I am starting to wonder if social media – blogs, bookmarks, profile pages, wikis – are getting a little too much press.

That sounds terribly backward, I know. I’ve been talking people’s ears off about how cool all of these things are for years now. While I won’t take personal credit for it, the attention of the world is slowly turning to this new revolution in publishing, in our lifetimes seconded only to the Internet itself. A study by Universal McCann recently showed how social media networks are increasing in use worldwide, which would on its own seem to indicate that we SEOs should just pack up our bags and move to Twitterland.

The problem is that there are still so many people who don’t use social media in their daily lives. If you ask family members where you can find their blog, or for their Twitter name, or even what their eBay rating is - a stretch, but still, technically social - they will give you a blank look. The majority of Internet users have only recently become aware of what blogs are. Their kids probably have Myspace accounts, sure. The rest just know what they hear about it on the news.

There are exceptions of course – YouTube is the favorite site of just about anyone with a high speed data line and time to kill. Blogs have also become good ways of gaining customers, though to the average web site viewer there’s nothing “social” about them. To a visitor to this site, this blog is simply more outstanding, quality content.

It is safe to say the majority of these applications are popular with… well, people like us: Marketers and computer professionals who know “neat” when we see it. I will go so far as to say that whatever responses are made to this very post, they will be made by a blogger or someone with a Twitter account – but probably not our spouses and almost surely not our parents.

For example, if one were to try and promote a company using only Twitter, and was wildly successful at it, that message would still only reach those of us who use Twitter. The rest of the world would never encounter it. Our spouses and parents might only become customers if the wave of Twitterers went out into the world espousing the company’s gospel. (Unless what you are selling is distinctly online product, like an e-mail list or visitors to your AdSense site.) It would seem a better use of time and money to optimize the company’s website for search.

For now, the best application of these social media programs is to get an idea of what the world – social media converts and not – is saying about you. It’s like an iceberg: The bit you see above water is a mere fraction of the rest of it that’s underwater. Similarly, if 70% of 100 blogs are bemoaning something your company did, chances are good 70% of everyone else is doing the same thing. Then you can go about the business of reshaping that opinion. While social media is still a few years away from being a place to generate sales, it is a Godsend for public relations.

Keep in mind, I still love this stuff. All of these social applications are a great new way to reach out to the world, and then to hear back from it. This is the promise of the Internet made when it first came onto the scene. And with the number of people worldwide with broadband connections at 300 million and growing, the day when a majority of the population can be convinced to buy something because of what they read on a blog or saw on Flickr is enormous.

Acting as though that day has already come though, I fear, makes us lose site of that goal. We should use these tools for what they are capable of doing now, not what they have the potential for doing someday. Today, if you want to make a sale the best place to be seen is the first page of Google results.

I was flipping through my Google Alerts this morning, sifting through the latest news on Internet search, or public relations, or marketing, when I came across a little gem titled, “Search Engine Optimization for Online Marketing.” In it, I was informed that Internet search is really, really important.

And that was about it. There was some other stuff in there about how back links are important, how you should update your site with new content often, that you should target relevant keywords… and so say all of us. Several other articles, some of which were merely blog posts or thinly veiled content pages, made the same proclamation: Search is really important. Like, really, really important.

Really.

Which is tantamount to proclaiming that chocolate is yummy and The Beatles were a great band: Good to know, but you probably already do.

What these articles are really designed to do is inform the world about the person writing the press release, and how you should hire them to do your search marketing. In order for a press release to be truly valuable, it has to contain information people might want to know. Simply regurgitating altruisms about your industry without giving any details reduces a press release to another form of print advertising.

The idea, then, is to create press releases that contain real information people might want or need. Interviews with industry professionals, steps to achieving specific goals, actual industry news, or why your product is significantly different than anyone else’s, make for much more effective press releases. The idea is not to just send one out because it’s good for you, but to provide value to someone else. This improves the chances of someone placing a link to it, or referring to it in their blog, adding it to their del.icio.us account…

At its best, your press release should be an exchange: You give readers valuable information, they give you business or at least a referral in the form of a link or blog post or what have you. If you keep this in mind when you create one, you will have far more luck.

There are people who HATE search marketing. I mean really hate it. They make fists, they grit their teeth, and they hit their heads on counter-tops - really hard. You will often hear these opponents to SEO say that, “all you need is good content!” and, “if what you have is worth seeing, then Google will pick it up on its own!” Which is, of course, recklessly stupid. Everyone thinks they have content that is worth being seen by others. If no one is seeing yours on Google, the natural assumption is that the other sites doing better than you have used SEO tactics, and in a world without SEO you would have naturally placed better than them.

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After adding the “nofollow” tags last year to Wikipedia to discourage spammers and search engine marketers (SEM) to use Wikipedia as a way to gain inbound links, Search Engine Land reports that Wikipedia editor Jehochman, has now contacted several SEO experts to edit and maintain a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) page on Wikipedia. It is nice to know that actual experts in the industry are maintaining this useful page, but it seems like a majority of the other pages on Wikipedia are maintained by people who think they know what they are talking about, but may have no actual experience. The page is currently a “featured article candidate,” which is the best of the best on Wikipedia.

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Doing well on Google means getting quality links. This means links with anchor text for that term you want to do well with. They should also come from web pages that are of a similar subject or ilk. (There are other elements like what the page is about, keyword density, etc. But we’re talking links today, so there.)

So how do you get all these links?

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This week, in a brilliant display of Internet solidarity, the copy protection source code for HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs was widely disseminated online. The reason? A lawyer asked them not to. (Read the story here.)This is the reason you need to tread VERY CAREFULLY when dealing with people online. After all, the way this story turned out wasn’t the end game for these people. That the studio threatened them in a way that would normally have worked off line, in the real world, is what set them off.

On line, individuals can have much more power than a company or its legal department. As such, this can happen not just when issuing a cease and desist, but when pitching an inappropriate story to another blog, or spamming the comment field on someone’s blog or forum. The Internet is a level playing field, the hierarchy of “strong” and “weak” based on a user’s knowledge of networking systems, HTML and their own daring.

This case is a prime example of this, and the studio that sent out these threatening letters in the first place has lost the battle because of it. No matter how many lawyers or cops or legal documents this movie studio assembles, they cannot prevent these 32 bits of code from becoming the most famous secret on the internet without the use of a time machine.