websense

So, I’m slower to jump on most bandwagons, and Social Media is one I’m pretty hesitant about.

Not that I think it won’t catch on, and really impact some businesses. I do. However, I think it should be something that businesses should really evaluate:

• Is your market there?
• Will you take it seriously?
• Will you (or your business) invest the time to really be part of the community?
• Are you already covering your bases in web marketing fundamentals?

If you answered no to any of those, then maybe you should really consider whether or not social media is the right answer for your business.

On the other hand:

Because of a small issue with a friend’s Facebook Account, I created one. Just so I could become “friends” with him and see what was up. My plan was to see if I could help figure this out, then remove the account, because of course, I assumed it would do no good for me to spend time on Facebook.

What happens, within a day I am linked up to several old friends and some new business opportunities.

Now, I have one more thing on my to-do list.

Lets not go off the deep end with this.

It’s great to see the engines finally finding the value in indexing rich media. Of course, it was only a matter of time ’til this happened. Now that Flash developers have been reigned in in many cases are using rich media where appropriate, but not building as much junk, it makes perfect sense that the engines would recognize the value in the content that exists in Flash format.

While the engines will be indexing this content, lets not forget about the user. There’s still a lot to be said for using standards oriented web development techniques and remaining mindful of all of the users that may want to access your site.

In my opinion, this news shouldn’t change anything about how we develop sites. Use Flash for content that is ideally delivered in a rich format, but continue to provide a non Flash alternative so that everyone has access to the information.

Keeping focused on all users will always help us generate the search results we all want.