If you believe that social media begins and ends with sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Digg, Reddit and Sphinn, that rock you’re living underneath must be cozy. If you assume social web sites are all about eye candy and juicy talk, you may be right.

A new book called, The New Influencers – A Marketer’s Guide to the New Social Media by Paul Gillin, was my reading companion during a recent travel experience to a search engine marketing conference. The first story Gillin tells illustrates our dream experience with social networking and marketing.

He describes how an AOL customer tried to cancel his account. As most of us who were around during the primitive Internet years can attest to, it was far, far easier to deliver a baby while jumping on a trampoline than it was to cancel an AOL account once you set up one.

One gentleman, Vincent Ferrari, is a blog owner. He recorded his phone experience with an AOL account representative. Of course, it didn’t go well, with the highlight coming when the then 30-year old Ferrari was asked to go get his father.

On June 20, the recording was broadcast via an audio file from his blog, and he asked his readers if they could report any similar customer service tales from AOL. Boy could they! An hour later his server crashed with over 300,000 requests for downloads of his audio file. Four days later, while his server continued to suffer from the strain, he was appearing on nearly every major TV news show, including being interviewed by Matt Lauer of the Today show in the USA. He made Nightline. CNN. Top blogs ran his story.

By August 1, Google presented 150,000 results for “AOL” and “Vincent Ferrari”. Meanwhile, AOL announced changes to their policy but insisted it had nothing to do with the Ferrari recording.

As the author writes,

“Vincent Ferrari may not have caused AOL to change its business model, but he must have influenced it. He lit a match that set off a conflagration of customer complaint. AOL probably new that its hard-sell tactics were unpopular, but it probably didn’t know the degree to which those tactics inspired rage among its customers.”

I love to study human behavior and the Internet. Social web behavior takes the cake. It’s a marketers’ never-ending party. Reputation management is something big business can no longer hope to control without also understanding Internet media. This new book is a relaxed, informative read that covers social media in all its various forms, including podcasting, blogs, and video.

He doesn’t end there. Gillin considers how the long-time public relations industry must adapt. He works in viral marketing, tools and illustrative examples from the field to help drive his points home to readers. Beginners trying to understand all the ways the Internet can communicate information will get explanations in an easy, non-technical language. For the experienced, ideas and inspiration are worth the very affordable price for this hardcover book.

In an era where traditional journalists struggle with point persons in an effort to get the “real story”, there is now the freedom and often easy access to get to the truth of a matter simply by following clues dropped by social media sites.

You can influence change by communicating what’s important to you. Done well and creatively, you can earn money, force positive change, teach, inform, unite, fight together for causes and create new communities that stretch far beyond your present physical boundaries.

Gillin lightly touches on the future effects of social media marketing and barely gets into how it has been used to threaten and bully people.

With influence comes responsibility.

Related:

Leading search marketer and blog owner implores Google to come to their senses in I, For One, Welcome Our New SEO Overlords

Examples of airline customer satisfaction and reputation management concerns in Airline Delays and Word of Mouth

Three people from the search marketing industry question the practices of Facebook and Digg:

Using Facebook: Uploading Your Original Content Automatically Grants Them License to Use It

Compare People Facebook App Pulls a Bait and Switch?

An Open Letter to Kevin Rose

I will be reporting on sessions at the SMX Social Media event in NYC for the Search Engine Roundtable blog next month.

At the recent Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose, Joe Whyte interviewed me and Bill Slawski for the Search Marketing Standard magazine. The interview is out now and it illustrates Bill’s brilliance.

Joe did a taped interview, which is harder to do, I think. I’ve done one that way and it requires going back and finding the parts of the conversation where you stayed on track. You need to edit out the off topic sections and giggles. The giggles are nearly always my trademark, I’m afraid.

We were outside on the sunny patio, just off the floor where sessions were being held. It was a favorite casual spot for meeting friends, getting some quick sunshine, or calling someone with some privacy. Joe sat with Bill and I and asked questions on search engine marketing and usability.

The transcribed interview is ready for reading at SES Interviews: Kim Krause Berg and Bill Slawski on Supplemental Index and Usability

I remember the moment when Bill said,

Flash has a tendency to be used in a way that ignores the medium it’s being used upon. The Web isn’t TV. If Flash is being used as one long animation, then they are trying to use the website as a television station. It’s much more than that. It can be used in many more ways. To ignore the fact that you have machines coming to your site to index your pages (or to do other things) is to ignore the medium.

When he said, “The web is not TV”, he said it with such passion and determination that I did a double take. Those five words really nail our responsibility to our web site visitors and the clients who hire us to build and market their web site properties.

It’s our job to know our medium better than they do and help them use all the different technologies available to them in ways that justify their usage.

As for me, I didn’t say anything smart like Bill did. I did, however, tap into the theme I wrote about today in Cre8asite’s Blog, Usability and SEO - Red Light, Green Light, when I told Joe,

My job is to make sure that all the work that an SEO does or a PPC person does pays off as soon as somebody clicks onto the page. If nothing happens when they click, then all that money is down the drain – which is why we need to work together.

And then I giggled, I’m sure.

Related item written by Miriam Ellis of Solas Web Design, called “Good SEO/Bad SEO, Good Designer/ Bad Designer - A Generalization Problem

Every time I think I’ve seen the world’s most idiotic attempt at spam, there is someone else who wanders into my world with something new that blows the previous brainless acts out of the water.

Such is the case of this line from a blog comment spam post making the rounds in the blogs of a few of my friends:

I know a lot of spammers and I will ask them not to post on your site.

Is he kidding? Not only will he personally go out and beat up your enemies, but to seal the deal, you have to promise to link to his site on your homepage, because as he so sweetly admits,

Its just done for higher rankings in search engines.

(Note. I’ve retyped my response to this five times and none of it is printable. So, I’ll just move on.)

The second unpleasant experience of late is the discovery of a “cre8asite” website that is nothing more than a spammy GoogleAdSense nightmare thrown into a blog. Cre8asite has a blog. It has belonged to Cre8asiteforums for years. It’s called Cre8tive Flow.

Our blog has no ads because our authors voted against it. Any ads that would be added would only give us more money to donate to educational endeavors. That’s our thing. It separates us from that other guy.

Whenever I want to see entertaining dumb stuff, I need only go as far as MyBlogLog stats. This is where I see humanity in all its glory.

Lately, they’ve searched for “blog goddess sex”. Why in the world they ended up at MY blog is a real mystery. How do blogs have sex? What is the goddess technique? Is it something I can learn? How soon?

A search for “Demi Moore” found my blog. I don’t look like her, but thank you anyway.

I get a ton of traffic from people looking up “MsDewey”, especially if you put the word “strip” with the search phrase. Someone actually searched on “how to strip MsDewey”.

HELLO! If she actually stripped in the MsDewey search engine, do you honestly think Google would still be the number one search engine?

Someone found my blog by asking Google, “What dimension are we?”

I’d like to know the answer to that one myself.

Sometimes I’m not sure if I’m in the right one.