How To Make A Fool Of Yourself With Social Media | Andrew Wee | Blogging | Affiliate Marketing | Social Traffic Generation

I gave Shawn Collins some feedback about what I thought was some spam on one of his blogs and was trying to define what is clearly spam, and what treads the murky waters of spamdom.

Obviously blog spam in the form of useless comments would be posting “Need Russian bride? Visit this website, good price, many selection. http://……ru”

That ends up in the spam bin immediately. (If it hadn’t already been filtered out by my Akismet or Bad Neighborhood filters).

What isn’t as clear are response like “good post”, “interesting” and “I will read this”.

I’d use a simple “letters to the newspaper editor” test – would you realistically expect a comment to be published if you mailed it to the editor of your local paper, responding to an article in the paper?

If you wouldn’t then, why would you choose to post it in a blog comments section?

Is it merely to see your name in “web print”?

Even if the intent is to post an obviously off-topic comment in hopes that someone will clickthrough to your affliate link/phishing site, the effort is wasted.

Even if the blogger doesn’t wipe the comment off with a click of the “delete” button, who’s to say that any reader will click on your link, even if the anchor text is “SoCal Beach Bunny”?

Social media is a double-edged sword, you can easily establish yourself as the leader in your space through the power of blogging and participation in community sites and forums.

At the same time, if you are facing a serious credibility challenge, web 2.0 can be equally ruthless in exposing every blemish, scar and imperfection in your “social media” campaign.

Although I don’t fully agree with Jason Calacanis’ arguments that the Internet is being polluted with affiliate spam, I do think of my blog as my virtual home and like to “curate” or censor out the junk that doesn’t add value to the blog reading experience.

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For ideas on building a sucessful blog-based business, check out my Secret Blog Weapon program.

Though it’s a social medium, success in Web 2.0 is ultimately about building a long-term relationship (personal or business) with your readers and your community. And that’s going to pay handsome dividends.

Anything else and you’re just fooling around.

6 thoughts on “How To Make A Fool Of Yourself With Social Media”

Shawn Collins November 10, 2008 at 11:45 pm

Hey Andrew –

Thanks for the note about that comment – I had mixed feelings about letting it go through – it was a “real” comment in that it was a logical comment to the post.

But then the guy goes and adds a three line sig with it.

I use Disqus and it doesn’t enable me to edit comments left by others. If it did, I would have knocked out the spam and left the good stuff.

Andrew Wee Post authorNovember 11, 2008 at 5:58 am

Hi Shawn,
Gratz on loosing the “Missy Ward” style wig.

I have to admit that in my early days I’d add my URL at the bottom of my blog comments till I was given a lesson by some of the more established bloggers out there.

Understanding the conventions of social media and following the “rules” are part of the game, such as using tasteful avatars, etc.

The signature accompanying the comment on your blog, was going into some serious scammy territory, and left a bad taste in my mouth, which I guess could be one of the litmus tests for “Publish or not?”.

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Disqus believes in a spamless world? They ought to refine their business model!