With Facebook, massively multiplayer online games, Twitter and Skype, chat remains a popular means of communication, though it’s usually referred to as “texting” now. If you’re new to text messaging, you might be confused by some of the acronyms you encounter. Here’s a glossary that will get you started on the right foot.

AAMOF – As A Matter Of Fact
AFAIK – As Far As I Know
AFK – Away From Keyboard
ASAP – As Soon As Possible
BBL – Be Back Later
BRB – Be Right Back
BTW – By The Way
CU – see you
CUL8R – see you Later
EZ – Easy
F2F – Face to Face
FAQ – Frequently Asked Questions
FWIW – For What It’s Worth
FYI – For Your Information
GG – Good Game
GTG – Got To Go
HAND – Have A Nice Day
HTH – Hope That Helps
IAC – In Any Case
IIRC – If I Remember Correctly
J/K – Just Kidding
IMHO – In My Humble Opinion
IMNSHO – In My Not-So-Humble Opinion
IMO – In My Opinion
IOW – In Other Words
IRL – In Real Life
LOL – Laughing Out Loud
NRN – No Reply Necessary
OMG – Oh My God
OTOH – On The Other Hand
ROFL – Rolling On the Floor Laughing
ROFLMAO – Rolling On the Floor Laughing My Ass Off
THX – Thanks
TIA – Thanks In Advance
TTYL8R – Talk To You Later
WTF – What The F**k

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Today I tried an interesting experiment. I googled “social media expert”. I wanted to see who would take Google’s #1 spot.

It wasn’t Chris Brogan, whom I would have guessed. Today’s top dog is Giovanni Gallucci. I had never heard of Giovanni, and unless you’re from Texas, it’s probable that you never have heard of him either. Giovanni lives in Dallas and over the last couple years he has made an impressive effort to position himself as a social media maven. I can’t knock that. It’s what anyone who wants to create an independent career in social media should be doing. If you look at his efforts, there is much to learn. Giovanni shows what it takes to gain traction as a social media professional.

To the established social media pros, the A-list, Giovanni Gallucci appears to represent everything that they warn people against. Self-proclaimed rock stars, experts, and ninjas do not present the perfect picture of credibility. There are plenty of articles about what to look for in your social media expert and what to watch out for, and it seems that they all caution us about guys who look very much like Gallucci. He calls himself an expert and a ninja. He alludes to press coverage but doesn’t show examples. He lists clients but doesn’t offer specifics on what he did for them. These points that do not stand up to suspicious scrutiny, and I recommend changing those aspects of his website, but I would not write the man off because his approach is more aggressive. His formula is working. He is the #1 social media expert in Google’s eyes.

How did Giovanni Gallucci steal the top spot from the likes of social media A-listers like Chris Brogan, Brian Solis, and Peter Shankman? He did it with focused SEO. Giovanni decided to optimize for “social media expert”, so that is the title given to his website. Within the content, you’ll find social media mentioned numerous times, along with words like “ninja”, “buzz” and “marketing”. The man understands on-site SEO and he has used it masterfully. He also has massive offsite SEO through profiles on more than twenty social networks, content on sites like SlideShare, YouTube, and Flickr, and an active presence on Twitter and other sites. He presents a focused and consistent picture of himself, and knows what he wants people to remember about him. This is personal branding at its finest. Gallucci seems like a smart, hard working, likable guy and I expect that he will continue to work his way toward a position on the social media A-list.

Where is the lesson in this experiment? First, no matter how strong your presence is online and offline, the top spot in any search engine can still be won by someone who is fully committed to that task. Chris Brogan used to occupy Google’s number one position. Chris still has the single most recognizable name in social media marketing, but it looks like Giovanni is in the race and hungry for victory.

Second, there is no such thing as an overnight success. It takes time and effort to not only learn the trade, but to market your skills and create a reputation. Giovanni can work five times harder than everyone else, and it will still take time to grow reputation and wide recognition. But it may take less time to achieve a high level of success because there are examples to follow and an industry that is hot for expertise.

And the last lesson I take from this experiment is that even though the experts say “don’t call yourself an expert, rock star, or ninja”, perhaps doing those things is precisely what you should do because a) they’re not doing it, and b) they’re talking about it. They promote awareness of the terms and refuse to apply the same terms to themselves, creating an opportunity for somebody else. Kudos to Giovanni Gallucci for recognizing the power of calling himself a Social Media Expert.

I noticed that “social media ninja” is still up for grabs. We’ll talk later. I have some work to do.

Tim Piazza is the lead architect of social media and interactive marketing at Keller Crescent Advertising, Indiana’s largest independently owned advertising agency. You can read Tim’s blog at http://www.bzzmatters.com, follow Tim on Twitter @TimPiazza and learn more about Keller Crescent Advertising at http://www.kellercrescentadvertising.com

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Two years ago, everyone was buzzing about Second Life, the online virtual reality community that looks like a game but feels like an experiment in alternative realities. While it initially attracted the role-playing fantasy crowd, everyone started to notice when companies like IBM established a presence in Second Life. For some it offered a more immersive type of web conference. For others it was a way to get away with playing a game while pretending to work.

Second Life now appears to be on the back burner for all but the most dedicated fans in the USA with virtually zero growth in traffic over the past 18 months as attention has shifted to Facebook and Twitter. Internationally, however, there has been a noticeable increase in traffic following a surge in mid-November 2008 that came to be known as the Copybot Controversy. In the aftermath, Second Life realized an increase of about 25% in European and other international markets.

The trouble with Second Life is that it is simply too complex to be instantly addictive to a massive number of people. Unlike Twitter, where the barrier to entry is toe-stubblingly low, Second Life requires a substantial commitment of time to learn how to do the simplest things like walk in a straight line. One wrong keystroke and you’re suddenly, albeit harmlessly, flying into space. More than half of the people who give Second Life a shot don’t get serious with it. On the other hand, just 3% of their members account for half of the visits to the site. It’s the addictive nature of social interplay that accounts for a huge amount of time spent by a very small number of people.

But to pass Second Life off as a trivial pursuit to completely miss the mark. Second Lifers are showing us a very crude view into the future, much the way HTML in 1992 gave us a crude preface to today’s web. Merge Google Earth with Second Life and Amazon.com and jump forward another decade or two in raw processing power and you will start to see that a completely immersive virtual reality is indeed possible with full support for retail commerce. The kinks will get ironed out, and when keyboards are replaced with accelerometer-embedded jumpsuits, we’ll be able to interact with the virtual world in ways that are presently difficult to imagine without smirking.

For now, it’s better to leave Second Life to the role players who get their kicks out of creating avatars and mingling with virtual characters. The audience is too small for an extensive marketing program, reaching about 45,000 US visitors each day and a little more than 100,000 daily visitors worldwide. That’s equivalent to the circulation of a small to medium-sized daily newspaper. Building a marketing platform inside Second Life is costly and time consuming. There are countless better ways to spend a marketing budget.

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People in a connected group start out mostly homogenous. Tribes are homogenous. Close-knit societies like Amish communities are homogenous. A room full of two year olds are homogenous. Jean Piaget painted a theory that says individuals construct and reconstruct their knowledge of the world as a result of interactions with the environment. We all have different experiences, so the tendency within a group is that while we are drawn together by our common views and experiences, we’re pushed apart by our unique views and experiences.

I’ve used this model to think about how online communities are formed. I formed theories about where they come from, how they evolve, and what leads to disease and sometimes the death of the community. Now I’m trying to reshape those theories to account for the rapid population explosion that communities like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter go through. The fundamental ideas haven’t changed, but my new concern is how does one navigate toward a long sustaining and healthy community when growth is so dramatic?

Twitter is an exceptional example. It has a ridiculously low barrier to entry. Anybody can broadcast to anybody else, and brevity is king. Right now, just about anybody can follow and interact with just about anybody else. I believe that as Twitter continues to grow, the Twitterers will react to the differences between themselves and the people they connect with more than they will recognize the common ideas they share with so many others. Many of those differences won’t fit into their world view. They will adapt by filtering what they are exposed to, making the environment useful again. Exposure will be narrowed to the people who are most like them, recreating homogeny. For Twitter to survive, it will transform into many micro-communities where people will raise barriers to joining those communities. They will become more tribal and develop a strict code of conduct.

It will be interesting to see how Twitter adapts to its continued growth. I’ll be watching and sharing my views.

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It works the same with any social media site. First the trailblazers come in, and figure out that there’s a new frontier–a place where they can be themselves, make their own rules, put up posters on the walls, do what they want.

The trailblazers are followed by the adventurers, who enjoy the relative anonymity. They stick around because they’ve found a communication channel with a relatively high signal and very little noise. They invite their friends with whom they can communicate in relative peace.

Pretty soon, having heard stories about the adventurers, along come the pioneers, the Seth Godin and Neil Patel types. They love adventure, but they’re also entrepreneurs. They see the possibilities of building a bank and a hotel. Then they advertise. They get the word out about this hot new pioneer village where you can be yourself, make your own rules, and do your banking all at once.

At this point, the trailblazers and adventurers start to move on. It’s no longer what they were initially attracted to. But that’s okay, because now we’ve got a nicely growing community. The influx of new members expands at an exponential rate, and the folks who capitalize on it are the pioneers. Others try to move in and share in the wealth, but mostly, they simply serve to enlarge the audience even more.

All of this growth attracts great numbers of people who have little investment in the original ideas, but are attracted to any place they see a huge crowd of people they can engage. By engage, I mean advertise to. At the same time, there is a huge surge of people who join the community because they’ve heard its a great place to visit, much like a theme park.

And the more it grows, the more it ripens as a platform for marketing, and the more difficult it becomes to find the stuff that the community was built on in the first place. The noise buries the signal.

In the end, the pioneers, having grown rich, insulate themselves from the larger community, stepping out in public only when they have a message to share that serves their interests in some way. The marketers generate most of the content, and the population generates most of the commentary, but without any of the incision that characterized the early settlers. Eventually the community may even turn into a neglected slum.

This may sound like fiction, but it’s not. It happened on Compuserve, it happened on Usenet, it happened on the web, and it’ll happen to Twitter. The lower the barrier to entry, the faster it happens. Social communities die from overpopulation.’

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I think the list ranking is more a reflection of popularity and the result of SEO becoming embedded in the process of online marketing. At some point, all SEO activities become a habit like buckling the seat belt when you sit behind the wheel of a car. It’s not something you think about, it’s just something you do. The new activities that you establish are the ones you think about.

Still, the list is a good indicator of what you should be doing to promote your brand. If you’re not already engaged in social media, you need to start now, by first tackling the top 5 and then considering how you could engage in the rest of the top 10.

• Blogging (34%, 183 Votes)
• Microblogging (Twitter) (29%, 155 Votes)
• Search engine optimization (28%, 151 Votes)
• Social network participation (Facebook, LinkedIn) (26%, 137 Votes)
• Email marketing (17%, 90 Votes)
• Social media monitoring & outreach (17%, 88 Votes)
• Pay per click (14%, 73 Votes)
• Blogger relations (12%, 64 Votes)
• Video marketing (10%, 51 Votes)
• Social media advertising (7%, 39 Votes)

You can see the entire list at http://www.toprankblog.com/2009/02/reader-poll-top-digital-marketing-tactics-for-2009/

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