Dr. Earl R. Smith II

9 Responses to “Social Marketing or Social Scam?”

1.
April 2nd, 2008 at 5:58 pm e

Charles Caro wrote:

What you described basically sounds like a bottle of snake oil, which means anything that is supposed to cure everything probably cures nothing.

From information I read at the linkedintelligence.com website it seems that at least on the LinkedIn website any advantage may be wiped out by the fact that LinkedIn routes the link through a redirect function on the LinkedIn server which kills any search engine benefit, since the link is not actually to your site. The chore may get even more complicated when you add to the mix embedded keywords and basic content on a webpage at a website, especially a website like LinkedIn.

If your interest is in creating legitimate back links to your website without hanky panky that may harm you more than help you, I would suggest you also join something like Squidoo or Qassia (see links below). The links created by Squidoo are not encoded or routed through a separate server, which does work out to benefit you.

Another thing that will surely get your back links found is to create a custom search engine at Google. You can include the custom search engine at your website, but you can also make the custom search engine public, which gets it indexed at Google. It is pretty safe to say that Google does take look at what is on its website, and it seems that such custom search engines do count in the popularity poll.

2.
April 2nd, 2008 at 6:00 pm e

Jared Tracy wrote:

Sorry. You got scammed! This is not unusual. There are dozens of Internet scams out there. I’ve been monitoring a few of them so that I can tell my friends and clients to stay away from them. There are too many to monitor them all.

I’ve heard of SEO on steroids. It’s a waste. It is related to the same guys who recommend a ping optimizer for WordPress. The “optimizer” story is enough to scare anyone into buying their service. It’s completely bogus. Yet, they have a great website that looks like it is something legit.

“The principal arguments in support of these sites is that they provide back links to main websites, allow for a wider distribution of materials and get indexed by search engines”. No search engine in the world works like this. In fact, this kind of “link baiting” will garner you the opposite of what you are looking to do.

3.
April 2nd, 2008 at 6:02 pm e

Howard Yermish wrote:

A couple of things…

1. You may want to submit your links to your social networking pages directly to Google rather than waiting for Googlebot to get around to it. (Link below)

2. Some search engines (Yahoo) will ignore your profile pages unless there are lots of people (”friends/buddies”) in your networks. My suggestion is a minimum of 10 people that are not clones or drones. (Active users)

3. Waiting just a week for Google is relatively short. I always recommend at least 3-4 weeks even when manually submitting the link. Make sure to put the Google Analytics tracking code into your site as well.

4. Some social networking sites have your profile pages protected for privacy reasons (and not to dilute the search engine results) so you may need to “make your profile public.”

5. You may want to find networks that are more targeted at your particular business niche, rather than going straight for the big networks.

6. And to really make this work, you need lots of humans cooperating for a common goal. DIGG can sense spam and automated attempts to game the system.

7. And (2) if you have read Seth Godin’s works, you will realize that the best way to get people talking (social marketing) about your products and services is to have products and services worth talking about.

Hope this helps.

4.
April 2nd, 2008 at 6:04 pm e

Martin Malden wrote:

Social Marketing is nothing more than the implementation of Permission Marketing – if you’ve read Seth Godin’s books you’ll be familiar with that term, but if not (and you’re interested in Marketing) check out his blog:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/

Social Marketing is based on the principle that if you want people to buy from you they first need to trust you. Rich Schefren, another successful Marketer, refers to this as winning attention.

Without attention (or permission) you can spend as many marketing dollars as you like and people will generally either click away or go to the kitchen and make a pot of tea. We’re so inundated with marketing messages all day long that we simply tune them out, a lot of the time without even realising we’re doing it.

This makes spending money on traditional marketing (interruption marketing) increasingly less cost-effective and the falling advertising revenues in the commercial media (TV, Radio and Press) would seem to indicate that advertisers are moving to other forms of advertising.

Social Marketing, then, refers to the ability to become known and trusted within a community. And since, in Internet terms, we’re talking about the online community it’s potentially huge.

However, simply putting up documents will not hack it.

You actually need to become part of the ‘community’ and that means contributing in forums, providing input, help and quality advice or responses to members’ questions and so on. Again – the goal is to become known and trusted.

If you go into any of these forums and try to sell your product or service in the ‘traditional’ way you’ll very quickly be labelled a spammer and hounded out..!

Social Marketing takes a lot of work and will not bring instant results.

However, it does work and if you check out this blog post you’ll see the actual results from my own experience:

http://tinyurl.com/223996

(Apologies for the tinyurl but the original was 100 characters long!)

Because many sites use the nofollow tag and others use re-directs it’s true that many of the social marketing sites and bookmarking sites don’t provide valuable backlinks.

However, what you really want are visitors. Backlinks are only one of many ways to make your site more visible to the search engines.

While it is most definitely good to build up the number of backlinks to your site, you don’t want to rely only on this as a way of generating traffic.

Backlinks don’t buy from you – visitors do! (If they’re targeted).

The emergence of new sites like Twitter, Pownce, Tumblr and others provide new ways of spreading your community and, therefore, your reach.

And with effective use of RSS you can automate a lot of the time consuming work that’s necessary for social marketing to be successful.

Plus – Social Marketing doesn’t involve spending money – so it’s not a scam, at least not in the traditional sense.

5.
April 2nd, 2008 at 6:05 pm e

Murray Gordon wrote:

Social SEO Networking is definitely a recommended new way to obtain links to your web site. A week, however, is probably not enough time to wait to see if you have successfully created new links. Google can take several months to update its inbound links list. This depends on the nature of the site where you posted the piece containing your link, and the frequency with which Google updates information pertinent to your site.

I would recommend signing up with Google’s webmaster tools so you can check when Google last spidered your site, and to see what links they currently have, which point to your site.

6.
April 2nd, 2008 at 6:06 pm e

Geri Rockstein wrote:

Since SEO has become a media darling and an industry cash cow, it has corrupted the industry. I have been writing SEO content for at least 6 years now and I have seen the good, the bad & the ugly.

SEO is not a do it yourself or a stand alone process. And it should only be undertaken by experts who do SEO and only SEO for a living. There are no quick fixes and you can’t get great SEO results for free.

Contact a professional who has been referred to you by a trusted source and discuss your SEO needs.

7.
April 2nd, 2008 at 6:08 pm e

George Gorman wrote:

I love reading comments on Social Networking, SEO, SEM ask 5 experts you will get 5 differing answers. Most people know just enough to be dangerous when it comes to marketing online.

My differing answer is…Social Marketing is a massive but fickle opportunity, if you can tweak interest with a humorous, or hard hitting article, a fun or infectious gadget then you can have a multitude of visitors to your site, as viral marketing works its magic. However, these same vistors expect free, constantly changing, popular content, where they can get involved, contribute and be involved, if you cant maintain that interest they will be off to the next fad before you can say ‘where is my ROI?’, the average Digg or del.ici.us article stays on the first page for 15 mins.

When looking at social networking sites you should realise that as Martin says most have ‘nofollow’ tag’s which mean that search engines wont index nor follow (pass on page rank) to your site/article your linking to. In bound links have no magic wand, you cant do a few blogs and shoot up the google page results, you need to build a slow and steady set of links to your site from ‘related’ sites, and a few related page rank 6 sites anchoring to you with keywords related to your site, will be better than 1000 page rank 2/3’s linking to you with a tag like ‘more’ or ‘link’.

Your better to focus the same amount of effort on designing your own site using good SEO principles, this will mean that your planning for the long term to appear highly in SE results, rather than hoping for SN recognition. Making your site relevant will mean others will want to link to you!

Ensuring your meta tags, headers, alt taging, body structure and anchor tags on links are designed to give relevance to the core terms you want to appear for in search engines will pay of more in the long term.

If you are wanting a few URLs spidered, look to
http://www.google.com/addurl/
if your looking to have your whole site spidered by google its worth creating a sitemap.xml have a look at googles webmaster tools very useful…
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/about.html
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/sitemap-generator.html
and if your wanting to do the same at yahoo have a look at
http://developer.yahoo.com/search/siteexplorer/

I’m always open to answering private questions on SEO/SEM/SN if you have further questions feel free to ask.

Links:
http://www.google.com/addurl/
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/about.html
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/sitemap-generator.html

8.
April 2nd, 2008 at 6:18 pm e

Pete “NetDoc” Murray wrote:

Unless you got charged, I would not call it a “scam”.

The forums you choose MUST have critical mass for SEOs to be of any value. If you have chosen forums with less than a thousand registered members or who have less than 25-50 members on at a time, you are wasting your time.

Make no doubt about it. The activity of the forum will determine your success. My forum has 93,000+ registered users and usually around 2000+ concurrent guests and visitors. We have as many as 200 Google bots on at any time (not included in our user/visitor count).

9.
April 2nd, 2008 at 6:21 pm e

Andrew Smith wrote:

I use Google Web Master Tools to keep track of Google’s spiders. I usually wait about a month (sometimes longer) to see high ranking results.

https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/