Search Featured: Tamar Weinberg

Tamar Weinberg loves Social Networking.

MD: Tamar, first of all you are called the ultimate social networker and I do see you everywhere I am. How much time do you spend networking and do you think that it is something everyone should be doing or rather just an outlet for people who can’t stop chatting.

TW: Well, I really don’t have time to really chat with all the social networking I’m involved in (which I consider to be a 24/7 type of behavior — except that as an Orthodox Jew, I’m a Sabbath observer, so I’m not really online then!). Granted, I love to embrace the individuals within the social media sphere, and I am mostly doing it to build relationships, but I also like to discover information that the collective would find interesting. I find social media informative, lucrative, and also a really great way to market to individuals (provided that you do it right, and it varies per network and per product offering). The latter is why I’m mostly involved in it, but it’s something you really need to know very well; it’s about knowing the psychology of individuals too.

MD: I personally believe that the percentage of internet searches is going to be more and more happening on social networks and people will rely less on search engines in the future. Do you agree and where do YOU believe people will get the best overall results for their searches in let’s say 5 years? Will the amount of social networking results dominate to the point that more and more people will enter them directly rather than rely on organic search engine search?

TW: I think that factoring in what other people want is likely to happen. Hopefully, this will do two things: it will make the earlier adopters a lot more influential. It will also turn everyday internet users into influencers too. This is only possible, though, if social networking becomes more mainstream with the help of search engines (and not only for personalized results).

MD: What is it that you’re passionate about?

TW: I’m passionate about doing what I do now. I love writing and helping others. I also love social media but I can’t just build a social network that will take off from inception. Think about Cuil.com, the new search engine that supposedly is aimed at taking down Google. Within its first day of launch, Cuil had more negative press than one would have imagined. Other social networks have tried to create the next “Digg clone.” The problem is that there are a lot of passionate users that exist on these sites already. It’s hard to drive away users from the sites that they use religiously unless those sites cease to function effectively. Think about Twitter — when it died, Plurk, FriendFeed, and Identi.ca filled the void (for awhile). Friendster was replaced with MySpace (and later Facebook when it opened its doors to everyone). Friendster’s failure was also in the fact that it wasn’t able to deliver what it promised and the network issues were too frequent.

MD: A part of social network is IMO addiction. I find myself reading thru stuff that will not really benefit me, but can’t really stop going thru it. I know that I am not the only one and was wondering, what is it that a social network has to do in order to keep its users hooked?

TW: Usually, it depends on having early adopters that are influential — at least having the people you listen to vouching for the service. Twitter was initially approached with a lot of skepticism, and I think I joined a year before the rest of the SEO community did (December ‘06). Still, though, others came as their friends started talking about it and word of mouth spread.

Also, a very important part of fostering addiction is reliability. That’s how many people flocked to Twitter (at first) in addition to FriendFeed and other social networks. Identi.ca is still one of those new networks that is being doubted because it’s a Twitter clone with little to offer (except that it was up when Twitter was down). It had a lot of its own issues with stability at first and most people doubted it would survive. Sure, I see people occasionally add me as a friend on the social network, but I don’t think anyone is using it as religiously to consider Identi.ca an addiction. I know there are some Twitter and FriendFeed fanatics, on the other hand.

A big part of an addicition is being regularly engaged. If you see someone talking about the site but then losing interest, it’s not going to succeed at keeping the users hooked. You need to help build the community as well.

To sum up, it depends on influence, stability, engagement, and community.

MD: Let’s talk about SEO for a minute. And spam of course. It seems that Facebook has things under control and MySpace is getting better. A lot of the social networks use do follow and they are the ones most vulnerable to spam. Should a social network use the no follow attribute? And how do you feel about the fact that so many social media pages rank high in especially Google and people use those platforms rather than their own sites to promote their products? I am mainly talking about Squidoo and Hubpages which do a pretty good job editing for quality, but then again, isn’t this something that is going to almost force people to use social networks unless they have a nice size budget to market their sites?

TW: Well, I don’t like how my Twitter and Digg profiles outrank me for my own blog that I put more of my heart and soul into, so I do feel the concern there. Sure, I don’t mind if they rank, though. Putting it that way, it’s great for reputation management. On the various sites, though, I’d say nofollow is helpful; I speak from experience from managing a social media network which recently was attacked by this kind of spam. Having Viagra and Tramadol pages generated by money-hungry spammers and not a large staff to combat this kind of spam becomes a problem and I understand the logic behind such a decision.

MD: When you read blogs by search engine employees giving SEO Tips, how do you feel about that. Does it seem strange to you and do you believe their “advice” to be honest?

TW: I think it varies. I trust a lot of educated individuals and I’m glad that they are opening up about their tips since it all makes us more knowledgeable (though it depends on the blogger; some posts obviously are weighed with a grain of salt whereas others are more important). However, with regards to SEO, I don’t consider myself to be one. I’m a blogger who is hugely immersed in social media and I report occasionally on SEO topics. If someone asked me for SEO services, I’d defer them to someone more capable.

MD: If you haven’t read this yet, you should. Not only is it informative, it also entertained me to read the conversation between Aaron and Matt. How do you believe Knols will fit into the whole picture of social media and where do you stand on the fact that Google requires you to first file a DMCA request before removing copyright violations? Shouldn’t it be a lot easier considering the fact that copyright violations go hand in hand with duplicate content and affiliate spam? Do you think Google should rethink their attitude?

TW: I’ve never been too enthusiastic about having to file a DMCA either via fax or snail mail. We’re in the age of the internet, people! I don’t own a fax machine and I hate how long snail mail takes. If Google encourages these practices, they should have a DMCA team dedicated to handling requests via email forms and trust the digital signature as authentic.

With regards to Aaron’s piece on Google Knol, it was very insightful. It’s troubling at the same time that the pages rank so high so fast — but it makes sense that Google wants to promote their product by “abusing” their search engine to do so. Actually, I hope that Google rethinks their attitude with regards to ranking those pages.

MD: Are Knols going to be useless or do you think that they are the new way to connect writers?

TW: I think the Google Knol project happened a bit too late. Wikipedia has been around for years, is clearly in the forefront, and there’s no real comparison. Google does have a competitive advantage here, though, because they are ranking those Knol pages higher for the very reason so as to bring the Google Knol project to the attention to the general public, but I also think that’s an unfair advantage that they’re exploiting.

I honestly don’t really know if I’m ready to say that the Google Knol project is a flop; it’s too new. But at this point, I also don’t see it going to turn into a community-building tool. At this point, it seems that people will use Knol to get a #1 ranking and nothing else.

MD: Last but not least, what are your long term plans, what do you want to get accomplished and what sort of impact do you want to leave behind? What motivates you the most in your mission and what do you believe others should get out of the networking example that you set?

TW: I don’t really have long term plans. I live every day trying to do as much as I possibly can and try to squeeze out every possible opportunity I can. If you ask me a question, it’s really hard for me to say no!

I don’t consider myself a trendsetter, but if I can offer one bit of advice with my “networking example” as you put it, I’d say that outreach is critical, and there’s not only one channel on which to do that. Vary your sources and interests. Don’t only use Plurk or Twitter. Don’t only focus on IM. Social networking — for the act of networking purely (not for marketing and content promotion) — is best when you spread yourself thin so that you can be ubiquitous. You likely won’t hear that adivce in any other type of discipline, but in this particular case, it works.