Every social media platform--LinkedIn, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Flickr and many more--has features for sharing, commenting, reposting, rating, recommending, joining, linking, using mobile apps etc. The principles of sharing, collaborating, and participating are more than tried and true best methods for networking offline and online, collaboration is actually built into the technology.
Take Google technology as an example. Google has developed a set of rules and procedures to consider 500 million variables to determine if your site is relevant, comprehensive, fresh, and fast and packaged into a neat algorithm.
Google PageRank ™ Technology
Considers over 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that receive a higher PageRank are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.
Hypertext-Matching AnalysisAnalysis of page content. However, instead of scanning for page-based text (which can be manipulated by site publishers through meta-tags) Google technology analyzes the full content of a page and factors in fonts, subdivisions and the precise location of each word. Google also analyzes the content of neighboring pages to ensure results returned are the most relevant to a user's query.
A great youtube video understand linking and hypertext is The Machine is Us/ing Us.
The other platforms have done likewise to assist its users in tracking, matching, and networking refined to a more specific purpose than key word matching, but people connecting.
There is much to distrust on the web. We should all be of leery of scams, hacks, and privacy issues. The secret to successful online marketing is to be consistently appealing and trustworthy. In a world where choice rules and it is, in fact, built in to the technology, just a hint of traditional hard sell advertising (or a social network du jour going awry) will scatter the flock.
Perhaps this is a
case, with all the good, the bad and the ugly in the world, being good may get
you a better hand of cards.
