I was recently reading a post on Marc Pentermann’s blog that suggests social media optimization is pretty much SPAM for social media. My comments about that are as follows:
I think the issue of SPAM and any kind of marketing will always exist regardless of the medium. Email, web pages, blogs and social media are all susceptible.
Just because it is possible to SPAM a medium does not invalidate that medium. Should we not send email because others use it for SPAM? That would not make sense.
It is also important to note that SPAM-focused efforts are not long term marketing solutions. Leveraging the opportunities with social media makes it easier for marketers to reach their intended audience and for users to find and share the content they’re interested in.
Marc makes a good point that with the increase in popularity of social search and social media, companies will flock to SMO tactics. Doing that en masse is expensive and may lead to the creation of bots to create social bookmarks, which is not much different than bots that leave comment spam on blogs.
Not to rain on anyone’s SMO parade, but there is always a dark side to things as Graywolf expertly points out in his post, “The Dark Side of Social Media Optimization“
