In today’s age of social media, search engine optimisation & search engine marketing, there is a misconception that anyone can do it.

If you know how to edit some meta tags, insert alt tags in images and stuff your content full of relevant keywords you can carry out SEO on your website.

If you create a group for your company on Facebook and get 50 members, you are a Social Media expert.

If you can setup your own PPC account in Google AdWords and broadcast your ads to the nation, then you earn the title of Search Engine Marketing Manager.

The truth is that this is all a misconception. Because there is so much information floating around about SEM, SEO, PPC and the like, both bad and good it is difficult for anyone to know if they are really doing a good job or not. I can say for a fact that a lot of people are doing a bad job, and Google is not helping in this area because all they are thinking about is their revenue stream.

99% of Google’s revenue comes from Google AdWords. Without this revenue stream Google wouldn’t exist as it does today.

As a specialist in this field it upsets and frustrates me that Google project the misconception to it’s AdWords advertisers that anyone can open and successfully run their own account. Of course, it is possible to open and start a new account quite easily, just as it is possible to do SEO on your website with a few META tag adjustments and keyword placements… not.

With basic help on how to run your own AdWords campaign, Google makes it look easy for the average person to run a successful campaign.

When you think about it, Google is the next Microsoft. Microsoft make it easy for anyone to open a new spreadsheet, word document or powerpoint presentation. While this is great, it doesn’t mean that you are an expert in any of these programs, it just means that you can spend a lot of money on a program in which you are going to use maybe 5% of it’s total features.

This applies equally to Google AdWords. AdWords is a fantastic platform and offers advanced analytics and adjustments to the ads run on this platform. The average user will use 5% of AdWords capabilities. A specialist in the field will use 90%+, giving their client maximum Return On Investment (ROI) and maximum benefit through Google AdWords.

Just because you can open and appear to run your own account in Google AdWords, doesn’t mean that you are not flushing your money down the toilet in overpriced keyword bids and under-optimised account setup. The basic user will lose out big time with their 5% knowledge and 95% ad spend. Don’t be fooled into thinking your are an expert just because you know the basics.

Remember that AdWords amateurs spend 95% of their money as they only use 5% of the programs features. Professionals use 95% of AdWords features, while spending only 5% of their money.

Hiking Hong Kong recently embarked on a Social Media Marketing campaign to increase their Facebook Fan numbers and to make their website more interactive. Fan numbers increased dramatically from about 200 to now almost 1000 fans in just one month. This was achieved by creating Facebook Ads creating brand awareness and by placing Facebook Social Network Plugins on their website. Hiking Hong Kong went to town by engaging in multiple social networks including Bebo, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Digg, Flikr, Picasa, LinkedIn, orkut, Squidoo and Twitter. The launch of their new blog and live pollution and weather updates have increased visitor number to the point of exceeding their bandwidth limits for the month of November 2010.

The Hong Kong Jewish Community Centre have also launched their new website complete with News page and Google Calendar integration.

Hong Kong Jewish Community Centre Website

We look forward to interesting new projects in the year ahead: 2011.

Social media is becoming the corner stone of the web, evolving every day and challenging the search engines at their own game.

People no longer only use search engines to find products and services. They listen to Twitter, browse Facebook, check out online reviews and surf on their mobile phones.

In fact eMarketer have released some stats which show exactly how much rubbish is floating around on Twitter. The stats (August 2009) show that 40.55% of Tweets were deemed “Pointless Babble”. That with an additional 3.75% of spam and you are starting to approach a value that would make Twitter perhaps only 50% useful.

Tweets Worldwide By Content Category, August 2009

There is an upside to all this useless chatter on Twitter (and Facebook). It used to be on blogs.

This means that blogging will gain a higher reputation now that Twitter has taken much of it’s useless blog posts away. This will mean that more of the information found on blogs will actually be meaningful and therefore gain a higher ranking / reputation from search engines.

So what is the big deal about online photo sharing? Find out more in the video below:

David gives you seven tips on how to manage your reputation online and says that you should not fear bad reviews.