• Co-founding the Affiliate Summit with Missy Ward (the next Affiliate Summit East is from Aug 10-12 in Boston)
• Multiple updates on his Affiliate Tip blog
• His sarcastic and wry style on Affiliate Thing (together with co-host Revenue Magazine editor Lisa Picarille)
• His relative new foray into group podcasting at Geekcast.fm together with partners-in-crime Sam Harrelson and Jim Kukral. (Jim did a video interview with me in the midst of the recent Affiliate Summit West)

If you like Shawn’s Road Trip/American Pie-ish style of humor, you’d want to check out this Easter bunny video broadcast:

Also, check out this Facebook thread where we’re aiming to hit 500 comments. Every little comment helps!

I go through the remainder, and too a whole bunch more in as well. These are typically with the sender’s “website” listed as a squidoo lens with the lens title something along the lines of “/instant-money-bonanza” or “/5second-millionaire” and inevitably leads to a spammy/scammy page with a $27 ebook teaching you how to make $1,000,000 in your sleep, while sipping a margarita.

Right…

So if so many blog comments are ending up in the trash, especially if you have a vigilant editorial team checking the comment moderation queue, is it even worth taking the time to submit one?

Let’s expand this a little wider and include forums and social networking/conversation sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and even Yahoo! Groups too.

The primary goal in social marketing is to establish trust, credibility and competence.

You need to be able to give out information that is reliable, accurate and shows what you’re talking about.

On a social scale, submitting a comment about viagra, or free pron! or anime hentai, particularly on a scrapbooking blog is going to be way off topic. The only solution is to delete this digital trash.

On the other hand, if you’re submitting a comment like “Nice work” or “Good job” or “Great post”, aside from feeding the author’s ego, it does nothing to stimulate the conversation.

What’s the person supposed to do?

Say “Thank you” ? It’s still the end of the conversation.

–

Now here’s where I may detract from other bloggers and writers…

I feel even as a reader, given the interactive and dynamic nature of the Internet, it is your responsibility to continue the conversation…

Huh?

That means if you’re choosing to participate in the conversation, you should strive to add some value to it – give a contrasting opinion (especially if you think the writer is wrong), cite how what’s being written about has been proven in the real world, give an example of how you’ve used, or failed to use a principle or technique being shared.

Even a one-way medium like Sam Harrelson’s Affiliate Fortune Cookie podcasts (famous for their 22 minute duration) give an opportunity to interact through the blog comments section.

It’ll be interesting to see readers start doing their own audio rebuttals or responses.

[Shawn Collins already features an opportunity to post a video response to his video blogging on his Affiliate Tip blog]

Likewise, YouTube fanatics have been recording numerous video responses to each other, especially with popular threads like the  Cris Crocker-Britney Spears tirade. [CONTAINS EXPLICIT LANGUAGE]

That particular clip has clocked up 1,957 video responses at last count.

–

The bottomline in social marketing:

• Provide Value:  Value is a vague term, but any info which the writer or other readers will find useful can be defined as valuable.
• It’s a 2-Way Street: A discussion is when two or more people talk. It ends when someone stops talking. So keep the ball rolling.
• Be Open-Minded: Learning occurs when you’re exposed to something strange and new. If you’re not willing to listen to new ideas or different opinions, social marketing will not do much for you…

While there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with the practice, I feel that it sets up expectations that the blogger or website owner will have to deliver on once the visitor lands on your page.

If you can keep your readers happy, you’ve laid the foundation for a successful and low cost (possibly free) traffic generation model.

The sad reality is that more than 90% of the sites using such techniques have average (and usually sub-standard) poor content.

At best, this is gimmicky in my opinion and best used for one-off, throwaway adsense-oriented traffic.

But if you’re a serious Internet Marketer in this for the long haul, you’d do much better to build your brand, which means either using your photograph, or an image which represents your online presence.

Iconic Avatars: Michael “GrayWolf” Gray, Jim Kukral, Rasheed Ali, Robyn Tippins, Todd “StuntDubl” Malicoat, Shawn Collins, Chris “Drinkbait” Hooley, Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker.

Credibility and reputation are essential to your long term success, and being consistent in your online branding build rapport with your visitors. Consistent branding will bring you intangible returns in the way of joint ventures which will net you much more than merely driving traffic to an adsense-optimized site.

I don’t know about you, but it would be difficult to take some aspiring marketer who uses a Hooters girl as his icon, seriously, much less consider a joint venture.