How do you make big decisions from microdata?

Right now, everyone seems focused on real-time search with some component of qualitative measures on individual tweets.

How do you tie microdata to “macro” memory?

Tweets are great for reporting but not for analysis or growth – the best content producers tend to spend the most time composing their communications and linking it to historical information. Reading a book is almost always a better choice than spending time on Twitter. Unless this public stream of consciousness is a precursor of singularity it is severely flawed.

With microcommunication platforms amplifying all signals, spam is becoming increasingly problematic – how is this managed?

Right now, filters are generally based on peer networks, but peer networks are only 1 dimension of the social space (another, more valuable one being interest networks) – and peer networks on permeable (API-enabled) platforms are easily infiltrated (via bots).

I’m sketching out a blog post on SMO (social media optimization) eclipsing SEO as a focus for online marketing.

If you have brains and some experience in “social media marketing,” whether it’s getting active on Twitter, pimping your site on social networks, starting Meetups, etc., would you mind leaving a comment with your responses to the following questions?

1. Do you think SMO is all hype? Is SEO (or even traditional marketing) still more relevant?
2. Can you name any other valuable SMO “placements,” such as Digg’s front page, FB feeds, etc.?
3. Getting integrated into FB Connect so your platform’s activities are written into FB feeds seems like a must-do for any serious web app. If you were trying to define SMO best practices, what other practices would you recommend for grabbing a social media spotlight? Email bloggers? Reply to tweets that match keywords of interest?
4. What tools (if any) do you use for SMO (e.g. TweetDeck, email campaign management, link marketplaces, web rings)?
5. Anything else? Do you think SMO can be outsourced? Does SMO have to be the product of passion?

This stems from my realization that it’s probably more valuable to have a link to your site appear in 100 peoples’ activity feeds on Facebook than on a page of Google search results, particularly if you’re going for something more than simple traffic (trying to sell something, for instance). My own experience building dubandreggae.com’s membership reinforces this belief, though there’s an obvious bias, because DnR is a socnet rather than a brand, vendor, or media outlet. This has been reinforced though, with Justin’s recent launch of LAMP Security – he’s seen a jump in traffic thanks to posting security advisories to niche mailing lists and being reblogged within the space.

Thanks for any help and insight you have on this topic. I’m happy to compile and share the responses – in addition to synthesizing the information into a blog post – if you want to read them, and I’ll credit contributors in the post itself. I’d also be happy if you forwarded this to anyone else who is knowledgeable and might respond, especially social thought superheroes.

Peace out
c

Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting.

[...]

“It’s an aggregate phenomenon,” Marc Davis, a chief scientist at Yahoo and former professor of information science at the University of California at Berkeley, told me. “No message is the single-most-important message. It’s sort of like when you’re sitting with someone and you look over and they smile at you. You’re sitting here reading the paper, and you’re doing your side-by-side thing, and you just sort of let people know you’re aware of them.”

Why is this important?

Paul Graham is a big proponent of face-to-face communication as a critical component to cooperation, business success, and innovation. In his article on great cities, he observes that :

Maybe one day the most important community you belong to will be a virtual one, and it won’t matter where you live physically. But I wouldn’t bet on it. The physical world is very high bandwidth, and some of the ways cities send you messages are quite subtle.

He repeats a similar “high bandwidth” mantra in an article on why startup founders should all sit together in the same room: because there is a great deal of important subtle, ambient information that we pick up in person but wouldn’t ever make time to include in a media communication.

That’s exactly the kind of communication that is provided by Flickr. Again from the NYTimes article (excerpt edited):

“Ambient awareness” is very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye.

“Instant” is synonym of “immediate”. The American Heritage Dictionary defines immediate in one sense as “Acting or occurring without the interposition of another agency or object; direct.” The word’s etymology is from the Middle English immediat, from Old French, from Late Latin immediātus : Latin in-, not; + Latin mediātus, past participle of mediāre, “to halve,” later, “be in the middle,” from Latin medius “middle.”

“Instant” bypasses many of the normal downsides associated with mediated communication. This only works if microcommunications are cheap to create (e.g. Ping.fm, Twitter, Zannel) and it’s possible for an audience to see the relationship between them (e.g. FriendFeed).