Infograph by PPC Blog

Ever since I started working as a copy writer, web editor, designer and content specialist 15 years ago, regardless of whether the company was a major corporation or a small business,and  despite all the changes in web technologies like faster processors, servers, bandwidth and so on, one thing has always remained true, and always will:  Content, in all of its various forms - is indeed king. 

The best written, strategized, informative and compelling content – whether it is text, videos, photos or Flash – is key to the success of an online business on so many levels - including user experience, trust and confidence, conversions and retention.

The latest algorithmic changes announced in June by Google are having, and will continue to have, minor to profound impacts on long-held keyword placements. In some cases, the changes will have a negative impact on keyword rankings, especially so for competitive keywords. SEOs that fail to devise and implement a 2010 content, SEO and marketing strategy that emphasizes regular updates, a diversity of relevant information, social media engagement and so forth will be at a disadvantage over time. 

Domains and web pages that have ranked high up in Google for certain keywords for years may drop down if the information provided does not meet the freshness test, which likely has built-in new calculations for relevancy based on the date of the content in question. Google’s recent changes with the roll out of Caffeine and the MayDay updates, means that there is suddenly more competitors for big keywords than ever before. 

Google Caffeine’s Impact on Search and SEO

Caffeine is a huge update to Google’s indexing frequency of the web, with a greater concentration on delivering indexing results more quickly than ever before. The obvious intended benefit to the searcher is to present more up-to-date search results, and in theory, more relevant information that meets or exceeds user expectations.

so that users searching on Google will begin to see fresher, more relevant content.  There are many reasons Google is introducing all of these changes to their algorithms. Perhaps the biggest reason is to address one of the biggest complaints about Google; that is, less than impressive results for keyword searches, especially those that require the most current and reliable information.

Caffeine was also developed to return search engine results faster. This is probably more of a benefit for hundreds of thousands of web servers in Google data centers, and less important to the end user. Afterall, most people don’t care if a search result was delivered a half second faster but they do care about the quality and the freshness of search results.

One can spectulate with a degree of certainty that another reasons Google is moving to index more of the web faster, and deliver that index more frequently (rather than the two-week delay with the old indexing structure)to its users is to address the need-it-now expectations of users. It is safe to assume that Google realizes the critical role that social media is playing in the evolution of online communications and information exchange. As more and more people go to social media to satisfy their information needs, that is less business for Google. Since it is safe to assume that social media will continue to grow for some time before leveling off, traditional web search engines like Google need to position themselves aggressively within that space. So far, Buzz doesn’t seem to be building the critical momentum it would have had by now, and when do you hear anyone say they use Google’s Social Search (yes, they have that) engine to find information specifically from social networks.

It must be a big worry of Google executives how popular and what amazing growth Facebook and Twitter have been enjoying over the past few years.  If you think about it, those are customers Facebook and Twitter are taking from Google, in one way or another, and in some cases, in all ways. With more than a half of a billion users around the world and growing, Facebook is uniquely positioned to challenge Google in the search market. So, it’s no surprise that Facebook has announced that it is building the largest social media search engine in the world. Twitter, LinkedIn and MySpace are also likely looking at ways to chip away at Google’s apparent monopoloy of search online.

Google cannot afford to lose any of its search demographic; without search, Google has little else to offer. Attempts over the years to launch other web products and services such as Froogle, Picasa, Checkout, and the latest apparent failure, Buzz, which was supposed to compete head-on with Facebook and Twitter, just reinforce the point that Google is the king of search online, and not much else. But its reign as the number one search engine could very well be waning, as the ‘coolness’ of the brand degrades over time, consumers turn to newer brands, and the usual attrition that almost all monopolized corporations eventually face – Apple (not the new Apple), Microsoft, AT&T, Dell, and so on.

Google’s Controversial ‘May Day’ Updates

In May 2010, Google made a significant update to its algorithms to instruct spiders to crawl, and follow links, deeper into sites with good domain/page ranks with emphasis on determining ranking positions for long-tail and secondary keywords. 

Google’s ‘Show Options’ and ‘Freshness’ of Search Results

In addition to the changes introduced by Caffeine and the MayDay updates, Google is regularly changing the way that people search, and offering them more options than ever before. This presents new challenges for SEOs. One big change was the introduction of the ‘Show Options’ in 2009. For years, Google had pretty much ‘hidden’ options that allowed users to narrow search results by date, type (ie, forums and videos), language and so on. The introduction of the ‘Show Options’ on the main interface of the search results page makes it easier than ever for users to customize their search results depending on their needs and preferences.

For example, with the time frame options, users can quickly filter default search engine results by Past 24 Hours, Past Week, Past Year, etc.; (strangely, a ‘Past Month’ filter is not easily available – would love to know the reason for that decision).

That said, Google still has a long way to go before it can reliably offer the best, and most current, information about any topic, but especially for searches of terms that should return the most updated, and most credible, data. For example, if you type “troubleshooting slow Mac”, the first two results are articles from 2007 and 2008. At first glance, this is not fresher, better information.  Sure, the top results for that search term may have gained authority from backlinks, domain rank and so on, but what the user is really looking for is the most up-to-date information for troubleshooting a Mac, and in this case, Google did not deliver.

Sure, one could sort Google’s default results for “troubleshooting slow Mac” via narrowing the results by date under Google’s “Sort Options”, but that is not an optimal user experience. Perhaps a feature like “Did You Mean” (used when Google thinks a word was misspelled) would be helpful, something alone the lines of,  “Get The Latest Results for [search term].”

Hopefully, over time, the major issue holding Google back from truly fulfilling its promise to users will be corrected in a big way. This will take enormous work on part of Google, especially as search queries become increasingly dependent on the “freshness” of information (and not merely from news publications), and perhaps less reliant on how many backlinks a matching result has, or how much authority the root domain has achieved over the years.

Companies Can’t Afford to Be Complacent

As more people look for, and go to, information based on “freshness”, websites that do not create regular, fresh content arugably will be at a disadvantage over their competitors who understand and embrace content creation in all of its forms. A complacent attitude about updating a website to tailor results for Google’s various needs, and failure to create various types of content on a regular basis as part of an overall strategy,  could become a huge liability for companies, businesses, organizations and individuals who rely on ranking well in search engines. While creating fresh and dynamic online content has been important for brands during the past decade, it is now more important than ever before. 

To Succeed in the 10s, Companies Need Multi-Skilled SEOs

A good SEO understands that techniques and best practices are in constant flux, and does his or her level best to stay informed, and test, updates and changes to the major search engines, and in social media.   Now that Google has publicly stated that they are more interested in fresh content than ever before, every business that relies on their web properties for revenues needs to have a strong group of solid, experienced SEO writers who demonstrate aptitude and skills in various disciplines, including  journalism, marketing, design, usability, social media, and of course, search engine optimization. It also helps if an SEO has experience with server administration, site architecture, coding and programming and content management.  

A dedicated team of dynamic marketing and SEO professionals will help companies meet, and exceed, their goals for acquisition, branding, marketing, conversions, sales and retention. 

Summation: Strategize, Produce, Implement and Analyze, or Die

I’m amazed that so-called expert SEOs and online marketers don’t realize the importance of all of the latest search engine updates in their planning, implementation and updating of content and social media strategies. If you rely on a SEO to bring relevant traffic to your website – a key component of new sales conversions – and you are seeing a flat-lining or decrease in your traffic coming from search referrals, chances are they are not planning and optimizing your products and services for the latest search engine updates. These oversights are costing businesses tens of millions of dollars in potential revenues.

Phillip E. Daoust is a writer, editor, SEO whiz, content specialist, social media strategist, and marketing professional who works and lives in Silicon Valley.

Matt Cutts talks Google Caffeine, Page Rank, NoFollow with WebProNews

Keeping up with the amount of SEO news and information that comes out every week could easily be a full-time job in itself. Therefore, you need a place to go where an experienced SEO assembles the news you most need to know, as well as the articles, reports and features that you should probably read if time permits.

In a two-part, twenty minute video interview with Google’s WebSpam lead engineer, Matt Cutts, WebProNews ask Cutts about a range of issues important to SEOs.

Most Important Info From Interview:

Site Architecture – In addressing the issues revolving around sculpting a site with no follow in mind, Matt advises instead to concentrate on the site architecture, making sure to limit the number of sub-folders branching off from a top-level category (main menu navigation sections) in order to make a site more efficient for search spiders, and for the user. Basically, don’t bury your most important pages in subfolders; keep them close to their root page. This reconfirms one of the best techniques for building, updating and managing page for SEO and usability simultaneously.

Site Sculpting with No Follow
Matt does not recommend using NoFollow tags on internal pages as part of site sculpting process (often used to control distribution of link juice) and even discourages its use to trusted external sites you link to. However, he suggests the best use of the nofollow tag is to questionable third party sites. Therefore, it seems his bottom line is that nofollow is not all that useful, and has little affect on a site’s rankings.

However, that is counter to the findings that Rand Fishkin at SEOMoz discovered in 2008 after integrating nofollow tags in a site sculpting project for the SEOMoz website. It’s possible that Matt and Rand are talking about two different approaches to site sculpting with nofollow, and perhaps that is where the confusion lies. However, at the end of Rand’s article, he admits that site sculpting with nofollow for clients had mixed results.

Google Caffeine
Matt replies to questions (1:51) of why Caffeine has only rolled out to only one data center, and the plans for the deployment to all data centers in the coming months. He debunks (3:11) that consideration site speed is tied to Caffeine, and how much of impact it has on determining rankings, stating again that quality and relevancy of content is the key factor.

Site Speed Better For User Experience Than SEO
However, Cutts contends that in some cases, site speed may be a small consideration, but it “won’t be the largest of the 200 factors.” Rather, he points to studies from Google and Bing that clearly show users engage and frequent a site more, the faster it is. That’s clearly what many respected usability studies show as well.

Quality Content More Important Than PageRank
Matt talks about why webmasters and SEOs shouldn’t obsess about Page Rank (5:34) instead recommending that quality content (something Cutts has alluded to again and again for years and this interview – hint, hint) is where the focus should be, among what he tags the “over 200 signals” that impact search rankings; smart SEOs understand that Google indeed considers “over 200″ factors when ranking a website/page for its targeted keywords.

Why PuSH Publishing Is Good For Everyone

Cutts describes the usefulness of deploying the PubSubHubBub (PUS) model (6:45). Basically, when a publisher of a site or blog posts new content, it pings a Hub, so that the subscribers to that site or blog’s feed, and other associated networks, will receive it almost instanteously. It’s already up and running for FriendFeed.

There are a number of great advantages to the PUSH technology, as Cutts points out. One being that it is less of a drain on system-wide resources that have to constantly ping, and process those pings, for updates. As well, if you only visit a site you like perhaps one or two times a week, now you will be notified (although there wasn’t information specifically about how – I think either through the feed or email, and of course, FriendFeed, presumably you are signed in) whenever a post is published on the site you are subscribed to rather than you manually going to all of your favorite websites to seek out what you missed in the past week or more.

Addressing the potentiality of spammers taking advantage of the PUSH technology, Cutts outlines (7:29) the approach that will be used by Google to give trustworthy blogs priority within the PuSH technology framework, so that’s good news for well established, well respected blogs, and some websites as well.

In Part Two, Cutts gives props to SEO and social, and predicts increased hacking and black hat SEO for 2010. His bottom line (as mine has always been) is clear: “make content stand the test of time.” Amen brother.

Trend for keyword "social media" in past year on Google Search

Amazing as it might seem to some of us online marketing/SEO/content professionals, there are still companies and businesses that do not participate in social networking, or do so at bare minimum – much to the peril of their own interests. Without picking out any specific examples, I have personally seen many examples of this resistance to social media outreach and engagement, much to my amazement.

I can remember back in the late 1990s plenty of examples of companies, and clients I worked for, who did not believe that the web would change commerce, business, academics and so on in radical ways. They resisted putting their money and resources into the new media and instead believed the traditional means of media – basically, print and broadcast – were the best investment for their money. This was startling to me, and eventually, those same business and other entities suffered as a result of their resistance to change, often getting into the game way too late, and losing money and reputation in the process.

The same exact thing has been happening with social media in the past couple of years, and the same outcome will occur. From a bottom-line perspective, it is disastrous to resist social media, most especially for companies and others that rely heavily on their online presence.

Google’s Social Search Beta Goes Live

To emphasize the importance of social media, Google officially rolled their lab experiments with Social Search as a live beta on Google.com today to “make search more personal with relevant web content from your friends and online contacts.”

During the past year, Google realized the trend in social media was too big to ignore, and in the past three months or so, the world’s most visited web domain, allocated a huge amount of resources to launch lab testing of social search results. According to their official blog, “We were excited by the number of people who chose to try it out, and today Social Search is available to everyone.”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYf5iSA6t6g&rel=0&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]
Google doesn’t go into much detail about Social Search, instead opting to give examples of how social contacts and search are combined to benefit users and their friends and family.

The Google post also explores the social search result options for Google Images. Specifically, now searches for images on Google will include options to click on “My Social Content” and “My Social Circle.” For example, clicking on the latter link will display results of images from Picasa, Flickr and “other” photo-sharing sites that were posted by people in your social contacts, and will also allow you to view how you are connected to those people.

It is more clear than ever – the times are a changin’ (as Bob Dylan sang), and those who do not change with the times – and quickly and with someone who really understands how to manage those changes – are essentially giving their existing, and potential, customers and clients to their savvy competitors on a silver platter.

Next: Social Media and the Mobile Web.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phmtGN9Kxuw&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

Just about any professional in the SEO, SEM, marketing and content world knows how essential – and yet how overwhelming – it is to keep up with the best and most credible latest news, commentary and resources. For my own sanity, I regularly cherry pick the most useful information from a variety of sources to keep up on everything that is happening. Key to staying informed is focusing on what information is actually valuable and if that information comes from a reliable source.

On a weekly basis, I will now be publishing the best links in the areas of SEO, SEM, content, marketing, social media as it pertains to cutting-edge web presence. As the name of this blog implies, understanding the total web experience is critical to creating a strong and successful online presence, brand and to attract and retain customers and other relationships in a world that is overloaded with choices and competition.

“How Google Ranks Tweets” – Technology Review

“How to Make the Most of Your Social Media Time” – Web Worker Daily

“PubCon 2009 Vegas Recap” - SEO Round Table

“PubCon: Bing and Google” – Out Spoken Media

“Four Search Predictions for 2010” – Search Engine Watch

“The Best Posts in Search Engine Marketing” – Semmys.org

“Tracking SEO Success with Charts” – Search Engine Land

“The Top SEM Blog Posts of 2009″ – Search-Mojo.com

“Make Money With Twitter” - Twtfm

“Create Content or Die” – TopRankBlog.com

“Digital Marketing Strategy Development Part 1: Image And Identity” – TheFutureBuzz.com

“Customize Facebook for More Fans” - Search Engine Land

“Advanced SEO Toolkit” – Search Engine Journal

“10 Tips To Get Retweeted” – SocialMediaToday.com

Make sure to check back regularly for the latest updates, trends, news and resources related to search engines, SEO, SEM, social media, marketing and content. As a content and search technology specialist for more than a decade now one thing has remained the same: Content is Still King.

Link Building articles:

Link Building Strategy: Employee Volunteer Program – January 14, 2010
Link Marketing Challenges & Solutions – December 24, 2009
Rethinking your Link Marketing Strategies – December 10, 2009
Link Building With a Small Budget – November 12, 2009
Developing Successful Viral Marketing Ideas – October 29, 2009
Targeting People Who Control the Links – October 15, 2009

Important Articles from The Future Buzz:

45 Blog Post Ideas That Always Generate Buzz
6 Buzzworthy Internet Laws All Marketers Should Understand

10 Reasons Why Social Is Your Future SEO Strategy

10 Things Marketing Professionals Starting Out Should Do
19 Reasons You Should Blog And Not Just Tweet

When it comes to advanced keyword research, SEOs need a deep understanding about which keywords are searched for most by people within a targeted marketplace. The overly simplistic belief that placing keywords in web page title tags, headers and copy is sufficient for a successful search engine optimization strategy is extremely naive, outdated and potentially very costly.

More than ever before, advanced keyword research, implementation and analysis are critical components of any successful SEO campaign – both in natural and paid search results. First of all, an effective keyword research project requires a strong understanding of the space one is attempting to compete in, and an expert knowledge of the tools, techniques and resources that will help devise an overall keyword strategy.

For example, a nationwide used car business starting out new on the web is going to have a much harder time getting natural search engine results that lead people to their site than existing and bigger competitors. There are a host of reasons for this, among them being domain age, lack of valuable backlinks, existing competitors’ advantage and so on.

If the business was instead, say, Billings, Montana Used Cars, that’s a different story.

Therefore, an effective SEO strategy requires the ability to first understand the nature of the marketplace and audience the SEO is targeting. It simply does not make sense to devise keyword campaigns without first conducting market research and analyzing existing keyword campaigns within the targeted arena you are hoping to compete in.

For example, the new company that wants to launch an online, nationwide used car business would require a completely different keyword strategy than the local used car business in Billings, Montana. The former would need to spend more significant amounts of money for paid search results alongside an ambitious, widespread online marketing campaign.

Once a business is established, trusted and well regarded by online consumers, media and bloggers, it can build page rank for its site and increase its online visibility with the aim of improving overall natural search engine results that bring targeted, valued visitors with the aim of converting them to long-term customers.

When it comes to keyword research, a good SEO specialist understands that natural search results have more value than paid results. The main reason for this is that when people view search engine results for their keyword query, they are much more likely to trust non-paid results (despite search marketers years of trying to get them to click on paid results). All of the prominent keyword studies demonstrate this.

Yet there are still many businesses that waste enormous amounts of money on poorly researched and implemented keyword campaigns.

Whatever the type of business or target audience, advanced keyword and market research are critical components to a successful SEO strategy. In my last position, I was able to significantly increase relevant search engine ranks for dozens of competitive keywords, improve the overall quality of content, drive more targeted traffic and increase long-term site and channel traffic in a relatively short period of time.

Recently the founder of SEOmoz, Rand Fishkin, assembled a great set of tools and resources to help SEOs with advanced keyword research. I have reviewed his work – a habit of mine – and pulled out and expanded on his most important points regarding advanced keyword research. This is the first of a multi-part series of articles that will examine keyword research, implementation and analysis.

Top-Level Keyword Research Tools

Google Adwords Keyword Tools

MSN AdCenter: Research Keywords Tool

Wordtracker: Keyword Tool

Google Suggest

Tip: As Rand recommends, analyze relative search volume rather than raw, overall search volume numbers. By looking at the overall percentages of search volume for keywords across various free (and paid – such as Site Catalyst) tools, a SEO has a better gauge of which keyword campaigns to go with. I added Google Suggest to this list because my experience has shown that it sometimes provides useful keyword recommendations along with important insight on existing keywords.

Calculating Keyword ‘Temporal Fluctuations’

As with most things, search volumes for specific keywords vary based on a range of factors. For example, there is a huge spike in online queries during the month of April for ‘IRS extensions’ and ‘stuffing recipes’ in late November. When the post-election demonstrations in Iran last June broke out, there was a dramatic spike in search volume interest worldwide for the keyword combination “iran elections”.

Chart shows a dramatic surge in search interest for 'iran elections' vs. 'health care bill' even though overall news coverage for 'health care bill' out paced 'iran elections'

Therefore, it is important to have a good idea of when and why your keywords perform the best to make the necessary changes in campaign strategies.  Here are some free, helpful tools that can help measure temporal fluctuations in keyword campaigns and even suggest other keywords.

Google Trends for Keywords

Google Insight for Keywords

MSN AdCenter Labs: Keyword Forecast Tool

Tip: While Rand wisely suggests Goggle Trends and MSN‘s keyword tools, I also use Google Insight.

Also, these findings need to be compared to keyword performance over time on the actual targeted website’s metrics. As far as the fundamental difference between Google Trends and Google Insight, the former is less speculative than the latter. Trends relies on existing data to demonstrate search volume relative to all searches and Insight compares search volume interest across regions, categories and time frames.

In this installment of advanced keyword research, we looked at the top free tools for basic keyword research as well as resources for gauging keyword trends, forecasts and suggestions. In the next installment of this series, I will show you how to research keyword performance for top-level domains (TLDs).

Article by Phillip E. Daoust

Microsoft’s new search engine Bing has increased its share of the search engine market for the second month in a row. According to comSource, Bing accounted for 8.9 percent of all search queries in the U.S. during July, a .5% increase from June and nearly a one percent increase since it’s launch in May.

The modest victory for Microsoft’s Bing appears to have come at the expense of their two biggest rivals in the search engine space, Google and Yahoo. The two most popular search engines both saw their market share decrease by .3%, to 64.7% and 19.3%, respectively.

While it is still too early to celebrate, the numbers are encouraging for Microsoft, which has struggled for nearly a decade to compete with Google and Yahoo in the lucrative search engine marketplace.

Furthermore, it not clear if the initial increases for Bing will sustain into the future, beyond this summer’s huge, nationwide marketing campaign.

Investors are cautious about Bing’s promise for the future. In a note to investors, Benjamin Schachter, an analyst with Broadpoint AmTech, wrote: “Although Bing took a bit of share from both Google and Yahoo, we are reluctant to extrapolate this into meaningful long-term share gains.” As reported in The New York Times Tuesday, Schachter noted that despite Google’s slight decrease in July, the one number search engine experienced its second highest share of monthly queries ever.

Nevertheless, if Bing continues to gain search market share at its current rate over a sustained period of time, and if Microsoft follows through and takes over search at Yahoo, investors will change their tune. Google’s number one revenue stream is generated by paid advertising from its wildly popular search engine.

Ten years ago the rate of growth for web usage was off the charts; by 1999, the number of people using the web skyrocketed from 36 million in 1996 to 248 million by December 1999 – more than a 650% increase in three short years. By 1999, the web was one of the the biggest things happening in business, culture and technology. Adding fuel to the fire, personal computer ownership more than double – from 15% to 35% of households owning computers – between 1990 and 1997.

Source: allaboutmarketresearch.com

In April, dotMobi, the company that controls mobi domains — the only Internet address created specifically for locating content that works on all mobile phones — announced in June highlights from a study of mobile web trends. All of the statistics point to an explosion in mobile web content creation.

Using the “largest top-level Internet domains” as a benchmark, dotMobi reports “a sevenfold growth in the number of mobile Web sites in the past year”. A year ago, a mirror study revealed there were roughly 150,000 mobile web sites available. That figure is now at approximately 1.1 million based on a scan of the “largest” active Top Level Domains (TLDs).  To get an idea of how the rise of mobile sites is trending similar to the rise of traditional web site, a 1998 study by the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) concluded there were approximately 1.5 million public, PC-based Web sites across all TLDs. Verisign recently estimated 77.4 million live “.com” and “.net” web sites.

If the trends in growth of active mobile based sites is anything like the explosion of PC based domain growth during the past decade, every business that wants to connect to the new generation of consumers needs to start planning a mobile strategy today. For companies that already have a mobile web presence, chances are you are going to want to allocate more resources to mobile web development, optimization and marketing.

Other stats on more recent Internet usage growth and computer sales:

http://www.bls.gov/opub/ils/pdf/opbils31.pdf

http://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/1999/Apr/wk1/art01.htm

Article by Phillip E. Daoust

There are literally dozens upon dozens of issues that affect conversions. SEOmoz blogger Chenry has just released a report on how CAPTCHA affects conversions rates based on his own personal study.

The conclusion of the report is that accepting SPAM is greater than the loss of potential conversions from real customers who either have difficulty with either reading or entering the alphanumerical codes required to complete a conversion, whether it is a marketing or sales.

However, I am a bit weary of the methodology. It is not clear how SPAM with excessive links is distinguished from a valued site with excessive links. And, there is no accurate way to determine a user from a bot – at least as it was explained in the article. Another consideration is what affect turning CAPTCHA off can have if a site is hit with SIN attack.

Another important point not mentioned in the article is the fact that the rising popularity of reCAPTCHA, now used on FaceBook and other top sites, which includes an audio option if a user cannot discern the CAPTCHA code.  

Maybe these are nit-picky points, but that can only be determined by reviewing the raw data that led to the author’s findings.

A SPAM conversion was recorded when the submission had excessive links or was a solicitation for a service.  A failed conversion was recorded when a user/bot entered an incorrect CAPTCHA or never correctly entered the correct CAPTCHA after multiple tries.  A successful conversion was when the information given in the web form was the required information minus any spammy information.

Read the article in its entirety.

The recent unrest in Tehran following the contested national elections proved, perhaps more than any other worldwide event in communications history, just how powerful social networking has become.

In fact, the United States government asked Twitter to delay a scheduled maintenance update until after midnight Tehran time so that the network would be available to Iranians who were unable to use cell phones, satellites, and land lines, and the Iranian press which was under a government-imposed blackout.

Because Twitter and other social media networks use proxy servers, it was much more difficult for Iranian officials to block access during the unrest.

Because of social networks, vital information, video and photographs of what was happening in Iran were broadcast to the world, so much so that even major worldwide news organizations, such as CNN and the BBC, were getting most of their information from social networks – effectively turning the average person into a reporter.

In addition, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and other social media services are influencing millions of people many thousands of miles away from Iran to be engaged and inform their friends and family. Plus, social media, when all other forms of communications are unreliable or shut off, has made it possible for millions of people not in Iran to stay in contact with loved ones in Iran.

The Iranian crisis legitimizes the power and influence of social media. It is clear that social media will only grow in popularity over time and possibly give populations around the world more power than any other medium in the history of communications.

That remains to be seen, but the scope, and personal stories, of the Iranian crisis would have never been what it has in recent weeks were it not for social networking.

Clearly, the Iranian unrest has made it harder than ever to dismiss social networking as a fad or useless phenomenon.