In a recent FastCompany piece by Gina Trapani titled “Work Smart: Claiming Your Name on the Web,” the author makes the following statement about creating one’s personal profile on the web, “To make yourself findable, claim your name in Web search results by setting up pages with information you’re comfortable sharing.”

The part about posting pages with “information you’re comfortable sharing” is key. The web today is a double edged razor sharp sword that advocates unlimited freedom of information and speech on one edge, while viciously cutting away basic freedoms when used as a highly monitored, mined, and scrutinized spying mechanism (as it is today) on the other.

Bottom line? Anything you post on the web is accessible to employers, colleagues, friends, family members, enemies, police, and other governmental and private agencies – without your approval or knowledge.

I recommend you consider all your online activity as essentially a strategic marketing initiative. Take care about sharing personal information on family and friends you wouldn’t want Hannibal Lecter to know (a bit dramatic maybe, but accurate). Take time to carefully consider precisely what you want to communicate. Write it down, review it a few times, then think about how you will communicate it. Will you blog daily, weekly, monthly? Will you setup and post to a Facebook page? Will you setup a LinkedIn profile? Will you Tweet some aspects of your life on Twitter? Whatever you choose, take the time to be strategic about it.

With more than 500 million users spending more than 700 billion minutes a month on Facebook, the fact that the site is reported to readily comply with requests from national and private security organizations means you should take care with the information you share.

A recent study by ForeSee Results shows that social media is a still maturing marketing medium, and that traditional marketing, including email marketing, are preferred.

According to the report, “social media interactions are a main influence for only 5 percent of visitors to retail websites” and “more traditional marketing tactics like promotional emails (19%), search engine results (8%), and Internet advertising (7%), influence more visits to retail websites.”

The report also concludes that traditional marketing techniques like promotional emails influence not only more traffic; they also deliver better-quality traffic. Some of the most satisfied site visitors arrived at a site because of previous familiarity with a brand, receipt of promotional emails, word-of-mouth, and visits to product review websites.

Only 8% of online shoppers said that’s social media was their preferred way to interact with a retailer. A majority want to engage with retailers, but but prefer to do so via email or on retail websites, rather than on social sites. Another key finding is that people are more satisfied with a retailers’ presence on Facebook than they are with Facebook itself.

Visit ForeSeeResults.com for more information or to download the full report.

The keyword is “social.” It refers to a place where people interact online, usually organized by groups around common interests. What makes social media “social” is that anyone can post and respond to content. There are presently three main social media categories or types of sites: 1) News; 2) Networks; and 3) User Generated Content.

Social Media Categories:

• Social News: People post and vote or rate news or other content they consider important. StumbleUpon and Digg are popular social news sites.
• Social Networks: People organize into groups along interest lines and communicate with each other with pictures, memos, status updates, email and other applications. Facebook and MySpace are social networks.
• User-Generated Content (UGC): Sites where users can post content and make accessible to the public. Typical UGC formats include comments, ratings, reviews, and other feedback mechanisms. YouTube and Flickr are popular user generated content sites.

So here are highlights on where some social media types overlap the three categories:

• Blogs have features that touch all three of social media categories. Blog content is user generated, may have news value, and is typically viewed by a network of followers. Blogs overlap the social news and UGC categories.
• Twitter is a collection of networks, covering different and varied topics and interests, where users follow each other’s brief updates (or “Tweets”). Twitter overlaps the social news and social network categories.
• RSS, (Really Simple Syndication) allows a person to subscribe to receive new or updated content they are interested in, automatically whenever it is added or updated by the author. Content is made available to subscribers using RSS by creating what is called an “RSS Feed.” RSS overlaps the social network and UGC categories.