Over the last year hashtagsocialmedia.com has grown and grown and we are attempting to match that growth with new and useful features. So here is the rundown:

Hosting Platform

Last year we were plagued by server and hosting issues causing the site to crash too often whenever traffic would spike. There is nothing wrong with this particular host. They just were not the right tool for the job and as our demands grew they just could not keep up. It happens.

In January We moved out Hosting over to Media Temple and it has been a huge improvement. So far we have not exceeded our resources even during our busiest events without affecting the site performance.

New Twitter Integration

A few new Twitter features and a few more to come:

• Twitter sign in through  Oauth
  • Users can now sign in through Oauth on our Live page or any of the event pages. This will let users Follow and favorite and participate in events directly from hashtagsocialmedia.com
    

• Filtering the #socialmedia noise
  • As the use of #socialmedia hastag grew we got so much spam that the we needed a way to filter the spam out. So we added the “Filter the #SocialMedia Noise” option to bot the live and event archive pages.So now when viewing the archives you can get a clean organized transcript of the event with the moderator highlighted for readability

    
    

    
    

    
    

• Follow users on twitter directly through the live and events page
  • When you sign in with twitter on hashtagsocialmedia.com you can now easily  follow people right from the archive page without leaving the site

    
    

    
    

    
    

• Thumbs Up Feature
  • This is a ratings feature. As the events wrap up we want to be able to highlight the most insightful tweets and report them back.  Right now this feature is 100% user powered so we need your help to mine out the most valuable points in each discussion. All you have to do is click the thumbs up icon and it will increase that point value for that tweet. You can give the “Thumbs Up” during the live events or when reading back through the transcript of an archived event.

    
    

    
    

    
    

• “The Big Follow”
  • This was just added yesterday and it is one of the features we are most excited about. “The Big Follow” button will be displayed on the event archive pages, but only if you are signed in through twitter Oauth, When you click “The Big Follow” your will automatically follow all of the participants of this event on twitter. This is a great feature as everyone that participates in the weekly chats are professionals trying to advance the world of business in social media. So you can easily follow a quality list of professionals on twitter.

    
    

• Profile Pages
  • We have added profile pages so that users can look back on what other users have tweeted in previous events. So if you are following the live events on Tuesdays you can easily click the profile button and get an overview of that persons activity in the #socialmedia twitter events.

Sorting Features on the Event Archive Pages

Last week we added some basic sorting features for viewing the archived twitter events. When and event transcript you can now sort the event ascending or descending based on the time of the tweet. In other words you can read the event forwards or backwards. We also added a requested  staggered chat view that may be easier to read for some.

New Ways to Connect

• Twitter
• Facebook
• LinkedIn <– Just Added

Iphone App

A couple weeks ago our iPhone app was accepted into the iTunes store. It is a free app and provides some simple and useful features. We often hear that people can not participate because they are not at the office or in front of the computer for one reason or another and this app may solve that problem for some.

1. Read the Latest Blog Entries
2. Follow the Live #sm twitter events from anywhere –
3. Participate in the live twitter event by replying or re-tweeting
4. Follow the schedule of upcoming events

One Year Anniversary

Finally we have our 52nd event coming up in just a couple of weeks. A solid year of  hosting events every week. Congrats to Jason Breed and Marc Meyer for making it happen each week.

Good News!

The official  hashtagsocialmedia.com  iPhone App has been accepted into the itunes store and you can get it now!

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/socialmedia/id352777958?mt=8

Why use this app? Glad you asked. Here are some of  the features

• Read the blog topics and full posts
• Follow the live twitter chats on the go
• Participate in the live twitter chats while away from you comp. … reply.retweet,…etc…
• Schedule of upcoming events

Our main goal in creating this app was to give people an easy way to follow the conversations when they are not at their desk. However, we are seeing more and more opportunities for this app already so we think this is just the beginning and that we can add more features soon.

(An SEO friendly URL shortener may not be far off)
Twitter really is making an impact on the Internet more and more, like it or not. URL shorteners have popped up all over the place to accommodate long links in the strict 140 character or less twitter world. Of course, the biggest drawback to these links is they are not SEO friendly. This is a big drawback. Since all url shortners do is act as a redirect translation system all short urls point to the url service. So if you are using bit.ly or tinyurl or aything else all you are  adding backlinks to the domain of that services. Sure those services claim to use 301 redirects but lets face it, it’s likely done via programming code which basically equates to a javascript window.location url. You might get something out of it but not much. Anyways, you don’t use URL shortners as an SEO tactic in the first place.

However, in the near future, using an shortened url service may may actually work with your SEO efforts. Google has just announced today the Google URL shortener. For the time being, it is only available for their internal use but they will likely open it for general use soon. The service is named http://goo.gl/ . Not too shabby. The domain name is only 6 character total with the .gl included. They even managed to brand it  by calling it googl. Not too shabby at all.

The benefit of this service, once it hopefully goes live to the public, is that you would be registering your short URL redirect with google. So Google would not have to index a service like tinyurl or bit.ly to understand what these redirects are. They will already know and could possibly fold this index into their other mystical algorithms.. This is very timely considering the rush to create a more relevant “real time social search”. Imagine trying to index every url shortening service out there fast enough to keep up with twitter. This could eliminate that challenge altogether.

So the question is… If and when this service goes live to the public, will you still use any of the other services? If so, why?

This morning a client of mine received an email from a supposed Internet marketing specialist. This email is such a great example of a company misrepresenting the search engine marketing industry and SEO techniques.  How many false statement can you identify in this letter.

It really is amazing… in one message this sake oil sales man has:

• misrepresented the SEO / SEM realities
• Insulted current SEO efforts ( while using an irrelevant key-term, no less)
• Guaranteed top placement for “All of your keywords”
• discussed his link selling scam
• Threatened to help out a competitor if we did not sign up with him  and his unnamed “partner” who manage thousands of websites……….
• Finally, this person actually says he can offer “Buying money at a discount” , if that ‘s not a red flag, I don’t know what is

Do business owners actually fall for this kind of marketing? Doing a quick search for this company on Google the first result is from  ”RIPOFF REPORT”. Clearly Google knows this guy is a fraud.

Is Google taking any steps to really deter this kind of activity. Can it? I don’t expect Google to play police man but is there anything else they can beyond giving them low page ranks? I mean these SEO snake oil folks almost never produce worthwhile results but they do damage the industry through misrepresentation and confusing business owners. Google has really built this industry, now what can it do to help protect the legitimate SEO companies and business owners?

I have a 5 Google Wave invites available. Just leave a comment below and the email address you want the invite sent to.

UPDATE: I just received a whole new batch of invites so if you request one from me you will probably get it.

When we started the #socialmedia Tuesday discussions there really wasn’t a whole lot of use of the #socialmedia hashtag on twitter. As we and others used it more and more, spammers have jumped in and now the #socialmedia hashtag is flooded with #socialmedia tweets

Since March 23rd 2009 we have been capturing every #socialmedia tweet to  that has been tweeted. You can see in the graph below that the general use of #socialmedia has grown substantially.  No longer just a little spike on Tuesdays, all week long there is #socialmedia activity.

So far we have captured 271, 500 #socialmedia tweets. However the pace of tweets is increasing quickly and we have capture over 50,000 #socialmedia tweets in just the last 30 days.

All of these tweets have been made by a total of 46,781 twitterers

As a result  the hashtagsocialmedia.com website has gained more attention and you can see the increase in unique IPs in the graph below.

To be fair, our system has capture tweets on days when twitter users have been hacked/hijacked as well as days when the Twitter API failed to produce results. So considering these anomalies we have a pretty accurate picture of the use of #socialmedia.com.

I wonder if there are any other hashtags on twitter used as much and for so many months consistently as #socialmedia.

Over the past few months we have made a lot of changes to the hashtagsocialmedia.com website: A New Design, tweet directly on the live page directly, exposed some of the traffic and tweet counts and of course we have had some incredible moderators.  As a result we have seen more and more traffic and participation.  I’ll be revealing more of the stats on the use of the #socialmedia hashtag shortly.

Over the weekend we added a few more updates. We updated the home page with  a little bit of interactivity that will allow you to  browse the head-shots of our moderators, review the topics they discussed and quickly access to archive of that event.  We also added a little more detail to the event pages: properly calling out the topic and the main questions asked. We have more to do on these event pages but it is a start.

There are more features coming soon.

Announcing the launch of Home-things.com. Home-Things.com provides access to many rare and hard to find home decor items from around the world. Each week new products will be added to the online store and specials and coupons will be featured.

Home-Things offers a wide range of products including African American, Bath and Body, Candleholders, Candles, Clocks ,Garden,Glass Creations ,Home Decor , Household Items, Kitchen , Nautical,  Picture Frames, Water Fountains and Works of Art .