Day 5 of the 2010 online Social Media Success Summit included 3 more information-packed sessions.

Unfortunately, the last session seemed very rushed (it ended in under 18 minutes) and it was probably a good topic for further discussion.

The three sessions were:

1. 8 Steps to Creating a Winning Social Media Strategy
2. How Mobile Marketing Can Improve Your Social Marketing
3. The Future of Social Media

Once again, I’ve published a detailed wrap up post on Market it Write’s blog with the main takeaways of the 3 sessions, so I’ll just provide a few highlights and observations here.

I never realized that just by participating in social media marketing and email marketing, you are also participating in mobile marketing. Why? Because people interact with their social networks and email from their phone. As the popularity of smart phones grows, this will be increasingly important. In fact, it may be an important trend to watch when it comes to the future of social media. Yesterday’s presentation in that regard was about focusing on trends and not specific technologies.

An eye-opening example of that were the stats on search engines from 1999. Back then, Yahoo was the big Kahuna of search. Google hadn’t even emerged yet. Today, Google dominates the market. It’s a lot like how MySpace shrunk and Facebook grew dramatically. What new technologies and platforms will be out there just a few years from now? It’s mind boggling.

What are your thoughts on mobile marketing and the future of social media?

Lot’s of people have been having fun creating a video of their Search Story on YouTube courtesy of a new Google app that makes it fast and easy. Here’s mine:

A new blogging services client asked me to help get her blog set up on Google Blogger (blogspot) a few months ago. I was happy to help.

This particular blog’s purpose was to provide useful information and legal tips on personal finance and debt management. The client wanted to monetize the blog through some affiliate programs and with AdSense.

I had no problem getting the content in place and laying out the pages, etc. I’ve used Blogger quite a bit so it didn’t take much time. A few weeks later, I went into Blogger to edit this personal finance blog. To my surprise, Google had disabled the blog completely as they believed it was spam. WTF??????

Now, it’s about 6 weeks later. Today, for the THIRD time I clicked the link to get the blog restored within Blogger because it was mis-characterized as spam. Meanwhile, the blog is not live, is not available to the public or EVEN TO THE BLOG ADMINISTRATOR, so even if I decided to try making some adjustments so the Goog wouldn’t consider it spam in the future, I CAN’T. In essence, then, Google Blogger has hijacked this content since it is no longer accessible. And meanwhile, of course, I see spam blogs all over the blogspot domain all the time. URGHH!!

Of course, all of this points out that if you want to have a blog, you are best off hosting it on your own domain so this doesn’t happen to you. And yes, there are countless other benefits to hosting your blog on your own domain, but that’s a post (or several) for another time.