For now, the service will focus on Direct Messages and on emails announcing direct messages, since that’s where most of the phishing attacks have been taking place.

Personally, I never ever click a link in a Twitter direct message – even if the message is from a trusted friend, since you never know if the account has been hacked. I tell friends that the best way to reach me and to send me material is through email and not via Twitter DMs. I’ve seen many Twitter accounts who state in their bio that they don’t respond to direct messages – I’m sure many people have simply disabled direct messages notices and want absolutely nothing to do with those.

I wonder if this recent development will change things and make direct messages useful again, or if people have become so weary of them that it’s a lost battle. Regardless, I’m happy to see Twitter taking the phishing issue seriously and protecting their users against it.

One type of business account that I always find interesting is when a business creates a Twitter account, tweets a single tweets that says something like “our store is so awesome” or even just lists their URL, and then follow 2000 people.

Essentially, these businesses are viewing Twitter just as they would view an email blast – you blast 2000 people (I’m sure they would follow more if the software had allowed them to) with your link, in a marketing campaign that will have an extremely low response rate – but then, you haven’t really invested much in that campaign either.

It’s an interesting approach, but not one that I would personally recommend. More than anything, it shows a complete lack of understanding of the nature of social media. Social media is the exact opposite of an email blast. Social media is the painfully slow process of reaching out to prospects and having real, authentic conversations with them. Of establishing credibility through showing your expertise and your willingness to be helpful – even if your prospects don’t buy a thing, for now.

Using Twitter as an email blast tool is an option of course – it’s quick and cheap – but it’s also a waste of time. If you’re going to use Twitter at all, use it properly – as a powerful networking tool.

Basically, he created the different social media accounts, and then put the whole thing on autopilot and forgot about it. He never bothered following anyone on Twitter, for example. He never initiated any conversations with anyone over there. All he did was create the account, and then send occasional updates via Ping whenever he posted a new blog post to his blog or updated his site.

Needless to say, this client is convinced that “social media doesn’t work” and that “it’s a waste of time.” It took me a while to convince him to allocate part of his marketing budget to social media – but this time to real social media, where you actually do (or I do for him in this case) what you’re supposed to do on social networking sites which is to network, to connect, and to have conversations.

Creating a Twitter account and never using it to follow new people who are relevant to your business and to have conversations with them is indeed a waste of time. If all your Twitter account does is get updated with links to your blog posts and there’s nothing else in there, then you’re not doing it right and in this case it’s better to not do it at all.

Social media, when done right, can create important connections overtime. But it takes time, patience and effort. If you’re looking for immediate results, or if you’re expecting to see results from inactive social media accounts that you put on autopilot, then you’re going to be disappointed.

The argument is that whether we like it or not, the world is moving towards less privacy and more sharing. People are starting websites, blogs and Twitter accounts, where they’re sharing in ways that they had never done before (some would say over-sharing).

All of this is inevitable and Facebook, by adjusting its privacy settings to make its default public rather than private (and giving users the option to reinstate some privacy protections), is now joining the trend. No big deal, says Zuckerberg.

Personally, I’m not exactly shocked. I never trusted Facebook to keep my information private. I always assumed that whatever I post there can be seen by anyone and have acted accordingly.

But I know many people who see Facebook as a great way to keep in touch with family and friends. They do post intimate details about their lives on Facebook, and photos of their kids. They don’t see Facebook as the World Wide Web but as a closed community of users; they don’t filter what they say over there because they trust that only their friends would be able to see what they say. And making it all public unless they take action ans make it private again (and they can’t even make all of it private now) is not what they had in mind when they joined Facebook.

Most likely, Facebook is giving up privacy not so much because it thinks people don’t want it, or need it, anymore, but as a reaction to the very public Twitter. I guess Zuckerberg worries that keeping Facebook a place for people to privately interact with friends will eventually be too limiting and will stunt its growth.

In a way, making Facebook public IS the end of privacy. It’s a breach of confidence on some level, and I think it means that going forward, people will have a hard time trusting any social network that says it’s “secure.” I don’t think it’s a bad thing: I think that whatever we put on the Web, anywhere, we need to assume that anyone would be able to see it. Maybe it’s the end of privacy. Maybe there was never real privacy on the Web.

I think they’re wrong.

When you join social media and start interacting with your customers directly, there’s a certain risk of course. You COULD say something really stupid and get people mad. Case in point: the recent Motrin fiasco. Motrin posted an online ad on their website about a year ago. The ad was supposed to be “cute” and, I’m sure, viral, but moms all over the Internet thought that the campaign was offensive and were very vocal about it.

Motrin had made a mistake. So what? They took off the ad, apologized, and moved on to create better social media campaigns.

Really, there’s no need to fear social media. When a brand uses social media, it gives them a face. It humanizes them. Customers love it and they WILL forgive a brand that made a mistake as long as the brand owns up to it and apologizes.

On the other hand, if you avoid social media, you risk being left behind. You can’t allow yourself not to use social media if your competitors are using it and if your customers and prospects are using it. And if you think that by not using social media you maintain more control over your image, think again: customers will still talk about you and voice their opinions – but you won’t be there to monitor what they are saying about you and to do damage control.

In fact, Twitter enables people to connect with brands on an unprecedented level and to have their problems solved in a way that traditional customer service is unable to provide, especially with so many customer service departments being outsourced these days which unfortunately results in communication problems and in BAD customer service.

Case in point: one of my clients, Dimensional Research, is a market research firm that specializes in technology market research. One of the tools they use for their online surveys is Zoomerang.

Frustrated with one of the Zoomerang software features, my client tweeted, “Please stop promoting your ‘getting started’ classes to power users every time we log on! Add a ‘don’t show me again’”

To which Zoomerang promptly replied, “Will pass along to our team. Thank you for the heads up!”

Of course, there’s no guarantee that anything will come out of these tweets. But the Internet is filled with countless examples of unhappy customers who complained via Twitter, giving companies the opportunity to reach out immediately and make things right – better yet, appear publicly as a caring company that provides excellent customer service.

Of course, when I complained on Twitter about my terrible customer service experience with Travelocity, whom I never plan on doing business with again, the company never bothered to acknowledge my tweets.

Which makes me think that if a company doesn’t care about its customers, then social media won’t change that – it’s the companies who care that can leverage Twitter to improve their customer service even more and outdo the competition.

Search engines, and especially Google, place a lot of value on backlinks. Regardless of how great your on-page optimization is, you need backlinks to convince G that your site is legit, and if you can get high quality backlinks from reputable sites, that’s way better than those zero-pagerank sites that many SEO companies maintain for getting their customers tons of low-quality backlinks.

When you do social media properly, and by properly I mean produce high quality content and repost it to your social media accounts, those accounts that you maintain daily and keep them vibrant and engaging and engaged in what others are saying, after a few months people will start noticing you. Some of those people have blogs of their own, and if they like what you are saying, they will click that link on your bio and head over to your site and check it out.

If your site is good, they might link to it.

Case in point: a client has a highly authentic blog and Twitter account. Both are not big, but the client is a true expert at what she does and it shows. I manage her Twitter account, which only follows relevant people in her space. A few weeks ago, I started following someone that seemed relevant and interesting. A couple of weeks later, that someone published a new blog post on their own high-pagerank, high quality blog, where they mentioned my client’s blog and linked to it.

You don’t need more than a few of these high quality links to do really well in the SERPs.

So if someone ever wants to know why social media is important, or useful, you can add “it helps with SEO” to the list.

My first reaction was jealousy. I can’t go Twitter-free because I tweet for a living, and while being paid to tweet may sound like a dream come true, and in many ways it is, anyone who’s been using social media for longer than 2 hours will know what I mean when I say that social media can be very draining at times.

The very attributes that make social media fun, engaging and – yes – addictive – also make it demanding and exhausting. The need to constantly keep up with others’ updates and to keep producing fresh content of your own, the fast pace, knowing that people online can move on so quickly and forget about you or about your brand unless you constantly remind them… sometimes, at the end of a long day, I wonder if the human brain is actually built to withstand the speed at which social media moves and evolves.

No wonder so many people and companies are using automated social media tools and hiring ghost twittereres (is that a word?)

While I won’t be doing a proper digital cleanse any time soon, I do take the occasional social media mini break when I go skiing. Three full days of white snow, fast skiing and no internet connection have a way of reminding you that there’s more to life than sitting next to a computer typing away all day long.

1. Keywords. A blog gives you an opportunity to add fresh, keyword-rich content to your website. The more optimized content you have on your site, the easier it is for search engines to index it properly. For example, if you run an eCommerce site, there’s probably very little content on your site so very little for search engines to work with.

A keyword-rich blog is a great way to let search engines know exactly what your site is about. The fresh content also causes search engines to crawl your site more often. A static site gets crawled far less often than an active blog.

2. Backlinks. A well-written blog will make others want to link to your articles. Backlinks are a powerful SEO tool – much more so than basic on-page optimization. A few high-quality links from reputable sites can send you quickly to Google’s first page of results for your main keywords, especially if your keywords were used as the link’s anchor text.

3. Reputation. A high-quality blog shows prospects that you know what you’re talking about. The main reason I started this blog was to show people how much I knew about social media. I felt that my personal blog was not an appropriate place for this type of content, so decided to create a social-media-focused blog. Several of my clients are maintaining a blog for the same reason. Not all blogs generate leads (though many do), but almost all blogs have the power to turn leads into clients by demonstrating to prospects that you’re indeed an expert at what you do.

Since I really, truly am a social media consultant (I provide social media services to clients which I think fits the definition quite well), the best I can do is to point out that there are spammers everywhere, especially online. The best way to decide if a self-proclaimed social media expert knows what they’re doing is to:

1. Make sure they have an active blog and that the blog is well-written, optimized for search engines and is able to attract a small community of regular commentators.

2. Make sure they have an authentic Twitter account with real Twitter followers who interact with them rather then just ignore them.

3. Check their client portfolio and, more importantly, client testimonials.

Any social media expert who makes promises about getting you an x number of followers or getting you to a specific rankings in search engine result pages is making empty promises and you should stay away from them. The promises about getting you lots of followers are especially bothersome because an artificially inflated Twitter account makes absolutely no sense. A tight account with relevant, responsive followers is much more valuable.

The bottom line is, I’m not too worried about the explosion of wannabees in my space. I think most of us can easily differentiate between someone who’s authentic and offers quality and someone who’s just trying to make a quick buck then move on to the next trend. When they are all gone, I will still be here, serving satisfied clients and helping them to grow their business and get found on the Web.