Chris Brogan wrote an interesting blog post on social media etiquette, featuring ideas for best behavior on email, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and more.

He wrote as a "starting point," and many of the comments by readers were interesting as well. Some of my take-aways:

1. Electronic communication allows for rapid dissemination of information, which can be great. But that doesn't mean all information should be distributed widely and quickly. Thinking about what makes sense to communicate electronically is the same as if we were going to say something in a large group of people, where we usually think hard before offering up a comment.
2. Many people cited geting phone calls or IM or SMS messages asking someone if they got their email, which was generally considered rude. I agree. My other contribution to this thread are email responses that just say, "Thanks." Don't make people open another email - it is a waste of time! They know you are thankful.
   
3. Things that are rude in the real world are rude online, too. It is amazing that many people forget that.

Have you had online communications that you thought were rude? On what media and in what way? Please share your experiences!

Seth Godin discusses today the importance of luck in his post, "The Difficult Choice." But his choice seems to be a false one in some ways.

You can look at luck as an all or nothing proposition- that if you have luck you don't have to try and vice versa.

But I wonder if there is a more nuanced look -- what if you make your own luck? That is the subtle yet powerful combination of hard work and attitude that puts a person in a position to take advantage of opportunities that come their way. It may seem like luck, but in reality it is just, as Seth notes, putting yourself in a position to make a single into a double.

If you don't run hard, then you cannot do that. But, equally as important, if you don't believe strongly that you can do it, you will almost never make that single into a double.

How have you been lucky in business? In life? Do you believe in luck?

There is a great piece right now on NPR's "Day to Day" by Andrew Wallenstein about how the Internet and digital television have brought us variety and control over how we watch the Olympics.

I personally for years have been irritated and disappointed by the patronizing spoon feeding of Olympic programming by NBC. If previously you were not into track & field, for example, you were out of luck.

This year, you can catch events prime time on NBC, all day long on NBC Universal, and on demand on the Internet. This allows you to feed your obsession with, for example, badminton mixed doubles.

As you think about how dramatic a difference there is between previous Olympic programming and this year's programming, it might be useful to think about your customers and their experience with your products or services. Are you providing them spoon fed content and experiences? Or are you also adapting to new opportunities for consumers and providing, as Andrew Wallenstein just cited, more of a "buffet style" where consumers have control of their options?

Wow - there is something to learn from an againg national television network.

Share your Olympic viewing experiences or changing consumer offerings!

I just attended a great Viral Marketing webinar by Jennifer Laycock of Search Engine Guide that featured practical tips for developing a viral marketing program. My head might explode. I brainstormed so many good ideas while listening to her, and the strategies that she laid out were very practical and actionable.

A few great ideas that I took away from her presentation:

1. Expect many of your viral marketing campaigns to fail. It takes a lot of work and some trial and error, but the knowledge you gain about your customers will be valuable no matter what.
2. Responding to negative comments about your business or product online is one of the BEST opportunities out there to build brand trust and a positive reputation. A humble, proactive, constructive response send a huge signal that a. You are listening, and b. You take your customers seriously.
3. Don't think about "social marketing" in social networks - think about "joining the social media conversation."

Any of you out there plotting how to engage your customers online? Do any of these comments resonate with your experiences? Share them here!

There has been a lot of buzz out there about Facebook, Twitter, Digg, and all sorts of other social networking applications out on the web. It is still unclear to many businesses how interactions on these sites may help the bottom line. The only way to know if it works for you, though, is to try some of these out. In order to help my clients and seek means to promote my own business, I am using more and more of these tools. One interesting finding for me is that how you project yourself professionally in many of these environments has become much more casual. Maybe it is because many of these tools are being used in people's personal lives first. Maybe it is intrinsically built in to the tools. I am finding myself searching for more casual profile photos and bios to represent my business - those used on my website no longer apply. What does this mean? A group of online marketers recently discussed inappropriate interactions in some of these networks and talked about varying concepts of online etiquette. Have you dipped your toe into social networks as a means to promote your business? Are you sometimes feeling you have to be more casual and personal? Disagree completely? Share your experiences!

Apologies to all my blog subscribers. I have no excuse for my lack of posting. Stay tuned, as I plan on resuming my daily posts, and I look forward to hearing from you.

Now, I am probably a little late to the game compared to other web industry early-adopters, but in case the rest of the world has not gotten into this, I have to extol the virtues of tagging, both as a user and a marketer. As social networking, blogging, and other participatory web environments continue to grow, tagging has evolved as an additional, convenient way to control and organize web content. What is tagging? Basically, tagging is a means to categorize content, whether it is a web page, a picture or a video, with categories that allow you to organize the collected content under that tag category at any time. Here are a couple of examples of cool tagging I have come across recently: 1. Photos - I started sharing my photos yesterday on Flickr, an online photo sharing site. As you upload the photos and supply descriptions, you are also asked to add tags. As you add more and more albums over time in your Flickr account, you can view photos across these albums that have the same tag. So if you have pics of your pet Fido in many different albums over a year, and you tagged all those photos with "fido," then you can view all photos you have of your best friend at any time by viewing that tag. 2. Online Bookmarking - I set up a del.icio.us account the other day, and I see where it is awesome. del/icio.us is an online bookmark aggregator, and it is very handy to me, since I have over 1,000 sites in my browser bookmark - not very useful. del.icio.us allows you to tag your bookmarks by category, so it is easy to dynamically access websites by theme. Also, you can access your bookm arks from any computer. Cool. Why is tagging important? These are two relatively mundane examples as a user, but when you put on your marketing hat for a minute, it is useful to consider the impact of tagging on your online message. For example, as tagging continues to grow as a means to organize information online, how can you present content that is easy to tag? This may influence how you write your online content. You may want to offer suggestions to tag content. You may want to incorporate tagging into your website and web properties. And you may want to make it easy for people to tag using the multitude of services similar to del.icio.us. Check on the top right of my blog or at the end pf this post -- feel free to bookmark this anywhere you please! Do you use tagging? As a user? As a marketer? Please share your thoughts on how tagging will influence how people interact with web content!

Search Engine Land posted a comparison of search engine ratings late last week, and it is interesting on a couple of levels: 1) It is an easy view to see how different ratings companies have different methodologies. 2) It gives a sense of who is gaining and who is losing audience. It is no surprise that Google leads the pack and in some cases continues to grow its share. The various ratings companies attribute anywhere from 47 percent to 64 percent share to Google. Yahoo share ranges for the most part from 21 percent to 28 percent of market, but a number of ratings services show a drop in February. MSN Live, Microsoft's search engine, has posted month after month of audience loss across most ratings services, but some mixed data in January and February indicate that this decline may have ceased. Why does this matter to you? Well, it may be interesting to see if your pay-per-click campaigns across these various engines are in line with these share breakouts. Checking out your organic search engine referrals would be interesting as well. If the share breakout of your PPC or SEO referrals are drastically out of line with these share numbers, it may represent an opportunity to improve your efforts. Plus, it is interesting to see just how long Google can continue to dominate versus such aggressive competitors like Yahoo and Microsoft. Do you have some other ideas on how these search engine market share numbers can help all of us plugging away at our organization's online marketing programs? Comment here!

Apokrisis is a small internet consultancy located in Anchorage, AK and is committed to helping clients tie in internet strategies to their overall business goals and and apply technology and a means, not an end. We are especially committed to the innovation and success of small businesses and tourism companies.

Kristen Lindsey, owner of Apokrisis, has been involved in technology marketing for over ten years in a variety of roles, and she currently works with clients on online internet and marketing strategies, search engine marketing, online advertising strategies, viral marketing promotions, web 2.0 strategies and implementation, web content development, and web analytics.

A majority of her current clients are tourism businesses, including tour companies, hotels, CVB's and DMOs. Her professional involvement includes the Web Analytics Association, PRSA, and the American Marketing Association.

Apokrisis celebrates its fifth anniversary in October, 2008!

Search Engine Roundtable is reporting that Yahoo issued another index update this past Friday, and that they are updating the index more frequently to enhance search results more rapidly.

Many businesses have been frustrated and stumped by the Yahoo index, which seems to defy many rational optimization techniques. Furthermore, erratic updates have also made it difficult to estimate how long it takes for optimization changes to go into effect, thou SEO Roundtable reports very little posting activity about this index recently.

What has been your experience? Are you ranking well or poorly with Yahoo? Have you been frustrated by efforts to improve your Yahoo traffic? Share your thoughts!