An article by Todd Mintz made me realize that it’s not Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, or the others commonly known Social Marketing sites that sounded the first alarms of Social Networking, but rather the 80′s ban REO Speedwagon with the famous song Take it on the run. He starts his article with the famous lyrics “Heard it from a friend who, heard it from a friend who, heard it from another. That’s pretty much the essence of making social networking work; its that same old approach, just online. It’s not just “posting and praying” but contacting your network of connected social networkers so they can “tell two friends, who tell two friends, who tell two friends, and so on, and so on” (you old timers remember that shampoo commercial right). So was it really REO Speedwagon then or Breck that was on to this early on?

On an SEM related note, Todd also links to Thomas Dolby’s blog. This is an example of how not to set up a blog (the links are not optimized, and the hot category for that blog is “misc”). Some would call that site bashing, I call it free consulting. I am sure he does just fine with his name recognition and all, but to have a year worth of non optimized blog post… yikes! Perhaps he will see this blog post and contact me about optimizing and monetizing his blog, or maybe his royalties are treating him well enough. BTW Mr. Dolby, it’s seo @ oldschoolseo.com.

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