New Jersey Marketing Consultants Offer Real Support for Webmasters
Published December 29th, 2008 | 
Let’s face it: It’s extremely difficult to build your website’s brand in a sea of websites that make-up the Internet. As your website grows, there will probably come a time when you’ll need to engage the services of a professional offering consulting Internet marketing services.
The problem with that is, most of the so-called SEO/Internet marketing pros online often turn-out to be some guy who lives in his grandmother’s basement who maybe read a book, took a seminar, or perused Google’s own support page. In other words, they don’t have the bone fides to back-up their rhetoric when it comes to navigating Web 2.0. Thankfully, there is one company (that happens to be located in my own neck of the woods) — Reciprocal Consulting. Reciprocal Consulting, formerly Foreman & Pike Consulting, is a company made-up of serious IT professionals with solid track record for success. With over twenty years experience in Information Technology and with employees who bring with them knowledge from many areas including webdesign, telecommunications, Internet and traditional marketing, webmasters will find that both their brand and their reputations are in good hands. They offer services ranging from pay-per-click management and search-engine-optimization to social networking optimization and competative marketing intelligence.
The Twit Who Sat On My Face
Published December 21st, 2008 | Over at Twittip.com there’s a post that’s stirring-up a lively discussion: “The Misunderstood Uses of Twitter and Facebook: Are you a friend, follower or a fool?” The post’s author’s premise is this:
— Facebook’s main purpose centers on furthering and cultivating relationships with already established friends
— Twitter’s main purpose centers on social networking (meeting people across the world with similar interests)
This blogger further says that “when [he thinks] of Facebook and Twitter, [he thinks] of Preparation-H and toothpaste. Both are quality products. Both have their uses; but Preparation-H, like Twitter, is only needed at a certain point in life.”
On the surface, the analogy makes sense. It seems fairly obvious that Facebook and Twitter go about the business of “friend-building” differently. I think the analogy misses something important, however. It’s an apple ‘n’ oranges comparison and, while apples and oranges are both kinds of fruit, they are fruit of a different tree. But those two trees do share a common root. If you look at social networking generically as a form of communication, then the only thing separating one form from another is the speed with which one is able to communicate and process that information. On one end of the spectrum you’d have human thought and on the slowest end, you’d have a handwritten letter. It would probably look something like this:
Letter-email-blog-Facebook-Twitter-IM/chat-cellphone-conversation-thought
<<--slowest/highly organized/more intimate -------fast/less organized/less intimate-------fastest/least organized/more intimate)-->>
As such, if you are looking at “social networking” as a means for “making friends,” the whole argument becomes absurd because the very nature of the technology is that you are trading coherent organization and real intimacy for speed and efficiency of communication. Now, this is not to say you can’t make real friends online — it’s just more accurate to acknowledge that friendship building, to the extent that it does occur, is an added benefit of social networking and not the primary function of using tools like Twitter or Facebook. No, social networking is all about self-promotion: yourself, your business, your ideas, your blog, delivering your point-of-view to individuals in short bursts of information — individuals who hopefully share an interest in what you’re selling. It might actually be more accurate to call this process “information trafficking” rather than “social networking,” because meaningful person-to-person networking is still primarily face-to-face spoken communication, whereas ideas and information are still primarily distributed through written communication, psuedo-conversational mediums such as Twitter or blogs notwithstanding.
While it’s certainly nice to connect with or reconnect with an old friend and it’s nice also to make new friends, I have no illusions as to why I belong to social networking communities or the “need” for Twitter. Twitter isn’t so much a community unto itself as it is a tool to traverse the space between other communities. For example, I have accounts with both MySpace and Facebook. While I’ve found some overlap between the two sites, for the most part, my friends on MySpace don’t go on Facebook and vica versa. What I’ve discovered is that there is more overlap between Twitter and every community I am involved with than with MySpace and Facebook alone, so Twitter is like a bridge between them. And while I’ve only recently started tweeting, I do see a time when I will get much more use out of it than I do presently because the funny thing about technology is that when it ceases to be a mere tool and becomes a “lifestyle,” it trends toward becoming absolutely necessary.
