The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success

"Different isn't always better, but better is always different."

I'm not one to seek validation in the approval of others, so I've been slow to grasp the significance of "social networking" sites. The fact is, you could ignore them at one time, but the ever-changing secret machinations of the major search engines more or less compel you to get involved in them now. That is if you want anybody to see what you publish online.

I'm not going to go into great detail about social networking here. This isn't that sort of site. My focus is to highlight products that are useful and hopefully sell a few. I'm just scratching the surface of The Social Media Bible, but I can already see that it's going to be worth many times the twenty bucks I spent on it. According to the authors, this book will help you:

Increase your company and brand value by engaging people in new forms of communication, collaboration, education, and entertainment Determine which social media tactics you should be using with your customers and employees Evaluate and categorize the tools and applications that constitute the rapidly evolving social media ecosystem Make social media tools like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter, blogging, podcasting, and hundreds of others a part of your business strategy Do a social media analysis inside your company to improve internal operations and outside your company to create and monetize relationships with customers and prospects Implement social media micro- and macrostrategies to give your business the competitive edge it needs to survive and thrive

I've already learned that it's more important to post to a blog frequently than to necessarily have a lot to say -- at least from a site traffic point of view. So that's it! Watch for my upcoming Halloween feature.

Heuristic Search Algorithms : StumbleUpon.com

Amazon.com > Books > Computers & Internet > Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence > Heuristic & Constrained Search >

"Good decisions are born of experience. Experience is born of bad decisions."-- Unknown

Don't let the techie title throw you -- heuristic is just a ten-dollar word for learning, and algorithms are just collections of computer commands that accomplish a certain task, much like a recipe. In fact, computer algorithm books are often called cookbooks. So what we're talking about here are computer searches that improve as you use them.

As an example, take Amazon.com's recommendation feature. (If you've read this blog before, you probably saw that coming!) Amazon tracks your browsing behavior on their site using magic browser cookies, and based on the information they collect, guesses what other pages might interest you. BTW, the recommendations I get aren't particularly focussed, since I crawl all over Amazon looking for niche market products. The heuristic algorithm therefore assumes that I'm interested in just about anything. Come to think of it, that's exactly what its supposed to do.

Another familiar example is the Yahoo! Search suggestions feature. If, for example, you enter the search term "router," a box of suggestions will appear after a brief delay. These might include "woodworking routers" or "ethernet routers" or "Netgear routers". I'm not using actual examples from Yahoo! since those are subject to change, but these examples should be sufficient to illustrate the point. I like the fact that Yahoo! merely suggests possible refinements -- Microsoft has an irritating tendency to assume that they know what you want better than you do.

StumbleUpon.com is a social-networking site and search engine that allows you to select up to 127 interests that will be used to customize your search results. As you use the service, you can click on one of two buttons (Thumbs Up) I like this or (Thumbs Down). Simple. If you're ambivalent, you don't have to rate a page. I've seen a lot of rating systems, but this is probably my favorite because you're not ruining somebody's day by giving them the thumbs down -- and they can't ruin yours. All you are doing is demoting the page and others like it in your own search results. People who think Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld are great American patriots are unaffected.

I looked at this service a couple of years ago and wasn't very impressed, but I don't recall the search feature being present then. I may have overlooked it, but I think you just had to "stumble" from page to page. That might be alright for casual surfing, but it's not very focussed. The database is now a lot bigger too. To try Stumbling, go to the Getting Started page, where you will learn all you need to know. If you have trouble adding pages with the toolbar because of your firewall settings, old or weird browser, or whatever, you can use the form below:

Submit Page to StumbleUpon.com

http://

Last, but certainly not least, your StumbleUpon history generates your own personal StumbleUpon blog, which is visible to the major search engines if you're just looking for backlinks, and to other stumblers, of course, if you are more interested in the social networking aspects of the site. You are cordially invited to subscribe to my StumbleUpon blog at any time.