Not my point. My point is that we talked a little bit about what we were hearing coming out of SXSW (not a lot, other than Holler and Google Circles) and it reminded me of something I saw that I think is pretty incredible.

First, enter Len Kendall. Len is a friend IRL and on Facebook and, as he was getting ready to go to Austin, he posted a photo of several moleskins and felt tip pens and I thought, “Huh. He still takes notes.”

What I didn’t know is this: He does more than take notes. He is super, super talented. So talented, in fact, he draws his notes.

Is that not the coolest thing you’ve ever seen?

THEN. I happened to see a link from Ogilvy pass my tweet stream. They, too, were taking visual notes (in fact, they were distributing copies of the notes at attendee’s hotel rooms so they were there when they got up the next morning – waaaaay better than USA Today!).

THEN. You know the red car syndrome? You never see a red car until you buy one and then, suddenly, EVERYONE has a red car? Well, that’s what is happening to me right now with visual note-taking.

Lauren Fernandez posted a link to recipes that are illustrated. Not in a Cooks Illustrated kind of way, but in a very visual, fun kind of way.

I’m reminded of the conversation we had during the live recording of Inside PR at PodCamp in Toronto last month. An audience member asked if we thought podcasting was going to explode, as we once thought it would, or if it’s going to remain where it is.

My thinking on that is that, as human beings, we’re very visual. We either learn visually or by reading (which, I suppose, in a way is visual) so it’s difficult for us to not only find the time, but pay attention, to a podcast. Now these drawings prove that thinking.

Isn’t it way more fun to learn about the sessions this way than to receive someone’s notes?

For more of Len’s (doodles, as he calls them, though what I do is doodle; what he does is so much more) and for more of Ogilvy’s illustrations, check out Posterous and Mashable, respectively.

She asked, “Quora: Do or do not. Why or why not? Figured I’d rather ask you than ask Quora.”

My response?

Do not.

At first I was really pleased with Quora. Want to know which parts of The Social Network are true? Dustin Moskovitz (Facebook co-founder) is there to tell you.

Want to know how to successfully pitch Mashable? Ben Parr is there to tell you.

Want to know how to successfully pitch TechCrunch? Robert Scoble, Ben Parr, and many others provide answers.

Want to know if Amazon is working on an Android eReader? One of the guys who is working on the programming gives you the answer (yes).

Pretty cool, right?

Well, it turns out it’s just a place for the insiders. If you’re one of those named above, your question (and answer) gets published and ranked higher than, say, me. And there has been a lot of chatter about the editors changing your question, if they don’t like the way it’s stated, sometimes taking it completely out of context.

Your question or answer can be voted down. And you can even be kicked off the site. All because one of the editors doesn’t like the way you’ve stated something.

So it’s not really an open web forum that allows you to get true and honest feedback. It’s a Q&A site (albeit a pretty cool one, even though Yahoo! Answers has 100 million users and they, well, do not) that is run by people who can change your question, mark down your answer, or remove you altogether.

The cool part is that there is very little spam (has anyone noticed a significant increase in spam on LinkedIn lately?!) and you have to use your real name, but brands aren’t allowed there yet.

Sure, your employees can get on there and represent you, but until they allow companies, it’s not going to be a very useful tool and one we won’t recommend to clients.

My recommendation: Check it out. Search on there for answers, if you have a question that is too large for Twitter (see what New York Times columnist David Pogue has to say about that). But don’t spend a lot of time or effort on it.

What’s been your experience with Quora? How would you answer Abbie’s question?

I am very flattered and humbled to be asked to write here… especially about privacy, the grand-prize winning idea I submitted for the Spin Sucks 9 Marketing Trends webinar contest.

I view social media as a revolution in interpersonal communication technology. Notice the word marketing is not in that statement. The current platforms were created to connect people to people and, based on current architecture, have enabled marketing to invade our personal space.

Note that no one ever asked us, the people, our thoughts on marketing, privacy, or control of our private communications among friends. When you call someone on the phone are you OK if others listen in? Or read your personal email? No, you would get a gun and fix that problem!

I run a Facebook page for a client. More than 75 percent of the Fans have 100 percent private profiles. The people at the forefront of social media have about the same percentage of completely private profiles. When Pete Cashmore of Mashable wrote that privacy is dead, he lost all his credibility.

Of course this benefits Facebook and Mashable. But does it benefit you? Were you asked? The people have spoken. I believe eventually we will be in complete control of how we communicate, the platforms, the privacy, everything, and it will be integrated into all sorts of devices in simple intuitive ways. And that will start with 2011.

Great new examples emerging:

Diaspora. This new network wants you to have control of all your data. You can communicate to your Twitter and Facebook friends, but all your data is yours.

Path. This new technology allows small networks of 50 people so you do not have to broadcast to the world.

Twitsper. This allows you to send group DMs. I can actually send private messages to more than one person at a time.

Imagine being able to share in all sorts of ways privately when we wish it to be. Social media marketing could become completely different. Viral will still be possible, but it will take better content and more leg work. There might be a dearth of public data, potentially ruining business models based on analytics and social media marketing. What about PR? What if the majority of social content is not public for brands to monitor sentiment?

Current business models were chosen based on exploiting our personal connections and activities for brand marketing purposes. But who wouldn’t pay a few dollars a month for great technology and control? Look for hybrid subscription models where you choose whether to pay for no ads, or use free with ads. Hootsuite just rolled out a premium account for $5.99 per month that would remove sponsored Tweets from your feed. It will be interesting to see how many sign up.

Howie Goldfarb is president and CEO of Sky Pulse Media, an agency focused on helping clients achieve outsized results in measurable bottom-line-impacting ways. He had a 14-year career in direct B2B sales before deciding to lighten up his dreary work life and move into advertising.

Editor’s note: Howie Goldfarb is the grand-prize winner of our 9 Marketing Trends for 2011 contest, in which we asked readers to submit the ninth trend for our upcoming webinar of the same name, which will be held on December 15. (It’s not too late to sign up!) The above thoughts are about his submitted trend, user control. In the webinar, we will discuss how to adjust your business to leverage all nine trends.

That got my attention. More online noise.

While the goal for the blog is to eventually monetize it, it’s equally important to maintain the culture we’ve created. But how do you do that as you grow?

This goes along with something I’ve been thinking about for a few weeks – how do we continue to engage with our community as it grows? How do we continue to make people feel welcome, pay it forward, and debate professionally as it gets bigger? How do we continue to make every commenter feel important when there are hundreds of them? How do we grow without making more noise? Does a blog eventually have to go the way of Mashable and Guy Kawasaki or is it possible to maintain the intimacy and accessibility we’ve created?

I’m not going to pretend that the 94 percent increase in traffic we had in July, after we started having daily guest bloggers, hasn’t been exciting. I’m not going to pretend it hasn’t gotten us months closer to our goal in just a few short weeks.

But this is your blog as much as it is ours. And we don’t want to create more noise. We want it to continue to be intimate; after all that’s the culture we’re building within our four walls. It makes sense to have a common culture in all aspects of the business.

So what do you think? Have we just created more online noise? Are we getting too big for our britches? Do you still see intimacy and accessibility? Or are we on our way to getting too big for you to care?

I’ve had some time to think about it and now I’m really sure I don’t agree with the story…or rather, the study that prompted the story. The study was conducted by Forrester to show that only 4 percent of Internet-using adults use Foursquare and, of those people, only 1 percent check in to a location at least once a week.

Let’s put this into perspective.

Worldwide, nearly 2 billion people use the Internet and, in North America, there are more than 265 million. If 4 percent use Foursquare, that’s 80 million people worldwide and nearly 11 million people in North America. If you break it down even further and say you only want to reach the 1 percent who check in at least once a week, that’s still 800,000 worldwide and 106,000 people in North America.

And, let’s think about this…likely the 800,000 people who check in at least once a week are early adopters of technology, which means they’ve built communities on one or more of the social networks and are looked at as people who are influencers. People who will tell others they should check out a business because of some special they just received. Does it really make sense to wait until later to adopt some location-based marketing?

I believe it was Seth Godin who said, “If you wait until there are case studies in your industry, you’ll be too late.” Using location-based marketing is a free tool and you have the opportunity to create extremely loyal customers. WHY would you wait?

Danny Brown guest blogged here about using location-based marketing and provided some great ideas.

I have a few additional ideas:

* Rather than making me carry around a loyalty card, why not offer me the same program via my check-in on my phone?

* As Danny suggests, offer specials to people who are not just Mayors.

* Offer something unique to people who come by your booth at a trade show and prove they’ve checked into your location.

* Give away something free for the 10th time I come into your store.

* Provide freebies and/or specials if I bring in friends and they also check in.

There truly are tons of ideas for location-based marketing that won’t cost you much more than brain power and some freebies. The time for location-based marketing is now. Do you still think 800,000 people (or even 106,000 in North America) can’t make a difference in your business?

So you’ve set up a blog that you’re passionate about and you’ve written your first few posts.   Who has seen it?  Your friends? Who is going to see it?  Your mom?  Likely if you’ve taken the good time to post your thoughts, opinions, and feelings, you are looking to share them with the world.  Or at least the world who also cares about your passion.

There are only so many people you can tell.  You only have one mom.  How can you get more people to read your post, to keep coming back, to leave comments, and to tell their friends?

Wouldn’t it be great to get Google to help you find those people?

Well I have a surprise for you …

Hooking into Google and getting listed on their search result pages is easier than it seems, but it does require an hour or so of work.  Tailoring your blog to be picked up by Google is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO.  Here are a few basic tips to get started:

1) Go to the Google Webmaster site and login using your Gmail account information (if you don’t have one, you’ll need to create one). In the middle of the page is a button that says, “add a site.” Click on that and add your blog URL. Then follow the directions to get your site verified. If you need help, this is a great video that walks you through the process.

2) Optimize your content.  Sure, you should write what you are passionate about, but there’s nothing that says you can’t cheat a little bit to attract more readers.  All you have to do is find out what people are searching for on Google and incorporate it into your posts.

With the Google keyword tool, you can enter a few key phrases from your blog post and find out which terms are being searched, then nudge your post in that direction … go on, try it.  It’s fun.  There also is a tutorial to help you figure out how to use this tool and you can find it here.

3) Recently Google started placing tweets near the top of its search results and is beginning to index Twitter users’ homepages more frequently … that means you need to not only use Twitter (Gini will tell you how to do this next week), but also optimize your tweets.

Just like in the second step, you should tailor your tweets to use popular search terms.  Here is a great set of tips from Mashable on SEO for Twitter. Optimized tweets will send more people to your Twitter account and likely to the links you post there.  Which brings us to …

4) Measurement.  Most blogging platforms, such as WordPress or Blogger, will let you add Google Analytics to your site so that you can track who comes to your site and what they do once they get there. There is a big blue box that says, “Access Analytics.” Underneath that is a link that reads, “sign up now.” Just like the Google Webmaster tools, you’ll need a Gmail account. Enter that information and it’ll take you through the steps to add your blog.  Here is another tutorial.

With these simple steps, you’re well on your way to attracting readers who search Google for your blog topic. It’s not hard; it just takes a little bit of time.

For those of you already optimizing your blog, what would you add to this for beginner bloggers?

What prompted my question, “Is the corporate Web site about to die?” was an article on Mashable about social media making corporate Web sites irrelevant.

I am here to tell you, the corporate Web site is about to die.

Do I think corporate Web site URLs are going to go away? No.

Do I think corporate Web sites are going to change and be more interactive and engaging? Yes.

In the offline world, we had the ability to write PR canned messages and push our brands to the masses without getting any feedback.  Our experts were reporters and influentials and we had to have relationships with a handful in order to affect how our messages were delivered.

With new media, the brand we’ve paid (in some cases millions of dollars) for doesn’t always equate what people think about us. People now have the ability to change behaviors as soon as they see something better, which creates less loyalty than in the offline world. In one of my favorite books, Groundswell, they say “Your customers have always had an idea of what your brand signifies; online they now have a forum to discuss it.” Today we have to have relationships with ALL of our customers.

So how does this relate to the death of the corporate Web site?  Your static, PR canned message Web site is dying.  Your new Web site must allow connection and engagement with your customers – the evangelists and the detractors. A great example of how this should look is Gary Vaynerchuk’s site.  It’s fluid, you can comment and connect, and you have multiple choices to engage with him.

During last night’s debate, I was challenged to shut off armentdietrich.com. Not yet, @stevecunningham! While our home page is static (for now), the innards are fluid, engaging, and allow people to connect with us. By the end of 2009, our entire site will be set for new technologies so we can focus on relationships with our current clients, prospects, and potential candidates. Mark my words.

Do you think the corporate Web site is taking its last breath?