23
12
2007
Social Networks are Communities! Not Self-Promotion manipulation Tools!
Posted by: James Lewitzke in Online Communities, RantsI’m so sick of seeing webmasters making ludicrous offers like “Stumble Me, I’ll Stumble You” or “Free Diggs”. These “deals” undermine the entire concept of a social network like Stumbleupon or del.icio.us.
To help potential “Page traders” understand what these are, I’ve drawn a few diagrams for illustration:
This is what is what it’s suppose to be like. But there’s always idiots and schemers out there that can’t create decent enough material themselves.
In my opinion, if you literally have to ask others to “Digg” your article, or “stumble” across a few pages from your site, then it is not worthy of the so-called rank, or whatever SEO Experts, PageRankers, etc. are seeking. What’s so hard to understand about that?
Dude, you’re not allowed to say this. It goes against prevailing social marketing wisdom, and therefore it’s automatically wrong no matter how logical or sensible your point is.
You also missed something in the whole social marketing game, through no fault of your own: the abuse of sites such as Facebook and Myspace by employees of large corporations who “look for one on one dialogs with potential customers”. Roots Canada is on record as stating they do this sort of thing, and if you give me permission I’ll link up an online video where they take pride in it.
I’m not allowed to say this? Who’s going to stop me?
I’m not as familiar with “Roots Canada” (Who they are or what they do specifically), but it sounds interesting, if you send me the link, I’ll take a look at the vid.
If a person is going to use a social network as a seo tool … a stat package, or something like it, is about as unobtrusive as you can get. I use the same AddThis bog control you’ve got, and it’s interesting to note which posts are popular, and which aren’t. It’s also good to see what other people are doing … in a competitive, and just a fun way.
Yeah, the social exchangers are definitely impersonal when it comes to the networks.
Although I didn’t realize (or was looking for one) that addthis could also be used as a bookmark tracker, to see which ones are popular or not, thanks for the tip Forrest.