It's too bad that a good thing like Social Networkng can also be a bad thing when there's too much of it - or when there's no real message and advertisers/marketers just pollute the web with messages no one really want to read or hear according to Steve Rubel in a post on Micro Persuasion titled An All Too Convenient Truth: Many Marketers Pollute the Web.
According to Rubel, most marketers miss the point of Social Networking which is to foster collaboration:
"...Despite all the money that's flowing online, most marketers completely miss the boat on what the web really can do for them. As I have talked about before, the Internet isn't just a communications medium. It works best when it's used as a platform for open collaboration. This means taking a PR-centric approach."
"...Social Network Advertising: eMarketer predicts advertising on social networks will reach $2.2 billion this year. However, traditional display approaches to date have not performed. As Ian Schaffer from from Deep Focus noted, marketers need to dig in and figure out how to make the experience better. This means what does work is creating authentic content, widgets/applications and more that people pull because they add value to the community. (Note: MySpace, a major social network, is an Edelman client.)
- Social Media Optimization: This needs to be watched like a hawk. As I have said before, if you participate and add value you are rewarded with Google Juice - and so much more. If you just set up sites and spam social nets to get links, then I am sorry, you're bad.
And there was a debate a few months back suggesting Social Media was being used by SEO Marketers to generate link juice - though that's not it's real purpose:
"...Last week I wrote about how some in the search engine optimization profession (not all) are openly espousing how to basically turn social media sites into heat seeking missiles for Google Juice - and not much else. Apparently there is a whole cottage industry called "Social Media Marketing" (SMM) that analyzes how to use social media for SEO purposes. That should give anyone pause."
I've felt that if you don't want to hear the message, wrapping a lot of social media messaging around it isn't going to make you like it any better - and social media is a lot of work - and I'm not sure everyone understands that.
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