It seems I’ve been talking to people about nothing but Facebook lately. I have had so many inquiries from businesses or entrepreneurs who say something along the lines of “I want to do a site like Facebook, except ours will…” that talking about a new web project with us lately seems to center on little else.

Its exciting that Facebook gave us their Facebook Connect interface which allows us to build online communities that utilize your FB login, as well as all your profile information. So I would ask you: why try to start your own social network right now that just creates another ’silo’ of friends, photos, and infomration. People have too many silos as it is: MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Youtube, the list goes on and on.  And, it should be mentioned, that people will ultimately grow tired of your silo when they decide not to keep up with so many accounts across so many sites. People are already tired of the silo effect- how many Facebook users do you know that converted from Myspace?  Yeah, that’s what I thought- a lot, and that’s pretty common right now.

Facebook gives us the answer by providing a single login that will work on any site that uses Facebook Connect. So now, instead of building your own social network, you just piggy-back on FB’s unbelievable success. (85% growth in 2008 is not too shabby)

We’ve signed several of these projects lately and that’s a trend that is going to continue, unless I miss my guess. What’s got me excited today is that the good people at the ‘book have continued their movement towards a more socially connected Web and provided Facebook Connect for iPhone. With 30 million iPhones sold, that means that we have another rich and engaging platform that we can now access and interact with using the social network that everyone seems to be a part of these days.

I was talking to the guys at Resolute Games about an idea that I had for an iPhone app that we could then offer to our customers. I’m just dying to find a project where we can develop an iPhone app that will somehow tie into our other Internet marketing efforts on some project or another. Talk about having some potential to engage your audience… iPhones and Facebook seem to be a match made in heaven for time-killing!

I repeated my recent lecture on ROI Marketing for Your Business:  Using Your Website to Drive Top-Line Growth last week, and I was thrilled with how many great questions I got at the end of the seminar.  Not only does that make it a better seminar for others, but it helps me understand what some of the more pressing questions are for the general public.  I think I tend to get a little jaded since I deal with the concepts of Internet marketing and, more specifically, Social Media Marketing on a daily basis.

There is so much continued interest in social media, which I think is only fueled by the fact that a it was recently revealed in a Nielson study that social neworking has overtaken email as a form of communication online.   There are hundreds of millions of people that are flocking to these sites with zoombie like single-mindedness with the intention of doing little more than… well, hanging out.

The important question that should be on your mind as a business owner or marketing professional is how can you tap into this enormous demographic? Unfortunately, there is no simple answer for that, and I don’t have time today to elaborate too much on the basics of a successful internet marketing strategy. The simple message is that you have to change the way that you’re thinking about marketing your business online because the way that people use the internet is changing.  Scratch that:  HOW people use the internet is changing.

People are not paying attention to the ads that they are constantly bombarded with through the thousands of media channels that are availabe.  Today’s consumer is not listening to one-way marketing messages like they were even 15 years ago.  Today’s consumer is empowered by the Internet because technology is on their side.  The new paradigm is that ATTENTION = ENGAGEMENT, so you have to find ways to engage your target audience.

If social media is simply a conversation taking place online, you need to find ways to get involved in that conversation.

I had my first board meeting today as a member of the board of directors for the Sales & Marketing Society of the Mid-South.  It was an interesting experience and I’m excited about the prospect of being able to really help this organization grow through effective use of online channels.

As the Director of Social Media, I spent the afternoon thinking about the various ways that I could achieve the organization’s goals through the use of social media, and other Internet marketing methods.  Since the primary objective for SMS is to grow their membership, I was pleased with how quickly examples of different ways to use social networks for this purpose sprang to mind.

I will likely be starting a new blog for SMS so that we can have a way to easily add content and get the conversation started – so stay tuned and I’ll post that address soon as we get it going.  I will also be chronicaling the experiences as a member of this board.  I’m thrilled that I have an opportunity to show what we can do to produce results for an organization that is starting from scratch from a social media perspective.