Introducing The Newest Member of the Social Networking Hall of Shame.

I’m actually grateful to this guy Matt. His utterly shameless promotion via press release, social networks, and probably skywriting over Atlanta raises an issue that quite frankly, needs to be discussed:

Is there any correlation between the number of friends or followers on various social networking sites and strategic business savvy? If you have 500 friends, are you better able to counsel your clients? Does maxing out Facebook or Twitter automatically make you better at PR, better at marketing, better at anything?

Is it possible, even using the awesome tools now available to us, to create actual relationships of any kind with a social network of 5000? Can you have real conversations? Can you genuinely contribute? Or is it merely a matter of using your Uzi-style technology to power-shoot links?

And most of all, most importantly to anyone considering creating corporate, non-profit, or any kind of business strategy, are you listening? Are you paying attention to the fiercely fascinating fray of humanity out there? At the heart of Web 2.5 is two-way dialogue. If your focus lies solely in generating hardcore numbers, is power-listening even possible?

Matt’s not the only one out there, not the only pretender-to-the-business-throne promoting, pushing and claiming that Vegas-izing the numbers is a true business or sales builder. No, this new uber-social world is jam-packed with people who might consider getting a real job and learning some actual skills beyond self-promotion.

In the meantime, this press release is worth reading, if only for a little levity in the midst of the screamworthy news on CNN and CNBC.

The Powerful Promoter Promotes Himself Straight to the Top of Twitter - Matt Bacak Achieves Another Social Networking Milestone

Suwanee, GA (PRWEB) December 2, 2008 — What’s better than soaring to the top of a popular social networking site? How about skyrocketing to the summit of two of them? That’s the envious position The Powerful Promoter, Matt Bacak, found himself in last month when he entered the Twitter elite. Proving just how powerful his Internet marketing promotional strategies are, Bacak not only became a top three Atlanta Twitterer, but he currently outranks 99.9% of all members of the site. Internet marketers who would like to follow The Powerful Promoter’s tweets and improve their own promotional efforts can do so online at http://twitter.com/mattbacak.

Matt Bacak
According to Nielson Online, Twitter is the fastest growing social networking site, achieving a 343% growth rate between September 2007 and September 2008. Facebook came in at the number six spot, growing 116% over the same time period. For obvious reasons, landing in the top tier of either of these social media giants could boost an Internet marketer’s career, but accomplishing it in both is an almost guaranteed catapult into the stratosphere. Well, that’s exactly what Matt Bacak has just done.

Earlier this year, Bacak hit the 5,000 friends’ mark on Facebook to land in the top 500 members. Now he’s entered the Twitter elite, where, as of press time, he sat firmly in the number three slot among all Atlanta, Ga., Twitterers. That position places him handily ahead of the hometown big business competition: Home Depot. Consistently ranking in his region’s top ten, Bacak also ranks 468 out of 506,626 Twitterers worldwide.

Wikipedia describes Twitter as a “social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send and read other users’ updates (a.k.a. “tweets”), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length. The service touts itself as a way to communicate and stay connected with others through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing? By one measure, Twitter had well over five million visitors in September 2008. That figure represents a fivefold increase in just one month and equates to three out of every 1,000 Internet users.

“Anyone can call their promotional abilities ‘powerful’ but I actually prove that mine are,” says Matt Bacak of his most recent accomplishment. “I consistently rank in the top 500 Twitterers on the Net. If you were an Internet marketer who wanted to improve your promotional game, who would you trust? Someone who is all talk and no action, or someone who actually walks the talk?”

For more information on Bacak’s ascent to the Twitter top, contact Stephanie Bunn at (770) 271-1536. To learn more about the promotional strategies Bacak leveraged to get there, visit him online at http://www.powerfulpromoter.com.

Many thanks to @MaryHodder, who tweeted this story and link.