Social Media Marketers Need to Accept Some Responsibility
February 7, 2007
Attention all Web 2.0 Zealots:
Spamming Digg isn’t an SEO activity. It’s an SMO/SMM activity.
So why is it that all the hip “Social Media Marketing Consultants” struggle with that concept? Is it because deflecting the wrath of all the top Digglets towards the SEO community allows them to slip under the radar with their own client work?
Lets take a look at a post from the Pronet blog. (Which is run by some very hip Social Marketing Consultants).
Muhammad uses a video (included below) of some douche bag named Gary pitching a Digg spamming service as an example of why Digg users hate SEOs and more importantly, why their hatred is valid.
Now, as you watch the video, try and forget about the crappy quality, or the fact the guy is a complete tard. Instead, focus on what the core of his service really is.
So the basic jist of the video is the guy offers a service where he will promote your content to social bookmarking sites for a fee.
Now lets take a look at some copy found on the “Services” page of a couple prominent Social Media Marketing websites:
Neil Patel – ACS
"Innovative marketing tactics can set you apart. By leveraging the new social sites out there we can help you do more than just get attention, we can help you capture it. Whether you are launching a product or service or engaging a full scale promotion, we can help maximize your effectiveness by taking advantage of the latest trend in Internet marketing. ACS has emerged as an opinion leader in social media, let our team of experts take your marketing to the next level."
Brian Clark – CopyBlogger.com
“Great content attracts links, but effective promotion is also critical. In addition to creating killer content for you, I’ll go to work with my network of top bloggers, social media power users, and other influencers, all in order to provide full service viral link building campaigns that work. These services are available on a one-off basis, but a sustained arrangement is usually necessary to provide long-term tangible value to your business. Contact me for a quote.”
Hmmm…. I’m not really seeing a big difference?
Now please don’t think I’m suggesting that either Brian or Neil are on the same level as our buddy “Video Gary.” I’m not. They are both really smart guys who are very good at what they do.
What I am saying is “Video Gary” is a product of their industry, not mine. You just can’t have it both ways. Once you get to the point where you have an acronym that describes what you do, you have to take responsibility for those in your acronym who suck.
Since SEM/SEO is where I spend the majority of my time, I’ll take responsibility for the guy who auto posts to 50,000 abandoned blogs with the anchor text “Buy Viagra”. He’s an SEO spammer because his actions have the potential to directly impact how a site ranks in a search engine for a specific phrase.
However, I won’t take responsibility for the people who spend their day posting crap on Digg (on behalf of a client) that rarely produces anything more that a short-term flood of traffic, and almost never has any direct impact in terms of helping a site rank for prominent phrases that people are actually typing into the little white box.
That’s not an SEO Spammer. That’s a Social Media Spammer. Accept that fact and move on.
Comments
9 Responses to “Social Media Marketers Need to Accept Some Responsibility”
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For SMO/SMM to work you can’t think of it as a one of. I lisented to your rockstars show on mashups and built one within 24 hours of the show. Within a week I had it on the front page of Digg. Didn’t touch it after that it ranks for some obscure stuff, but I haven’t touched it in months.
However I used the experience from that build out other viral efforts that are more than just a one hit wonder. Getting Dugg once ain’t the answer. You gotta do it a few times for it to hold.
If you’re up for it I’ll take the challenge and SMO/SMM some non PPC content and make it affect the SERPS.
Hey Greg, did you catch the typo in their opening graphics?
http://www.ultimatetrafficbluerpint.com/
Gotta wonder how many of those Digg entries have typos.
I’m with Graywolf. Get dugg 6 or 10 times, and suddenly you have trustrank out the wazoo! That’s hardcore organic SEO if you ask me.
I don’t think wonderboy Gary was suggesting the submissions for the traffic, infact he was suggesting it for the links. So he is, after all, just an SEO spammer.
If you’re up for a laugh here are some more of Gary’s videos
Good stuff Greg, a lot of truth in it, have been waiting for someone like yourself to call the whole thing out.
LMAO! Nice… and so true (as far as who takes responsibility for who).
Also, sidenote - you’re blog doesn’t view right in Avant.
I agree with Greg…if i was trying to rank for some specific competitive terms and I only had $5000, i would put my money into SEO, not SMO. Who has the time to get dugg 10 times?
You know me… all spam all the time.
For some reason, I don’t think Gary mentioned high quality, relevant content once, but I may have missed it while I was retching.
As far as SEO vs SMM, I see a lot of overlap, but there are distinctive skills at the outside edges that separate the two practice areas.
It was certainly not my intention to try to make a mockery of search engine optimization with my videos.
If that’s how that video comes across, then I apologize.
Here’s where I’m coming from, though. It seems like a lot of people don’t understand what it takes to get traffic or good search engine rankings. To illustrate my point, I was on vacation in Colorado with some friends recently, and the topic of websites came up somehow. When I explained what I did, my friend mentioned how he had some websites a few years ago but got rid of them because he never got much traffic. He didn’t understand that you need LINKS to rank well in the search engines.
I think that for a lot of new people, they’ll spend hours trying to get their meta tags just right or get their keyword density to an optimal level because some free article they read, some outdated forum post, or some friend just as clueless as they are told them to. When instead they should be focusing on two things – quality content AND quality links. Now I know my video says nothing about the importance of quality content, so I can’t really fault you or anyone else for not knowing my stance on the subject. I should have mentioned, probably even emphasized that without quality content you’re site won’t achieve its full potential.
But quality content still needs links. It’s pretty easy to explain to a client that their content needs to be good. They tend to understand and can usually handle that part on their own with little to no help from the SEO guy. The quality links part, however, tends to bewilder most. Part of the reason is that high quality links are hard to get directly. You usually can’t just email the authority in your niche and say, “Hey, I’ve got this cool new site, link to me.”
When I go about getting links, I look at them as the middleman to me getting what I want. I figure that if I put interesting articles in article directories, write press releases, and post sites on social bookmarking sites, I’ll start to get some of those high quality links I wanted in the first place provided my site and the content on it are high quality as well.