In the wake of tragedy, the Internet and social media sites can be the most precious resources people can have. But the can also be the most dangerous. There’s not a trained journalist in the world that hasn’t sat, open-mouthed, at the irresponsible and erroneous reporting of speculation and innuendo we’ve seen in the last week. From false reports of arrests to immediate assumptions of one political group or nationality’s involvement.

While I wish the mistakes and short-sightedness was limited to amateur media, much of which is found in today’s blogosphere, the so-called “professionals” mucked it up just as bad. Buzzfeed did a nice run down of that catastrophe, but did so in the URL of a post they originally ran that erroneously reported the news as well. The FBI even lambasted media that messed that up.

Still, there were two faux pas (pas’s ?) I believe have the potential to change social media forever.

Imagine you are Salah Barhoun, a 17-year-old high school student, and your picture is on the cover of the New York post with an article that identifies you as an alleged bagman in the crime. Imagine that 4chan and Buzzfeed are fueling viral posts with pictures of you walking with your backpack around the bombing site before it happened. Imagine you have to rush to the police on Tuesday to clear your name but can’t possibly shake the suspicion of those who see you walking down the street in today’s fractured media world where rumor and assumpion rule.

Salah Barhoun could potentially sue every website that carried his photograph

Would you potentially think you had a case to sue for libel? I sure would. And no, the word “alleged” doesn’t clear the media from wrongdoing. If he were alive, you could ask Richard Jewell about that. He went from hero to suspect to hero to paydays from CNN and NBC because he was falsely identified as a suspect in the Olympic Park bombing of 1996. No, he wasn’t able to shut either network down due to the heftiness of the fines, but what kind of financial coffers do many of today’s blogs have?

Those were the days when traditional media was all there was. Today, the world is different.

Thursday night and Friday as the manhunt exploded, so did the irresponsibility of media and non-media like. The Today Show’s Facebook stream even featured an individual who named the “white hat” suspect. The only problem? The name was mentioned over a police scanner but was never officially identified as a suspect. NBC, Buzzfeed and others reported the name as well. Then later recounted. But the recounting won’t take back the fact that Sunil Tripathi, if he is in fact not connected to the bombing, may forever have fallout because his name was linked to the act. If he turns out to be one of the bombers, does it make it right that, without facts, people were reporting his name as a suspect, pleading that he be killed?

What we saw last week was what anarchy looks like. No rules. No constraints. No justice. No government. Just the will of the (under-informed) people running amok. Thankfully, it was online in conversations and on in our streets. But that doesn’t make it right. It also doesn’t make it legal.

With a world full of media members — professional and amateur — where the lines blur between, someone is going to step up and test the judicial system’s tolerance for such reporting. If Barhoun, Tripathi or their families decide their peaceful lives, privacy or safety was or is compromised, they could file suit against any website that carried the pictures, the names or the claims. Can you imagine how many websites that entails?

While the laws, burden of proof and standards are quite different in Britain, anyone who retweeted a BBC story that falsely reported Lord Alistair McAlpine was a child molester was subject to a financial penalty and apology, forced by the courts. Kinda makes you wonder what would happen to you if the laws in the U.S. were the same, right? Post a link to that 4chan thread or Buzzfied article and YOU could be subject to penalty for helping drag Barhoun’s face through the mud. Or indicate Tripathi should be arrested, imprisoned, punished or killed.

Of course, every bit of this conversation is conjecture. No lawsuits have been filed, to my knowledge. But the potential is there. It will be the next time blogs and media get hold of an alleged assailant or bombing suspect, too.

At some point, someone will sue the bejeezus out of these websites. And they will win.

Can 4chan sustain millions in legal fees and damages? Buzzfeed? Your blog?

The justice system, at least in the United States, is reactive rather than proactive. As such, it takes the courts years to catch up with cultural shifts, especially in communications. The first lawsuits effecting social media only emerged in the last few years. They’ll keep coming. And soon, they’ll change the way we are able to report, retort and even retweet.

Buckle up.

Note: I wrote the following for Watch.tv. It’s republished here with permission. 

If your business has been on the World Wide Web for more than about 12 minutes, you understand that the most powerful and proven way to attract customers online is through search. That’s so much the case that an entire industry evolved to help businesses optimize for Google, Bing, Yahoo and friends. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a powerful driver of traffic. Since the two primary ways to make money online are to increase traffic or increase conversions, well … it’s important.

But social media has thrown SEO for a bit of a loop. Now, instead of bouncing around the Internet from website to website, perhaps stopping on the occasional message board or forum, people are spending time on social networks. And when they’re on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the like, they’re doing something they didn’t do before: They’re leaving content in their wake. The search engines know this, and know this content — in the form of Tweets, Facebook posts and even YouTube comments — is perhaps more valuable to consider in search algorithms since it comes from actual consumers having conversations.

Thus, the term and practice of “Social Search,” has emerged. Now, in addition to traffic, links and directory listings, your web content’s search engine rankings can also be affected by “Like”s, ReTweets, +1s on and so on. These social signals add a layer of human verification that a link or piece of content are worth seeing. The more social proof a given piece of content has, the better chance it has of ranking higher than competing content, provided all other entires in the algorithm for each are the same.

Like written content, video can be optimized for search. But it can also be optimized for social. While the two tactics are similar, there are some subtle differences, too. To understand them, we first need to understand the two audiences you’re optimizing for.

Spiders And Spies

Optimizing your content — video or otherwise — in the context of search engines means you’re optimizing it for two audiences. I call them Spiders and Spies. Spiders — the Web bots that crawl and index websites — are the ones that most SEO professionals focus on. If Google’s spiders index your site and it is set up to give those spiders strong, optimized information for the keywords for which you wish to rank well, you have a good chance of doing just that. Certainly, there are other factors involved — traffic, in-bound links, age of site and so on — but feeding clear information to Google, Bing, Yahoo and other web indexes so they know how and what to rank your site for is the main execution.

Spies, in my labeling, implies people who are viewing your content. You have to optimize for human beings too. Not only does your content have to be readable, you have to remember that you can rank No. 1 for a given search term, but if the No. 2 ranked item has a sexier headline, it may get more clicks. Once the search engine result page (SERP) is presented, bots no longer matter. It’s people that actually click.

Similarly, bots don’t share your content on social networks. People do. And it’s these people and their sharing, liking, thumb-upping (Is that a word?) and so on — sends the all-important social signals to search engines about your content. Those social signals help produce more relevant results for the searcher.

This video will further explain:

The One Key To Optimization

There are thousands of articles and blogs and even entire companies founded upon teaching people how to optimize their website and online content for search. You probably can’t navigate through less than five random pages from any handful of websites in the world without seeing an ad, a blog post or some other enticement to show you how to optimize your online presence. And knowing and understanding SEO and all of its intricacies can certainly help your business.

Similarly, there are thousands of blogs and advice-givers in the world of social media. And they can help you understand what social media is, how content is used there and how you can optimize social media for your business.

But at the end of the day, I’ve found that only one real tactic matters in winning search — both via bot and person — and the all-important battle of share with your online content. The one thing you need to do every time you post, Tweet, publish a video and more is to simply create compelling content.

If your content is such that your audience reads, sees or watches it and says, “Holy Smokes!” then you’ve won. They might say, “Holy Smokes! That’s awesome!” or “Holy Smokes! That’s Interesting!” or sad, funny, informative, entertaining and so on. But if you can elicit an emotional response (i.e. — making them say, “Holy Smokes!”) then everything else takes care of itself. Why? Because when the content is “Holy Smokes” content, people link to it, share it, plus-one it and the like.

The Rest Of The Optimizing Story

The absolute worst thing you can do as a business, then, is produce boring content. This applies to your video content as well, even more so. Think about it: How many times have you hit “Play” on a YouTube video, only to quickly stop, jump to a different one or navigate away altogether? If the first few seconds don’t grab your attention and don’t make you perhaps anticipate a little, “Holy Smokes,” you’ll bail.

So the first step in optimizing your video content is making sure the content itself is awesome. You do this by thinking of your target audience, putting yourself in their shoes and asking, “What can we put in this video — script, action or otherwise — that will make me say, ‘Holy Smokes?’” If the video isn’t compelling to Spies … not Spiders … it won’t be shared, or perhaps even watched more than a few times, in the first place.

You also want to ensure the video title and description are clear in conveying to the human viewer what the video is about and perhaps entices them to view it. “Arachnid Copulatory Practices In South American Rain Forests,” is not quite as compelling as a title like, “Watch Brazilian Spiders Have Sex!” … depending upon your target audience, of course. We’ll call this the “People” headline. It also helps to keep the gist of the video in the first 50 characters of the title. That’s all that will show in a main Google search result page.

The next step is making sure the video is also compelling to the Spiders … the bots, not the Brazilian ones. You do this in a few ways:

• Make sure your title contains the primary keyword for which you wish to rank.
• Make sure your video META data (the video description and tags) include the primary and perhaps even some complimentary or secondary keywords you’re targeting.
• Where relevant, add the date and location of the video. Search engines reward recency and if you’re a local business, local searchers will find you in priority over non-local businesses.
• If you post or embed your videos to a website, as well as YouTube or similar video sharing sites, look into creating (or have your web developer create) a video site map to submit to the search engines. If you use Google Webmaster Tools, you can find instructions on how to do this in their help area.
• After your video has run for a few weeks, or even a month or two, return to it and edit your “People” headline to be more search engine friendly. The initial unveiling of the video will attract more views because of social shares. After they’ve died down, your primary traffic driver will be the search engines. Make it more bot friendly after the sizzle has worn off.

Now you’re ready to post, but your optimization job isn’t done! Remember those social signals that also feed the search algorithm? Well, they won’t manufacture themselves. Certainly, if you have a big online audience already subscribed to your YouTube channel or blog, you’re way ahead of the game, but most content needs promotional help as well. My friend and author Jay Baer likes to say, “You have to market your marketing!”

Promote your video (or the blog post or page where it is embedded) on your social channels. If you have a group of loyal customers or fans, email them and ask them to share the video with their networks (if they like it, of course). And, quite frankly, if you really want to boost the traction of your web videos, you can also budget some dollars for Facebook or Pay-Per-Click advertising to the page as well.

(INSIDER TIP: Most of the “Viral” videos on YouTube are either promoted by celebrities or views are paid for to get the view count over 100,000 or more. It’s black-hat/unethical in many people’s minds, but that’s the big secret to “virality.” The content has to be good, but you also often have to pay for it.)

The more people you get your video in front of, the more social traction you’ll get. The more social traction you get, the more people will see it, the better it will rank in search and the more long-tail traffic you’ll see on the video as a result.

Don’t Forget The One Key To Optimization

Regardless of the minutia of keyword-ing this and back-linking that, the one true key to optimizing any Web content is making sure the content itself rocks. Keep that “Holy Smokes!” rule in mind when you’re creating your videos, Tweeting, blogging or even writing copy for your Web redesign or landing page and, in general, you’ll be successful.

I’m a writer. The day I figured out that was the best way to describe the essence of what I do, my craft, my calling … life made more sense.

Sure, I can blog. I can write a book. I can write silly emails to friends (and sometimes do for fun). It manifests itself in multitudes of ways, but regardless of what other labels people want to put on it, I’m best described as a writer.

As a creative type, though, I’m also quirky, often disorganized and overburdened with things I’ve said, “yes,” to. Finding the time to write, even when therapeutically the action is needed to keep me from going bonkers, is sometimes a challenge. Fortunately, I have people around me like Kat who can see when I need a kick in the pants.

She brought me Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art recently and told me I should read it. When Kat tells me I should read something, I should. So I did. And now I’m recommending it to you should you be a creative sort of any kind — writing, music, art.

The War of Art is an instructional manual for those needing to overcome Resistance. It is the force that keeps us from not only sitting down to commence work, but believing in our work, delivering it to an audience and putting that craft in its proper place — above most all else in our lives — to empower us to be more productive, fulfilled and successful.

I’ll leave the finer points to your reading, but here’s what I learned from The War of Art:

• I am a writer first and foremost. I knew this, but the reaffirmation was nice.
• Resistance is not just procrastination, but self-doubt, busy-ness, family needs, personal care and more. Anything that keeps you from practicing your craft and producing your art is Resistance. You have to fight it, always.
• You can prescribe, schedule and force creativity. It’s all about developing the habit of doing so, which can’t be forced instantly. It takes time to build the habit. Once the habit is there, the creativity shortly follows.
• Your writing doesn’t define you. You define it. The other way around and you’ll be miserable painted in that box.
• It’s perfectly fine to spend hours, days, weeks, even months crafting something that doesn’t sell, succeed or even get consumed by another human, so long as it satisfies your need to create.
• Success is measured best in the journey, not the destination. For the destination (sales, royalties, speaking engagements, etc.) will probably change, setting you on different journeys.

There’s a damn good chance that you have some project hanging over you. Maybe it’s professional — like the 2013 plan or that RFP for a new web design — but it could be personal — a touching short story you want to write about your mother or finally sitting down to sculpt the outline if your first novel. The only thing stopping you is Resistance.

Read The War of Art and you’ll not only understand, you’ll overcome.

You will know you’ve graduated beyond the superficiality of social media marketing when you shed the “social media” label from your thinking. Certainly, I’ve built a nice reputation by talking a lot about social media in the last few years. But social media is a small part of what will drive customers to buy or try, think or say.

In our book, No Bullshit Social Media, Erik Deckers and I playfully talk about the hippies and tree-huggers — the social media purists — who think social media success is best measured by how warm and fuzzy your warm and fuzzies are, and how many times you get to sing “Kumbaya” with your customers. Granted, there’s nothing wrong with warm and fuzzy or “Kumbaya,” but neither make social media marketing successful.

Another thing the purists are married to is an unrealistic ethical positioning. For instance, instead of embracing advertising as an integral part of a marketing plan, they tend to insult it as if ads are not effective at all. They call email marketers spammers and look down their noses at people who still spend money on Pay-Per-Click and online media campaigns.

And god forbid you actually take out an ad on Facebook?! Sacrilege.

At the Word of Mouth Marketing Association’s conference in Las Vegas last week, B.J. Mendelson, author of Social Media is Bullshit, and Dave Kerpen, author of Likable Socia Media, had a debate over whether or not social media was, indeed, bullshit. In the discussion it surfaced that some authors, including Kerpen, had achieved New York Times Bestseller status by paying a public relations firm to buy the book in bulk and accordance with known data points for the list, effectively gaming the system to get their respective books featured.

The purists were aghast, I’m sure. The notion that a book made the list through means other than honest promotion, sales and public response will turn a lovely, placid social media purist into a vehement, spite-spitting monster faster than you can hit a “Like” button.

But let’s level-set here: While it may not be something people yell to their neighbors, it is generally known among authors of business books that the NYT Bestseller list is game-able. There are PR firms that openly sell the service of engineering such feats. There are concentrated, generally week-long, promotions upon launch that hopefully coincide with Amazon’s pre-orders posting to BookScan, add in some strategic bulk purchases in various markets and tah-da! Best-seller.

While not something some authors want to participate in from either a cost or ethics perspective, it’s there, it happens and while it may not be 100% fair, I dare you to find a list anywhere that is. If an algorithm goes into producing it, it can and will be gamed, particularly if someone’s income or ego depends on said lists.

The only tragedies exist in knowing the publishers themselves never invested the time or energy to figure out how to game the system to their advantage, and the New York Times doesn’t better police the practice.

Sure, there’s an ethical question at play for the author. You’d better be transparent about the activity (to my knowledge, Kerpen has been) but some will discredit you for trying it in the first place. Others will take the high road, but if someone approached you tomorrow and said, “For $12,000, I can create data points that will drive a 15% increase in sales to your business,” you’d pull out the check book if the math was right. A book on the best-seller list means higher speaking fees, more book sales, higher advances for the next book and the like.

We’re in the business of making our products look good. Gaming that list makes the product (book or author) look good. From a marketing perspective, it’s a no-brainer.

Mendelson takes advantage of this in his argument. If gaming the system gets your book on the best-seller list, then you didn’t sell it using social media like you claim. And if there are any such authors out there fooling themselves or their audiences into thinking that social media is the only way they built themselves and their business, then Mendelson is right to call them out.

But I don’t think we should get hung up on whether or not social media contributed X or Y percent to an author’s sales, a business’s profits or the growth of a brand. We are marketers, not social media marketers. If it takes a direct mail piece, an ad campaign or a public relations push to get eyeballs on our product, service or marketing; if it takes something not defined as social media to help our social media work; then it is responsible for us to pursue it.

We are not serving our brands or businesses by making our social media work. We are serving our brands and businesses by making our marketing work.

And that often takes more than one tactic or channel.

Note: I have never participated in gaming any system, that I know of, including trying to engineer either of my books to any best-seller list. Just a personal choice to date. It’s certainly something I might consider down the road, however. 

Julien Smith’s new book, out today and part of Seth Godin’s Domino Project, is essentially about overcoming our core human instincts to flinch under pressure. Granted, flinching isn’t always bad — it can protect you from danger — but the main type of flinching Smith hopes we can work around are the types that keep us from controlling our destiny, accomplishing our dreams and doing the things we truly want to do but are often afraid of.

The Flinch is not just a business book. It’s an inspirational book for anyone who has some hurdle they wish to accomplish. Whether it’s lose weight, get that big promotion or even break the ice with that handsome guy at the coffee shop, this book will help you learn to recognize your own flinch mechanism and give you some actionable steps to rid yourself of the hesitation.

Like other books in the Domino Project, The Flinch is short, manifesto-style, easy-to-read and pithy. (And since this one is sponsored by the Domino Project, it’s actually available for FREE as an e-book.) Smith’s style really shines in this work. And it’s different from that of his Trust Agents co-author. While those of us who have been reading Julien for years have seen it on his thought-provoking blog, it’s nice for the publishing world and mainstream folks to be able to hear his distinctive voice.

Smith make’s you think. He pushes your boundaries and perhaps even makes you a bit uncomfortable at times. The Flinch is certainly all about making you uncomfortable, but in good ways. We have to become uncomfortable if we’re ever going to grow and blossom into that person we know we can be.

While there is one point in the book when you think Smith is trying to advocate for the independent, rage-against-the-machine lifestyle he leads, the principles in The Flinch can be applied to any situation. If you want to be a corporate climber — a suit — you’re still going to need to overcome your own genetic disposition to flinch. So anyone can get something out of this book. And I, for one, think everyone should buy it, read it and try to soak up the lessons. We’ll all be happier with ourselves if we do.

I don’t do many singular reviews of books anymore, choosing rather to lump several into one big video review, so you know this book is an exception to the rule for me. And it’s not because I know Julien and want to see a friend do well with his book. I wrote this review and want you to go download The Flinch for yourself for one reason and one reason alone:

When I put it down, the first thing I wanted to do was find my own brick wall and run through it. When you finish, that’s what you’ll want to do.

The Flinch is available on Amazon in electronic format for free.