Are you ready?  Two of the brightest stars in the Social Media Marketers Pantheon of Hero’s are at it again!  Get ready for the Ultimate Social Challenge with Tina Williams and Maria Gudelis, which starts in just one week. For a grand total of $7.00 you can get in the front door with two great marketers.  Just studying their tactics is worth one hundred times more than the $7.00 entry fee, which gets you into a series of workshops designed to maximize your social media bang.  As you know, Facebook has just implemented Timelines and killed a lot of the old FBML like and welcome pages…but Facebook is reporting 46% greater engagement on the new Timeling pages…(how is Facebook doing that)…Pinterest is a really hot topic right now, and Google is working to own search engine optimization with Search Plus Your World, and Facebook bought Instagram, and I hear that Google may buy Pinterest…where will it all end?   And mobile?  How will your small business utilize mobile search?  I am reading that buy next year, 50% of all searches will be from mobile, and if your website is not mobile optimized, then it will be invisible to mobile searches.

One thing for sure, recent changes can really put a damper on your Social Media Strategy, and Tina and Maria are two of the best at keeping us up to date, and providing very good stategy to their customers.  Of course, they are not the only providers of great and informative Social Media Stategy, so why not go with another provider?

The answer for me revolves around how they helped me personally resolve a problem I created for myself when I made a major mistake creating a Facebook page for a client.  Tina walked me through the fix for free on her own time.  That kind of  customer service, for free, when I had clear instructions about what to do, and screwed them up anyway, is why  I always market the programs they create.  I know that they back them up, not just through tech support, but personally.

So I am passing along the link to the Ultimate Social Challenge for you.  I want to urge you to go check it out, and if you are an affiliate marketer, they will welcome you as an affilite.  I think they had over 900 sales in the first hour the Challenge was open.

Are you on Pinterest yet?  If not, join.  It is tremendous fun, if nothing else, and it appears that there are going to be some real marketing ramifications for those of us who are looking to bring traffic to a website or a blog.  Of course, I am seeing a number of e-books and workshops reporting some astronomical results for the sellers of the courses and e-books.  If half what they say is true, then I want to get in on it.  I am still working to recover from last October’s Panda update, for AskMikeTheCounselor2.com.    That update really hurt, and if Pinterest can help me recoup that traffic, then let us get started.

I had seen some mention of Pinterest on Facebook, but mostly sighed, wondering how I would ever find time to do justice to yet another social media resource, and then my wife’s niece began to post pins on Facebook, and I asked her for an invitation, which we both forgot for awhile, and then she sent one over, and I build an account, and started fooling around with it, and started getting repins…which really piqued my curiosity, because I had not expected that.

So I started hanging out on Pinterest and checking out other boards and I was amazed at how many beautiful images are up on those boards, plus I found a couple of Daddy friendly recipes that helped my kids eat their dinner, at least a little more.

I understand how you could get addicted to Pinterest, because when I see a particularly attractive image which has been repinned from one board to another, I often follow back to the original board, and then see another repin, and so on.

As I built my boards, others signed up to follow, which really surprised me, and made me want to get better with posting photos.  Many are professionally done, obviously, but I think there is plenty of room for spur of the moment kid and pet photos, and I am finding tools that allow me to put url’s on them, or maybe captions highlighting my silliness.

At any rate, there is a link in the side bar, where you can come and visit me on Pinterest.   Please do.

So Google is going to include their social network results in search?  And they are going to exclude Twitter and Facebook?  Ken Evoy, owner of Sitesell is very much up in arms about this, as well he should be since the Sitesell model is based solidly in the ‘provide-valuable-content-to-search-engine-query” school of online business.   That worked very well when search results were not slanted by the search engines.  Now, it appears that Google will be favoring content created by members of Google+, which could exclude all of those content creators who do not belong.  So traffic to websites like my AskMiketheCounselor2.com could drop precipitously.

Evoy says that Google is unfairly attempting to dominate both the search results and the social media results, and it sounds suspiciously like a monopoly to my non-legal ears.

I would add in that Google’s recent moves in the mobile market would add another component to a strategy to control the mobile market too.  They have bought Motorola, and they are penalizing non-mobile websites in the search results already.  So if you are not mobile friendly the way Google wants you to be, which means having a mobile website that loads fast and meets the needs of a mobile searcher, which are very different than the needs of your basic PC surfer,  your website will drop in search engine results.  I do have a mobile website built for this website, and if you search for this url on your mobile, you will see very different results than you would see for a PC search.  My unofficial observation so far is that traffic is up on my sites that have a mobile version built.  I know Google has indexed the mobile version of my sites, and that did not take long at all.

While I admire the business brass that Google is displaying, I am not sure what my response should be.  Ken Evoy is saying boycott Google and go to Bing.  I am sure many others will simply go along to get along.   One thing is for sure, there is an uproar.     I will keep you posted.