Hi folks. This is Smitty, whose tale is told in Darwood & Smitty. About 30 years from now, my life goes from about average to pretty dang unusual in no time at all, as Darwood and I are asked to deliver a package to the president of Earth.

Now the tale told is a true one, but it appears that there are at least 12 likely parallel realities and potentially infinite unlikely parallels to those. So I can't tell you what will happen in your future. Only what happens in mine, which could be yours as well. In my day, surveillance is so universal that we've pretty much stopped giving anyone a hard time about their personal decisions unless they're hurting someone else. Because pretty much if we held everyone up to some sort of across-the-board standard, almost no one would be left with a job or a reputation given that we're all below standards in one area or another.

I should point out that I'm not just referring to government surveillance. Basically everyone has recording devices, and they're everywhere. So if it's done in public, and often in private, someone almost surely knows about it. It's actually because of this that a technology called Scatterjart was developed, which prevents any kind of recording within an area. Mainly used by politicians and those with loads of money. But I'll let the novel tell more about that.

All this is just to say that today, June 5, 2014, a bunch of people on your time line are deciding they don't want to be monitored all the time as they launch an effort called "Reset the Net" (#ResetTheNet). They don't want everything they do online tracked by unknown government officials who can use this information to pretty much criminalize anyone, depending on how they want to interpret things. You wanted to know more about terrorism and decided to look it up? Well, you might be a terrorist. Red flagged for life.

#ResetTheNet is sort of a very early effort towards Scatterjart -- preventing surveillance. In this case, it tries to stop mass surveillance of people's internet use. This is just a first step. As you should know, and probably do, the government won't just stop watching people. It'll keep discovering new ways. And people have the opportunity to keep countering this. But mass surveillance will become a part of everyday life if the people don't decide to take action like this at each and every step.

Skeptical as I am of politicians, I discovered in my adventure with Darwood that there are honestly good politicians out there. I also learned what it takes for the population to keep its freedom. And taking action together like what we see with #ResetTheNet is the kind of thing I've found actually works.

Not sure if these few words will encourage you to take action or not, but I hope some insight into at least one future will give you pause for thought and have you reflect on where to spend your energies to create the future you prefer living in.

Good luck!

Smitty Jones.

At night, I'm hard at work as America's Favorite Author (not yet statistically proven), but during the day, I work in digital marketing.

Digital marketing involves a lot of things besides just getting a website seen. It also has to do with a visitor's experience from the moment they first see an ad or article to the time they visit your site to the times they're exposed to follow-up e-mails to the time they finally make a first purchase ... and beyond. So don't get me wrong when I simplify digital marketing for this article, but I felt this relationship between digital marketing and human health was an interesting one to share.

Two primary elements of getting people to a website include SEO and PPC. SEO refers to Search Engine Optimization, an involved process that's designed to get a website better exposure in search engine results. PPC refers to "Pay Per Click," one of the more popular forms of paid advertising where you only pay when someone clicks on your ad and visits your website.

SEO done right is an ongoing process that involves talking to the search engines in a number of ways -- for instance, using something called metatags; developing content on a website; developing content OFF a website; and generally offering so much value to people online that they naturally begin linking to your site to share it with others (either on their own websites, on their social profiles, etc.) Again, done right it is ongoing and, because it calls for producing real value, it's not something you can automate for lasting results.

Of course the human way seems to be finding the easiest and fastest way to do something, so people have tried automating SEO as well as paying pennies on the dollar for people overseas to do the work. Have you ever run across articles that seem all but worthless and have an obviously poor grasp on English? If so, you've probably run across some of that hired work ... which no longer provides meaningful results because the search engines continue to refine themselves to look for quality over quantity. (And frankly, to the human stumbling across the articles, I expect they tend to diminish trust in the associated company as well.)

While SEO involves long-term work that demands quality and attention, PPC appears at first blush to be the opposite. If you're willing to pay for the quick fix, then you can run an ad and simply pay when someone visits your site. The more the competition in your industry, the more expensive the ads may be; but if you can pay little enough for the ads and convert enough of your traffic into sales with adequate margin, you can be profitable with PPC even if you never spend a day on SEO.

In my mind, these two approaches are very much like natural and medicinal approaches to wellness. Getting or staying healthy through natural methods -- like good nutrition, supplements as needed, quality sleep, stress management, etc. -- involves a kind of commitment that many people, from my experience, won't make. It means paying attention to how your body responds to different foods, the way SEO must pay attention to how visitors respond to content. It means choosing quality food, even if that's at the expense of quantity (though you still need enough), just as SEO is better off producing better content even if that limits how much is produced. And it is ongoing. It is a part of life rather than something you take once a day so you can ignore symptoms, much the way SEO is an ongoing effort.

Medicinal health, however, is built on the idea that we don't want to deal with negative symptoms and that, by paying a few bucks for medicine, we can swallow something and ignore the problem. Kind of like paying to turn on ads for your website so you can ignore the fact that you're not doing anything healthy for it (producing great content) and, as a result, it's giving you poor results (no natural traffic -- funny that we call non-paid traffic "natural" or "organic").

While natural and medicinal health often butt heads (resisting ... urge ... to make joke ... about both sides ...) with each convinced that the other is killing people, digital marketing might actually teach us an important lesson about caring for our health.

You see, someone in digital marketing might know more about SEO than PPC or vice versa. They might prefer one over the other. But I'll wager that almost any professional digital marketer knows how important both sides are when used properly and when used to complement one another.

For instance, sometimes before investing in the long-term effort of SEO for a particular website, someone might used paid ads for immediate results in order to test whether the site -- with traffic -- will lead to sales. If it's actually built around something people don't need or want, or the messaging is off, it's better to know that early on rather than spending a ton of time (which also = money) to drive natural traffic through SEO.

Similarly, we sometimes don't have time to achieve a desired health result to wait for good old nutrition to kick in. Using blood coagulants or setting a bone after injury are both good examples of Western medicine kicking butt over nutritional supplements.

But giving time / energy to SEO (even if hiring quality help to do so) means caring about the health of the actual site -- about the content people will relate with and hopefully share with others. Rather than bandaging, your attempting to thrive. And doing this should, in most cases, actually improve the results of PPC -- for instance, a higher quality landing page potentially means a lower cost per click on your paid ads and potentially converts more traffic, both of which drive UP your return on ad spend.

In other words, a digital marketer knows that the two sides work hand-in-hand to achieve optimal results. What's more, despite its initial appearance, digital marketers also know that PPC is not just a matter of throwing money at a problem and ignoring it. You could do that, but turning on paid ads without knowing what you're doing or how to monitor results could quickly burn your business, much the way practicing medicine without first studying medicine and then monitoring results for patients under your care could cause untold problems.

I mean, we all see the commercials. We know that pharmaceutical drugs come with long lists of possible side effects, which often include depression and death. This is true whether or not a doctor prescribes them but, I'll wager, the odds for bad results increase dramatically if you're self-diagnosing and popping whatever pills you want. In a similar way, the cost of paid ads can be dangerous to a business even in good hands, but the cost of paid ads in the wrong hands can almost certainly spell disaster.

Yet, despite the possible downside of drugs or PPC, they can also be essential to our goals for health or running a business online.

Another similarity relates to something you might have seen often on nutritional products: they don't diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent disease. They have to say this because of legal matters surrounding medicine, but it also makes sense: they aren't targeting symptoms, which are how diseases are defined. Instead, they're trying to provide all the nutrients needed for the body to operate correctly and, in doing so, hope to eliminate one or many or all diseases in the body. But nothing specific is targeted. Meanwhile, a drug isn't trying to provide holistic wellness of the body -- it is trying to target very specific symptoms in order to eliminate them through precise methods.

In a similar way, SEO seeks to drive more natural traffic across the board with content that will show up for a wide variety of search terms related to the business. PPC, on the other hand, attempts to drive traffic from very specific search terms (sometimes exact, and sometimes a little broader) to very specific pages. Again, it is the combination of the two, run correctly, that allows for the broadest possible results in business.

All this said, when it comes to health, I'm a big fan of thriving naturally and medicating only when necessary. In digital marketing (although I still think this requires testing on a case-by-case basis), I find that you can be thriving in SEO (getting a #1 search result, for instance), but STILL increase sales for that keyword by running paid ads that people might click on instead of your non-paid result. This is a topic for another day, but I think it's an exception to the overall health analogy. In health, I doubt that you're ever going to get healthier if you're thriving naturally and then decide to add medicine to "enhance" your wellness. Far as I can tell, it definitely doesn't work that way.

But at the end of the day, I think this digital marketing analogy is useful overall to remind us that there's probably a time and a place for both natural wellness and medicinal approaches to health. While the two tend to compete for space, as if fighting over the same purpose in society, I believe they are different approaches to a common end goal, much as SEO and PPC are. And as different approaches, they have the potential to work beautifully together ... if only they will. I guess that'll boil down to people's ability to stay open minded and look at the whole picture ... and to our ability to overcome the powerful messaging of the financially and politically strong pharmaceutical side of the equation.

If we can, maybe digital marketing will prove a pretty good model for human health.