Social Media Networking Marketing

Below is a response I wrote to a blog-entry this morning that harshly criticized the practice of submitting personal links to social media sites. Since there is coercion in the practices that are acceptable, I could hold my tongue no longer and posted a heart-felt response about this whole dogma that is developing around bookmarking and social media networking. Or shall we say, marketing?

There is a real irony to the whole world of social networking, and the criticism of social networking practices.

Take me for example. I'm an easy target.

Here is my social sphere, me and my cat, along with a mind that teases and taunts. I write about life, people, and other oddball things. You see, I tried my hand at being a professional coach. I did alright... but that's about all. Where I thrived during that time was creating interesting articles for my so-called target audience. And, I just 'put it out there.'

You see, a very sound theory exists that suggests that you put something out there, the people that really need to read it will see it. You just do what you do.

Then comes all this SEO stuff, and the people that want to utilize all the tricks of the trade to get their sites spidered, their content indexed, and build valuable links. Well, I didn't create the algorithms now did I?

So what's a little ole me to do?

I being doing what I'm hearing must be done. I open a few accounts online, I Digg my articles, I Fave them, Yahoo, Google, etc. and ya... I promote my stuff. (anybody ever read You Inc.?) Then I learn that I'm a bad boy for doing this and that people will vote me down and bury my links because I'm only submitting my stuff.

Well, hello!!

Social Networking, as you've suggested in what you've written, is a way for us to keep up with other people's happenings.

So what?

Now I have to take meagre time out of my day. Another lament implied by what you've written is that we have so little precious time for socializing. But take a look at all the tactics I have to employ, and all the extra work I have to do, just so I don't look like a twat to people for submitting my own stuff. Not only that, I hear that our links get penalized in our social media profiles, and possibly even deleted by the social network site admins and some even ban IPs from future bookmarking.

So what are you really interested in?

From what I'm gleaning from the tactics and strategies is not that anyone is interested in me, but rather, they're interested in having me do their hunting and fishing for them too.

Rather than simply share what I'm doing, creating, publishing, reading, producing and posting information to my social media profiles across all those social media sites - another time consuming task when doing it ethically - I have to hunt out other content for you to sift through. This makes no sense to me, particularly since we're social networking.

The logic here is full of holes as far as I see it.

• I create a social media profile to share my world with you.
• My world consists of my blog(s), my day job, my passion, my poetry, and a few other things that happen along occasionally.
• Naturally, I will post these bits and pieces to my social media profiles, whether they are social bookmarking sites, or whether they are social interaction sites.
• People who find what I produce interesting now have the opportunity to follow and link to me.
• You create a social media profile to share your world with me.
• Your world I'll discover over time, as my time permits my furtive glances across all my contacts.
• I may respond, I may not. I may bookmark something, I may not. Same vice versa.
• People who find the people I follow interesting, are also likely to start following them too.
  

Interesting how all this works isn't it? Funny we have to start getting all moralistic about how we're supposed to be doing it.

The purpose of all this is simple:

I can post a blog article in one location and create more paths to it, rather than have to copy and paste that article to a variety of other sites, article sites, blogs, and such to expand my reach. We're saving a bit of bandwidth maybe, maybe not, but we all know that duplicate content waters down the good stuff. And all those blog communities and discussion boards where we'd often be invited to post good stuff, often became black-holes that sucked even more time from our grasp.

As social media took off, we discovered a new way, an easier way to extend our reach and share our stuff. So when did it become a bad idea to share our own creative stuff, whether it be blogs, articles, photographs, or sites?

I'll tell you what I believe.

I believe the real culprits are the some greedy types out there who need to muddy the waters for their tactics to remain effective. Keep the masses off balance, flood the gates, change the landscape, create controversy, and get more people doing unusual things based upon what they hear, rather than upon what they would naturally do. This way they disguise their own bad habits from the algorithms as more people get confused and do silly things too.

What would I naturally do?

• I'd naturally post my stuff.
  
• I'd naturally post good quality links, sites, projects... whether it is stuff I stumbled upon, or stuff I'm working on, or people I've met along the way.
  

I think everyone would benefit in the end, instead of being penalized for being who we are.

I don't know that I had to get on the soap box on this issue. It's not like I have anything better to do with my time. My social life with physical people has dried up a lot with the advance of computing, so I don't really have anywhere to go. Then again, maybe I might find a real social life again if I could go back to just being me, rather than what the Internet shifting rules landscape says I ought to be.