Stop Abusing Social Media to Create Digital Vapor and Boost Your Ego
September 28th, 2007 by Michael Gray in Social MediaIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Read my top posts or learn more about Michael Gray. Want more frequent updates follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!
One of the problems I have with people who work in the social media space is that they use it simply to boost their own ego. It’s time for some tough love, creating linkbait in the SEO social media space is like joining in an incestuous circle jerking link orgy. While there is some content that has value, 95% of the work is meaningless for any thing other than self satisfaction.
If you’re one of those people writing 3.1416 ways to optimize your blog titles with wordpress plugin THX-1137 and you’ll triple your subscribers with some meaningless traffic ponzi scheme, I’m talking to you. Are you really creating and writing something of value that hasn’t already been said before? If you hesitate for even a second thinking about it, I think you need to re-examine your approach.
When I make criticism like this, people often reply hey Gray I’m not writing for you, I’m writing for my current or potential clients to show them we understand the space and how things work. To that I respond how things work in SEO-land is not anything like how they work in the rest of the world. Getting links in SEO-ville is much easier than getting links in competitive industries like finance or health & fitness.
If you’re really interested in pitching a job to a potential client, which do you think is more impressive, the traffic you got to your SEO blog from your egobait, or how you took a travel blog less than 30 days old and brought it 30,000 visitors in one week
.
Do you think your client wants to see examples of you promoting yourself, or see click-heatmaps showing the 20,000 people who came from a social media site visited other pages and hit the back button after the first page, because it was completly off topic for a B2B website?
Ask yourself this question are you better off spending your time building something for yourself, that has commercial value, and will build you a passive income from defensible traffic? Or should you spend your time creating a personality based on digital vapor, that has no long term value, and zero chances of ever rescouping time/energy/effort you put into it?
If you do, then go ahead spend your afternoon concentrating on writing yet another post thats been done 52 times before, it makes it so much easier for me to play in commercial spaces when there is less competition.
Sphere It
September 28th, 2007 at 6:36 am
Hey Michael,
Interesting article. I have been thinking about this too. My blog gets a lot of stumbleupon traffic. Sometimes it feels like vaporware and just padding for my visitors numbers.
September 28th, 2007 at 7:25 am
..He says writing a controversial post, that’s already been said… with a big Sphinn button on it..
September 28th, 2007 at 8:49 am
Ego on the web is one of the things that leaves a sour taste in my mouth with the work that I do. I see some of the issues you mention occur in the design field as well…lots of drama, posting that is more like “boasting” and blog entries and ‘announcements’ that do nothing to serve a client and only serve to toot one’s horn.
Clients in pretty much any industry care about what you can do for them, not what you think about yourself.
What I find fascinating and frustrating at times is that some of the prima donnas seem to attract a decent following, but I suppose it’s similar to celebrity culture obsession.
September 28th, 2007 at 8:55 am
LMAO
September 28th, 2007 at 9:10 am
nice! I tire of similar myself..
September 28th, 2007 at 11:01 am
LOOOL. Sorry, I couldn’t help it. Sphinn it, boyz!
September 28th, 2007 at 11:45 am
This is one thing I have against Sphinn. It just has enabled everyone under the sun to abuse SM. Most of my posts on their have just linked out to news sources and not my own blog saying what the top 100 free images are.
September 28th, 2007 at 12:22 pm
You know I kind of blogged about the same thing last night. There is so much Blogging material geared to social media traffic - which is a nice ego boost when it works. But how much of that traffic is for your ego and how much of it will actually get you business.
I’d love to have a lot of blog traffic, but its just like SEO or PPC - its the volume of targeted traffic you get not total traffic.
September 28th, 2007 at 12:37 pm
Very Nice… I just noticed this post of yours in the Ol reader after posting a similar rant today. I have amended it with a link to your rant brutha…
To much baiting and nepotism in the SM game…. ugh..
L8TR - Dave
September 28th, 2007 at 1:22 pm
Word. On one count, SEOs of all people are power users of search engines, so should be extra aware of what’s already published. On another, how is it we can go around warning against the trappings of duplicate content, yet indulge in making it ourselves in the name of self-promotion? So you’re right to call foul. SEOs who for the most part echo what’s already out there are hypocrites.
What advances the field more, in a way everyone in it benefits: blogs by SEOs for SEOs, or blogs by SEOs pitching to prospects? The former. Plus if you’ve really good, original thinking along the latter, would you really want to publish it? Chances are your best stuff, you’d prefer to mostly save it for when pitching in person, under NDA or other confidences.
Also, it’s not just that there should be only so much tolerance for it in the blogosphere. Those speaking at conferences should be wary of rehashing anything too much, for instance.
So as to online as to offline: Speaking to a familiar topic can be OK sometimes, but if not doing so in a fundamentally original way (e.g. adding enough info / perspective such that warrants a dedicated post as opposed to quick Comments on others’ material)… it probably doesn’t need to be delivered publicly.
September 28th, 2007 at 2:00 pm
i agree that the sphinn button on this post dilutes your point.
September 28th, 2007 at 2:15 pm
You go girl!
lay down that smackdown!
SMO/SEO + no substance landing page = a lot more nothing
September 28th, 2007 at 2:27 pm
I’ll bite.
You wrote the exact same post about a year ago about SEO bloggers that need to step away from the keyboard.
In fact, isn’t this post a bit of recycled wolfish ego building vapor.
P.S
loved your piece on controversy marketing.
Yoav
September 28th, 2007 at 6:05 pm
So do you wanna tell us what you did to get that travel blog traffic?
September 28th, 2007 at 7:58 pm
Hey…who’s knockin’ my B2B linkbaits?!!…
September 28th, 2007 at 9:22 pm
It’s all true, but it’s also pretty easy to say “What’s with all of these people vying for attention?” when you’re one of the people who already get attention. We all just want our own little piece of the pie. In this case it’s ego pie.
September 28th, 2007 at 10:02 pm
Well put, Michael. The biggest weakness of the web business sphere in general seems to be the “self licking ice cream cone” effect. A website, as a webste has no reason for being … and selling yet another eBook to yet another web marketing “sucker”, I mean customer, has no long-term business viability. People who read my “money blogs” don’t even know what Digg, facebook, etc. are. they do, however, have access to corprate checkbooks and their yearly budgets aren’t limited to the credit limit of their daddy’s Visa.
If people want to be successful in the “web side” of business they need to learn where and how “non-web” business is done … and stop stroking their egos.
September 28th, 2007 at 10:58 pm
Shhhh… maybe the SEO social media sites are intended to occupy the bulk of the SEO people who do not focus on outcomes. And that’s a good thing, right?
September 29th, 2007 at 6:12 am
You make it sound like boosting your own ego is a bad thing
September 29th, 2007 at 9:07 am
“TXH-1137″ = LOL.
September 29th, 2007 at 12:54 pm
@John Andrews (oh wait, not twitter, oh well) - LOL. That’s an awesome theory, crap, I’m on there a lot. =(
October 1st, 2007 at 2:13 am
“Stop abusing social media…”
Google can’t tell me how I should run my sites, but I guess Michael Gray can? Nah, I think I’ll do whatever I damn well please.
“Are you really creating and writing something of value that hasn’t already been said before?”
Which is ironic because you’ve already made your point back when you wrote “Bloggers step away from the keyboard.”
October 1st, 2007 at 5:09 pm
Aren’t SEO people incestuous anyway? Read what someone else wrote and then repeat is as the gospel until you read something else that refutes it, then claim it as your expert opinion.
#14 Matt Jones is asking the question that can put all of our ego’s to rest…
October 3rd, 2007 at 3:21 pm
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October 9th, 2007 at 12:56 pm
How do you mean? That we should provide value to our clients? Not just shuffle colored collars at them and impress them with traffic stats and banging their servers with digg frontpages?
That sounds boring…
October 11th, 2007 at 11:29 am
Everyone already said what I pretty much wanted to say. I’ll emphasize: #2, #4, #6, #11, #13, #14, #22, #23