Guide to make money online!

What do you know about social media? Before you answer that question, let me tell you that you know more than you may think. Social media is simply another way for us to communicate and connect with one another. If you are a smart communicator and understand the power of connections, you already know a lot about social media.

Ashton Kutcher said “One person’s voice can be as powerful as an entire media network,” once he surpassed 1 million followers on Twitter, beating CNN. He described this achievement as the “democratization” of the media. I have to wonder. Wasn’t the media democratized before? What makes it now a “democracy” because one man can reach 1 million people?

Perhaps democracy and democratization are the wrong words (even though it sounds catchy). What social media has done is unleash the power of communication and connection one person at a time. Communicating one-on-one always had a powerful effect on us because it enabled us to connect with one another. Everything you read and hear about social media requires connection and building relationships. Remember when communication consisted of three choices?

• Face-to-Face
• Telephone
• Handwritten letter

When given these three choices, we selected face-to-face interactions when we knew we had to make a special connection with someone. Telephone connections happened when we did not need as much intimacy or when distance prevented us from making face-to-face contact. We resorted to the letter as the least personal form of communication.

Today, we have many more choices. Nonetheless, our decision-making process remains the same. How much connection, how much intimacy do we need in order to communicate our message? CNN does not care about intimacy; they care about getting the news broadcasted to many people at once. Amazingly, social media also broadcasts news in much the same way CNN does. But, because the source comes from a “friend”, a “follower”, or a “connection” we are more likely to believe it. In the past we could eyeball the communicator during a face-to-face interaction to determine truth. Today, we must depend upon building relationships that create trust and that create believability.

Here is what we do know about social media:

• Our young people are connected. Today’s youth understands social media; they live and breathe it every day. They use the tools as ways to share with their friends. As kids, we used the telephone. Today’s kids use cell phones and MySpace. When you put the cell phone with MySpace, you get Twitter. To any young person, the power of Twitter is a no brainer.
• Social media brings on two-way communication. Where email was one-way communication that was often not instantaneous, Twitter is two-way and instant. Furthermore, with Twitter you can have instant two-way communication with virtually thousands of people at once.
• Social media enables people to deepen connections and relationships. I could correspond with you quickly through email. But, through Facebook I learn what you look like, what you like to do on Sunday afternoon, who your favorite actors are, and where you love to eat. Through Facebook, I find out that your dog has been sick or your child won a top honor at school. Through Facebook I learn who you are and what makes you tick.
• Social media is here to stay. The way we are communicating is in a revolutionary change and that change centers on social media. Traditional advertising and broadcast media must adapt to this new step-child. In fact, Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter, said, “Journalists who embrace the new media will thrive; those that don’t won’t.”
• Social media is forcing changes in marketing and sales. The way we discover, evaluate and purchase products and services is experiencing a major insurgency. Word of mouth purchases come not from the neighborhood pharmacist but from what our friends tell us on Facebook or what we hear on Twitter.
• Ashton Kutcher taught us that the way we hear about news and events is also changing through the social media. The fact that CNN wants 1 million followers tells that a major network recognizes the power of a social networking tool like Twitter. What are the things we do not know about social media?

Where is social media taking us? Where will we be in 5 years? No one has a clue.

Which media tools will survive? Is Twitter a passing fad? Will the little bird be eaten by the big cat, Google? MySpace is already on the decline. What about Facebook? My hunch is that each of these tools will find the right niche. MySpace will survive for the very young. Twitter in some form will survive for instant message type communication world-wide.

How will social media affect advertising, public relations, marketing, and sales? My guess is that broadcast, intrusive advertising as we know it today, will not survive. For some products (not many) it will continue in some form. Social media adds a new component to the “marketing” mix. By doing so, traditional marketing efforts must adapt. Time will show us how and who will survive.

What’s next? We now have Web 2.0 which means an interactive Web. It’s much more engaging to read a blog in which you can comment than to read a static website. For that reason blogs have soared in popularity. What will Web 3.0 or 2.5 or whatever look like? I’m sure there are some guru’s out there who can share what they see in their crystal balls. But, for most of us it remains a mystery. The challenge is to be ready. Two things we can count on: we are on the cusp and there’s more to come.

As a communications expert, all this excites me. Social media provides new opportunities to communicate and to connect. The fun part is joining the party. What are you waiting for? Now that you know that you do know something about the social media, and you also know that no one knows what’s next, come join us! See you on Twitter.

This month’s column was going to be about Facebook. I had about half of it written before I stumbled upon something unexpected that changed my mind, and the content below.

I’ll start from the beginning. I’m in the early stages of gut renovating my apartment. I’m very handy, and can do most of the work myself, including rough carpentry, drywall, and finishing work. I can even do moderate plumbing and electric. The former I am actually quite comfortable with, the greatest risk being flooding my downstairs neighbors (they are very nice people, and I’m sure they’d understand).

Electric work carries considerably greater risks, like fire, and death. The latter is a pretty big risk. My last electrician offered advice on this topic, and told me that if you grab a live wire with one hand you’ll be fine, as the electricity will complete the circuit through your hand. It’s when you grab it with both hands that you’re in trouble, as then the electricity completes the circuit through your chest. I found his theory intriguing but controversial. Regardless, I can’t do either plumbing or electric work in the city of New York, as building codes prohibit it. So I’m in need of a good plumber and electrician.

Though they must exist, I know implicitly that there is no way to find a good plumber or electrician in New York City. It simply can’t be done. I can find a plumber, any plumber, no problem. My Google query for “New York City Plumbers,” for example, returned 14,700,000 results. (How is that even possible)? But finding a good plumber, one who will show up on time and provide an estimate with fewer than five digits, can’t be done.

This is where I thought I would start writing about Facebook, and the opportunity Facebook has to corner the local search and services market. No one out there is doing this well — not the major engines, not the IYPs, not even the new(er) social search and recommendation engines like Yelp.

I was wrong about that last part, and I’ll return to this in a moment. The problem with local search is not in getting accurate listings, that’s easy. The challenge is in getting relevant reviews on those listings.

In order to do this, you need two key ingredients. The first is scale, as in a massive, active user base willing to inform objective business listing with subjective opinions. The second is relevance, as in some way to ensure the reviews you are reading are not written by shills, angry ex-lovers, or crazy people.

Facebook can address both of these challenges: It has a massive user base, and it’s networked, which provides all kinds of useful ways to vet the trustworthiness of a reviewer’s opinion. If Facebook jumped into the local search space I believe they could corner the market. But I think Yelp has actually beaten them to it.

I was going to put Yelp in my original column as an also-ran. My original thoughts were that Yelp did not have the scale to capture this opportunity. It was in digging around on Yelp looking for examples to prove my point that I realized I’d misjudged it. Yelp does have scale. Though not nearly that of Facebook, Yelp has almost 8 million monthly unique users (according to comScore), and has doubled its user base over the last year.

Yelp can scale content, too. I found a variety of listings for New York City plumbers and electricians (not 14.7 million, but enough) with ratings that looked plausible (i.e. not all five stars). And Yelp has a pool of users that seems, well, not crazy. That is, they seem to make rationale critiques and rate services appropriately (unlike some travel review sites that shall remain nameless). You can vet the reviewers’ quality by clicking on their profile, and their community is even self-policing, calling people out when they seem like phonies, and knocking them back in line when they stray from the site’s main purpose - real reviews about real services.

It was at this point that I realized I had to rework my column and develop a new conclusion. So I’ve revised my point of view. Facebook should not build its own socially powered local search engine; it should just buy Yelp. This combination makes both companies better. It would instantly propel Facebook into the local search space with the backing of an active reviewer base and a proven service model. And Facebook’s scale would rocket Yelp from niche to mainstream, making a good service even better by combining reviewer opinions with vetting via the social graph.

So Yelp, if Facebook calls you up on Tuesday and makes you an offer, you know who sent them. But I’m not greedy. In fact, in return for encouraging a nine-figure liquidity event in your favor, all I would ask is that you pay my plumbing and electric bills. You may think you’re getting off easy, but you haven’t seen these estimates.