I’d like to thank MyBlogLog Community Manager Robyn Tippins for the invite to join the MyBlogLog Advisory Group (which I’ve accepted) and I’d also add on to my guest post on the MyBlogLog blog.

First the MBL Advisory Group: I’m looking forward to working closely with MBL to further bring the service to a new level. The other advisors are experts in their own right, like:

• Cord Silverstein
• Wendy Piersall
• Drew Meyers
• Jonathan “Trust” Phillips

MBL is on the forefront of social networking especially for bloggers. In 2006, some naysayers were predicting that “blogging was dead, and Digg was the future”.

Uh huh.

Until Eric and the MBL team launched the MBL widget late last year which has become pervasive. In recent times, Scott Jangro’s BumpZee and BlogCatalog have launched their own variants of their social widget.

And lately you’ve got a number of wayward MBL users who’ve devised a number of dubious ways to generate income by comment or widget spamming the heck out of sites which use the MBL widget.

I think there’s a lot of bad information going out there. If you want to game social traffic or social media (depending on how you call it), you might like to build a foundation in “social engineering” along the likes of Kevin Mitnick, or what the NLP practitioners or Pick-Up Artists practice. You’re much better off brushing up on your social skills and applying techniques of rapport and relationship building in order to achieve your goals.

Widgets and by extension, technology is just a medium, it’s ONLY a channel to get your message across. You still need an attractive message to get a conversion. I call that message “content”. The bigger and stickier your ball of “content” the more likely you’ll succeed.

So it’s unlikely that blogs, forums, social networking sites are going to be “dead” anytime soon, but rather overly focusing on the “Internet” side of “Internet Marketing” is going to work against you.

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Having said that, building on the points raised in “Unlocking the Social Inner Circle Code“, one of the likely replies will be “Huh? How do I create value?”

The law of social reciprocity applies as much in the online world, as in real-world relationships.

If you keep taking from the other person or from the community, things will get to a point where you can’t take anymore. The social circle will release you and you’ll freefall into social oblivion.

I think value boils down to listening to your audience. Hearing what they have to say and providing an answer to what they have to say.

Spamming is very much a mirror of a one-sided conversation, you’re just blasting something at someone, never listening to what they have to say.

The moment you start listening is when doors start opening.