Social News and Community Sites Dislike Marketers Because We Too Often Cheapen Their Idea of Free-Flowing, Valuable Information That Stands On Its Own
Social sites have their own cliques, rules, and members who police their beloved sites for spam submissions. Marketers who don’t understand how to interact with these sites, how to behave, and how to read the rules before signing up, do people like me and the other members of such sites a disservice. There’s a reason top users of communities and news sites think all marketers are spammers.
Some reasons they think marketers are spammers…
1. Seeding (submitting) posts from your own blog. (Some have zero tolerance like Newsvine, and others expect you to submit a lot more about sites and stories that are not your own rather than just a long list of your own blog posts.
2. Ghost Profiles: The completeness of your profile is an indicator of whether you are or aren’t a spammer. If you sign up for a site like 9Rules.com and immediately begin submitting your own stuff without filling out your profile or making any obvious attempt to be a part of the community other than to promote your site, you will be dealt with harshly. The harshest part: deafening silence and apathy toward your posts leading to eventual or immediate banning of your site from the system.
3. All Take and No Give: You appear to only show up when you have something of your own to contribute. Your recent activity, logged publicly on many of these sites, indicates who you are really interested in: yourself. And there’s nothing the dedicated users of these sites hate more than blatant self-promotion.
4. Your content sucks BIG time: If you take a look around these sites you will see the kind of content that bubbles to the top and gets popular. Is your content anything like that? Then to them, and me, you are a spammer and you make it harder for legitimate users of these sites to passively market through good content and participation because you raise the sensitivity level so high that people like me even get grouped in with the spammers at times.
If You’re Not Part of the Conversation, You’re Part of the Problem!
There’s only one reason a person won’t see significant gains from a social marketing campaign. It’s because they treat it like a marketing campaign in the first place.
My clients and members of Authority Site Center are taught from day 1 to respect the social sites, know the rules, and post only when they have something remarkable to say. No sales pitches masked as content. No ghost profiles. No whoring your own links while failing to spend time interacting, voting, and clipping other content.
This is one of the reasons our members get more traffic and higher rankings from social sites than the average marketer. They are taught not to market under any of the traditional definitions of marketing.
Everyone on a social site is a marketer.
If they don’t have their own sites to promote, they certainly promote themselves by posting often, interacting and commenting, and being a pillar in their niche within the community.
That’s how you do it: promote yourself by being the most prolific and helpful member you can be in each community. Following the rules is proven to attract links and traffic. Spamming is a total waste of time. There aren’t any algorithms to defeat in a human network. Humans have excellent bullshit detectors and cannot be fooled.
The first rule after joining any new web 2.0 community or news site is to create a full profile and then go read what the top members are posting and commenting on. Learn from the people who are respected in each community and you will soon be able to interact properly and pull traffic out of these sites the way they do.
Don't
Miss Out On Free Traffic!
Subscribe to the FTR RSS feed
or our
email list so you don't miss out on real, traffic driving tips from Jack
Humphrey! You cal also and Follow Me on Twitter! Thanks for visiting!
{ 1 trackback }
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Top Work From Home 11.18.07 at 9:47 pm
Well said, as usual!
Social Community sites follow the same general rules of life and the main rule of “garbage in give garbage out” applies.
Chris
David Jones 11.20.07 at 7:58 am
Jack,
I am an old time marketer, and I’m just getting into the lingo of the new internet, what is so fondly called social community sites, it appears to me the rules placed here are no different than the news groups of earlier days.
The expectation of a news group, was simply this, if you came there bring some news. If you didn’t you were harshly dealt with. Each group had it’s topic or passion and if you were a valuable contributor to that news and or passion you were welcomed with open arms.
However in those days, you didn’t dare so much as put a URL in your post, or you would quickly find out what the word flamer meant.
I guess, what really needs to be understood by all, that courtesy and respect is by all means a top priority. Many of these contributors spend hours, researching these topics, trying to bring to them content of great value for all.
They do this willingly, looking for nothing more than an atta boy or girl when they accomplished their task. You can understand now why they get so mad when a spammer disrespects all of that work by not even so much as giving them the respect of that effort, by even reading it, let alone to respond intellectually about it.
David J
Jack Humphrey 11.20.07 at 8:39 am
David,
I agree and I remember the old days well. Times have changed though and these guys certainly, for the most part, don’t date back as far as you and I. They’ve gotten sick of marketing on the internet from recent years, and rightly so.
The problem is that many of them don’t respect that some of us make our living online and that while we try hard to respect their rules, they despise that we are marketers first and foremost.
It is either jealousy because they are going to work for someone else the rest of their lives or ignorance of the fact that most of the tools they use and love were put together and invented by people with one incentive: to make a living online.
If it weren’t for the more motivated, entrepreneurial spirits online, they wouldn’t have the sites to “defend” and form their cliques on that they do and that’s a pure fact.
So we have to respect the rules and they have to realize that we don’t create content for free for them to devour at the rate they do without even so much as a link back.
The spammers are a whole other issue and we have just as much trouble with them as they do. But again, since we market at all, we get hammered and thrown into the same pool as spammers sometimes even though we follow the rules.
Ray Monty 11.21.07 at 8:17 am
Jack H ~ You are good, real good - you said what I think in one column. “Newsvine Sucks”
Thank you for making my day.
Sincrerely,Raymonty/Old Dog,Raymont/Good Troll,Rayseedplanter.Gampa Ray/Grouppees,Seedplanter,Montaneer.
P.S. you can call me Raymin.
Sam Freedoms Internet Marketing Controversy Blog 11.26.07 at 3:41 pm
You forgot one…
Sometimes they see a post title like yours and take it as a statement of fact rather than a clever attention grabber.
Like I told Andy Beard, “What really remains is whether or not we want to be white hat spammers or black hat spammers” lol
Best wishes,
Sam
Jack Humphrey 11.26.07 at 3:44 pm
“Sometimes they see a post title like yours and take it as a statement of fact rather than a clever attention grabber.”
Yeah - it worked for Seth Godin so I thought I’d try it.
http://www.allmarketersareliars.com/
Andreas Lenz 01.22.08 at 5:15 pm
Thanks Jack for this post. Really great one.
That’s the key to success. The key to being listened to. Delivering really outstanding content. That’s the reason why the great Rich Schefren has a screenshot of this post in his Attention Age Doctrine Part 2 Report, and that’s how I found it.
Keep it on!
Andy