Social media's awesome power can really take your breath away when you take a second to step back and see the change that it can cause in the world. Many brands and traditional media companies are focused on social media's effects on their relationships with consumers. Yet it is social media's ability to fundamentally shift how people discover, connect, communicate and interact with each other that what makes the space so powerful.

It seems ironic to me to be looking at consumer satisfaction here in the States. With gas prices over $4 per gallon and rising, the housing market at an all-time low and a recession looming (if not here already) can consumers be confident? Well, according to a recent Spring 2008 Top 100 Online Retail Satisfaction Index report by ForSee Results, consumer confidence is up 1.4% from last year.

SEO professionals should be fluent in social media; however, I'm deeply troubled by the philosophy of blogging for the foremost objective of SEO. As a marketer, with accountability for my company's brand and reputation, I would never recommend this approach. In fact, I urge all marketers to go out of their way to avoid being led into social media when the motivation is rooted primarily in the SEO results you may achieve.

Don't blame Craig, It's not his fault.A story in the front of the business section of The New York Times this past Monday raised once again the issue of whether Craigslist was responsible for the troubles that the U.S. newspaper industry finds itself In today. While the Times' story didn't jump on that bandwagon -- and actually presented a pretty balanced view of Craig's true impact on newspapers' recent misfortunes -- just reading about the issue once again motivated me to address it in today's column.

Winston Churchill once said, "The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty." I think, but I cannot be certain and have seen no confirmation of this point whatsoever, that Winston Churchill started out his career working in advertising. I think he may have been speaking to those people who feel brand advertisers are not spending online in conjunction with the time spent online by their consumers.

MySpace, Facebook and Google have all recently made "major" announcements regarding the future of how their platforms will play with the rest of the Web. I put major in quotes because a majority of the functionality announced isn't yet available to the average Joe app/Web developer. Regardless, the trend seems to be the movement into Web 3.0 that is making the entire World Wide Web into social media.

One of my many quests is to build communities on behalf of the brands we represent. I write about this quite a bit. I try and think who out there has community and I feel that the line is blurry. Every brand I came up with seems more like "affinity" or "loyalty" versus community. Are they one and the same?

I use Twitter, the micro-blogging platform. Each post is limited to 140 characters, so it instills succinct, efficient expression. And you only receive regular posts from those people you choose to follow, so you can eliminate attention polluters. While Twitter is significant in its own right, most significant is what it represents: the arrival of short-form communications, specially tailored for our growing attention deficit and love for instant gratification. So someone recently asked me what value I get out of Twitter. Here's the deal...

The music plays on. Until this past Saturday, it appeared that two chairs were about to be removed from the game of musical chairs otherwise known as the "consolidation of the online ad industry." With a merger of Microsoft and Yahoo, two of the industry's largest "acquirers" would have become one, and one that would have been so consumed by integration issues that it was unlikely to have had appetite for any other major acquisitions for another year or two. Well, fortunately for the dozens of wannabe "acquiree" online ad companies out there, Steve Ballmer's weekend letter to Jerry Yang …

In our world there's an ongoing debate over the concept of art vs. science in advertising. I've commented on it before, but it's becoming fast apparent to me that science is winning -- and I want to explain why this makes me a little nervous.