But what happens when friends send you these messages?

Granted, it won’t be as overt as a “Hi, I’m Natasha, I would like to chat with you

Talk to me now at: [Adult friend finder affiliate link]”

But still, some of the things that rankle my haunches include:

• Talking about how amazing you are or how great you are (Go talk to your bathroom mirror if you feel the need to share).
• Talking about how you’ve been in the industry for 10 years or 15 years (Unfortunately, it was more like you experienced the same day over and over again since day 1 and haven’t learnt a thing).
• Endlessly promoting some product and include affiliate links in your twitter messages (We’re pretty savvy marketers and seeing a redirect URL and a bunch of cookies being placed in our browser fires off a couple of warning bells).
• Talking down and treating your audience like kids, assuming they’re going to believe everything you say.
• Failing to provide any value to your followers/listeners/fans.

In my opinion, there’s nothing terrifically new about the web 2.0 or social traffic sites – the same rules apply, it’s all about building the relationship with the person you’re talking to.

Just because you can use the power of twitter to send marketing messages out to 2,000 followers doesn’t mean you should do so at every opportunity.

Likewise, following 4,000 people and having 500 follow you back does not make you a “social marketing expert” either. On the contrary, it tends to smack of desperation.

Technology is a double-edged sword. Tools like Qwitter let you see when someone who has just followed you, decides to quit 24 hours later when you don’t follow them back. This is like the pickup artist who heads into a bar and uses a string of one-liners, gets no love and leaves at the end of the night empty-handed.

If you want to be in the internet marketing game for the long term, it’s important to play the game with a long term focus and a long term plan in mind.

Some of the principles that have helped me include:

• Focus on the quality, not the quantity of relationship: It’s much better to have 1 staunch ally than 100 casual followers. So quit bragging about how you have 1,000, 10,000 or 100,000 fans. How many of them do you know, and what do you know about them? Being a mere “friend collector” is even more superficial online, compared to it’s offline equivalent.
• Being invited and being part of the in-group: Do you feel that you know the person well enough to call them a friend? I think trust has to be earned. Even though social networks are open and you can find my accounts using the search engine, that does not give you license to ping me as I’m working on a campaign to give me a hot new offer, or beg me to try out your new product or service. “Permission Marketing” by Seth Godin is a good book which addresses this topic, failing which a copy of “Miss Manners Guide to Good Social Etiquette” wouldn’t hurt either. You wouldn’t come up to a group in a party and butt in with an off-topic, irrelevant question, so why abuse the internet in a similar fashion?
• Build the relationship: Relationships progress – from strangers to casual contacts to friends to buddies. You can’t leapfrog from strangers to friends or buddies in one fell swoop, unless you have some serious moxie. Developing a sense of EQ or emotional quotient and taking time to build rapport with someone shows sincerity and does more to build the relationship than anything else. But if you’re hellbent on trying to get a sale out of the whole superficial exchange, then there’s not much anyone can do for you.

In a nutshell, being a “bad” social marketer has a lot to do with coming across as being rude and seeing someone as a customer, rather than a human being. If you aren’t able to pick up the lessons to step up to responsible marketing over web 2.0 or web 3.0, you won’t be able to get a passing grade anytime soon.

As a marketer, social networks or web 2.0 networks and services give you an opportunity to reach out to potential customers at significantly lower costs compared to search engine optimization or paid advertising.

In my opinion there’s greater finesse involved, because if there are another 100 marketers using the same channel to reach out the the person, you have to fight to gain the person’s attention, even as they are being courted by 100 other suitors.

So the $64,000 question is how do you get someone’s attention without becoming annoying.

Can you painlessly win the social media love dance, without getting your heart (and sales conversion) broken?

Here’s an example of what I mean:

My facebook “friend add” request queue currently numbers in the 450+ range.

How do I decide if I approve a friend request?

First step, I look to see if we’ve friends in common.

Second, who are those friend? Casual acquaintances, close friends? Business partners?

–

If there’s a personal note, it could gain a couple more bonus points…or be a major deal killer.

A reason like “I saw you on the network and I want to grow my friends list. Please add me” works well if you’re building a friendship profile, or looking for strangers to chat up on an instant messengers or IRC. It doesn’t work as well otherwise.

Another poor reason “I see you’re in affiliate marketing. Let’s be friends”.

Erm, my blog is listed there. I have videos up. Would it be too much to take a look at what I do, and invest a minimal amount of time and effort to find out more about me. And then decide if you want to be my friend?

The analogy would be, if you wanted to expand your circle of friends, would you find out more about someone, or would you go out in the street and randomly start talking to strangers?

I can’t say that talking to strangers might not yield results, but I’m fairly sure the hit rate is going to be significantly lower.

–

So you’ve made it past the velvet rope, now what?

The love dance doesn’t end once you get in the “inner circle”. If anything, that’s when the work begins.

My focus remains to bring value to the table.

What’s “value”? It’s anything useful that will help the other person – perhaps a relevant blog post, report, video that relates to the person’s interest (personal, business or otherwise).

That’s what search engines do their best to replicate, don’t they? Serve up appropriate results.

Any relationship will improve if “stuff” going in, improves the relationship.  If you focus on improving the relationship, you can expect good things to come out of it.

What’re some no-no’s when it comes to building a relationship?

Here are 3 top cardinal sins to avoid:

• Being Irrelevant:Being accepted into a “friends” group means that there is some commonality between you and me. Serving me irrelevant and unrelated information or offers (even if it’s a highly profitable affiliate offer) will kill the relationship some, especially if it’s way out of what I focus on.
• Pulling Favors Too Quickly: Whether physical or virtual, there’s a comfort zone related to what people are willing to do. If we just became friends yesterday, and you send me an email asking to mail all my lists with your offer, I would probably do it if it was compelling, and I believed in the product or service. Asking someone to do something for the sake of doing it (even for the “highest payouts” reason often cited) is a bad practice in my books.
• Following Up: UFO marketers are really irritating. And they really should get their email systems fixed. When they need something from you, they send emails leading off with “Hey buddy! How’s it going? Here’s an offer you want to look at”. And when you send them an email, you don’t get a timely reply (and sometimes don’t get a reply at all). I have a blacklist, it might be good to stay off it. If it’s a consolation, Donald Trump talks about being stood up in his book “How To Get Rich“. How do you deal with these people? Just ignore them and move on, says the Donald.

Being a successful social marketer is not a difficult task. What makes it difficult is when marketers forget some of the simple rules and get themselves into a world of unnecessary difficulty.

The unfortunate part is that these troubles were likely of their own making.

For one, sorting through “followers” and considering reciprocal “friend adding” is easier because you can filter through the list of friends in a pretty speedy fashion (especially if you have a hundred or more pending followers).

A number of weeks ago, MyBlogLog community manager Miss Tilly mentioned the introducing of a Connector widget.

It looks like an aggregator for your social networking services.

And supports 7 services now, making it look like a scaled-down version of FriendFeed (which supports 41 services at last count).

I guess if you’re a Yahoo! stalwart you’d be using the MyBlogLog Connector (and hoping that new services will be added in a speedy fashion).

If you’re a bleeding edge tech adopter, you’d probably have got your FriendFeed account a long time ago and are tweaking your settings and services.

–

One grouse I have about social traffic is the lack of useful and intelligent filtering services, which will help improve your social experience. Going through the content on social networks now feels like sorting through a 1,000 email inbox trying to find that one useful email.

Effective social marketing is going to incorporate content and social relevance to grow beyond its kooky appeal to go mainstream.!

In this podcast, I covered 3 principles that will help you better plan and generate income from your social marketing campaigns.

The principles are:

• Pre-qualification
• Building a sales funnel
• Following up with your leads, especially using non-traditional communication channels

Check out the Friday Podcast:

If tended well, your social marketing efforts can take off virally and yield a bountiful harvest with social goodwill being generated, credibility being established and the positive buzz grows at a quantum rate – everything having to do with having provided value to the community and becoming a key member of the community.

But like an good gardener, if you don’t watch over your garden – whether it’s a blog, forum or content website, it can be overgrown with undesirable weeds – spam, massively out-of-topic discussions and trolls.

The Chinese/Japanese art of bonsai culminates in miniature trees cultivated to aesthetic perfection – these same principles apply to growing your social community too.

Here are a couple of strategies:

• Seed and Germinate: Continually spread your marketing efforts even after you’ve established a foothold in at least 3 anchor communities in your niche. There’s a tendency to find maybe 10 communities and spray your marketing efforts liberally over all of them and quit halfway due to fatigue. Instead, build an anchor presence initially, then expand your efforts. If anything, having a strong presence in one community is preferable to merely having accounts in 100 others.
• Watering and fertilization: Again, a seed dropped into the ground doesn’t do much unless it’s watered regularly. Continually visit communities, even after you’ve established yourself. Even though it’s a free marketing effort, you still need to “pay” in terms of time to growing relationships. It’s out of these relationships that better things come.
• Prune and deweeding: Continually check on the feedback that’s accumulating at your blogs, forums, social community profiles. Look beyond just having a large number of comments at your sites and go for quality, rather than quantity. One great blossom is better than ten average ones – if you let your ego run your sites, you’ll go for quantity. If you let quality rule, you’ll be growing your sites.

I like social marketing because it’s a great test of your ability to be disciplined, have a game plan in mind and continually take action.

It’s not an “instant” formula or even a “quick” one as some marketers would have you believe, but it can sustain you for a long time to come if handled right.

Especially if you’ve been traditionally focusing on PPC or Search Engine Optimization to generate leads and sales, these strategies can give you a couple more tools for your arsenal.

Social marketing is all about open communication and visibility. (transparency and honesty are key too).

If you don’t already have an online presence, look at how you want to position yourself.

At the heart of it, a Dell computer, an Apple iPod or an Asus Eee PC is just a bunch of circuit boards and electronic chips soldered together and encased in an aluminum or polycarbonate case. It’s marketing magic that imbues these objects with the emotional associations of style, ease-of-use, prestige, etc.

In his book, “All Marketers are Liars”, Seth Godin mentions how consumers are actually the ones lying to themselves. They imbue products and services with these larger-than-life characteristics and spending their income on “driving machines” and believe that a computer can help them “think different”.

If you’re an online marketer and you aren’t already picking up these tips to up your game, you could be missing out on the massive leverage these strategies provide.

Pickup artists like Neil Strauss AKA Style, Erik Von Markovik AKA Mystery talk about creating personas or social avatars. I don’t see this as very different from a brand that a company creates.

One question might be asked “So, how do I create my identity if I’m new to this?”

Answer: Create your identity based on what you want to be (your outcome) and strive towards it. An avatar is your desired outcome, you build it as a goal you want to achieve.

Having it consistent with your personal thoughts, values and attitudes will help you market via social media and web 2.0 with authenticity and brutal effectiveness. Projecting a picture of yourself as something you’re not is going to be a fruitless exercise down the road.

The pickup artists have put a practical application to Robert Cialdini’s concept of social proof – the idea of DHV’s or Demonstration of Higher Value. In Internet marketer speak, that’s becoming an authority site in your niche. (ok, I’m extending the concept further from its original position).

More importantly, social marketing still represents a pool of huge untapped potential – something like the Excalibur buried in a block of stone. The secret here is that anyone can be the “King Arthur” that pulls it out and unleashes its potential – it’s a matter of stepping up and taking action.

This clip with one of Mystery’s lieutenants, JDog, address the issue of creating avatars. Read between the lines and the same principles of focus, rather than “peacocking” will equally apply in your business too.

Market Leverage is taking the lead when it comes to relationship building and branding with measures like it’s care package campaign to the top affiliate bloggers, and initiatives like Market Leverage TV. Kudos to Mike and his team for getting on the radar with innovative social marketing strategies.

In the course of our discussion, I was wondering — Will affiliate marketing come to blows with social marketing and social media?

From my discussion with affiliate managers, it seems that the majority of affiliate marketers are only interested in the one-time pay-per-lead or pay-per-sale commission structures. Ask them about revenue share or continuity (eg: subscription/membership) type payouts and they aren’t as keen.

With some bizop offers paying out $100-120 per lead or sale, this could trigger the “quick cash” impulse among some affiliates.

On the other hand, savvy merchants and advertisers would’ve grasped the subtleties of lead generation, building up an leads database and reselling the data or marketing offers to that database, and in many scenarios employing both techniques.

In this case, rev share, especially for a CPA-based network will be a moot point.

This is the business model for “affiliate marketing 1.0” if you want to apply a label to it.

–

With social marketing and its technologies like video, social networking, blogging, forums, etc, the emphasis is on building the relationship, forming a community, focusing on the long-term – pretty much a complete opposite to “affiliate marketing 1.0”.

Sure you could just take the tech aspects of social media – the viral marketing, the video and audio which massively increase conversions and leave the relationship benefits at the door. But does that strip social marketing of some of its inherent benefits? Do merely become an updated version of “social engineering” as practised by Kevin Mitnick and others?

It’ll be interesting to see how these initiatives pan out.

Tune in to the Friday Podcast tomorrow to check out the interview with Market Leverage founder Mike Jenkins.

First off, the site has undergone a design revamp:

Looking very sharp.

Yesterday (Monday), my buddy Amit Mehta presented his series of Pay-Per-Click strategies – the slides and recorded presentation are available for download.

Today, SEO specialist Aaron Wall will be presenting SEO and linking strategies.

It looks like the Black Ink Project will get many new affiliates off to a flying start.

On Friday, I’ll be presenting a session on social marketing strategies and building your online brand.

If you don’t already have access to this quality training, you should register at:

–> The Black Ink Project

Because you are able to broadcast your message across multiple platforms and multiple social networks, you can reach a huge number of people in a very short time.

A recent incident (nowhere near conclusion now) bears this out.

Jim Kukral’s TwitterMeThis social adventure.

At the recent Affiliate Summit West in Vegas 2008: Andrew Wee, Shawn Collins, Jim Kukral, Sam Harrelson, Zac Johnson

About a week ago, Jim published a blog post “Twitter Marketing Experiment – TwitterMeThis” where he’s pay $5 to the winner of a trivia game played on the Twitter micro-blogging (similar to SMS text messages) platform.

Shortly after, the topic was discussed on Geekcast, Jim posts a follow up about “social media being bullshit” and Sam posted a response and Shawn follows up with a sequence of 3 posts: one, two and three. In between there’s a discussion on TrishaLynâ€s blog that Jim might not continue with the Geekcasts.

But Iâ€m not so keen to talk about the  discussion as to look at how it took place.

Far beyond a one-to-one email exchange, the issue has escalated to the point of seeming disagreement and the potential departure of Jim from the Geekcast team.

In the non-social media world, it would have just remained a private exchange of emails.

Within the social media context, the communication trail has gone through several blogs (many of which are highly trafficked), and re-syndicated or referred to by other blogs.

It has also been twittered about (with many of the protagonists in this exchange having followers in the high hundreds.

Add to this the number of Youtube and other video responses being generated, and you can see that a minor disagreement has blown up to probably most of the affiliate industry knowing or at least hearing about this.

If you factor in the fact that Iâ€m halfway around the world, reading and blogging about this at 4am, youâ€ll see that social media is pervasive and goes viral instantly. Forget “tell-a-friend” the news is delivered as soon as you type “twitter” or “youtube” into your address bar.

–

What are the implications for social marketers?

• Awareness: Given the fact that most marketers will be reading words on their screen or facing a videocam, itâ€s easy to forget that thereâ€s another person at the other end of the computer. You can make friendships really easily on the internet, you can similarly disagree, argue and experience flare-ups with your friends too.
• The meaning is not always clear: Obviously nothing will communicate your point as well as a face-to-face meeting. Itâ€s hard to tell if someone is being serious or theyâ€re just joking around when they say they are upset with you. You could think theyâ€re joking around, when in fact they could be seriously upset at the other end.
• Itâ€s still the “undiscovered country”: Yes, we know how to use these new fangled technologies, but I donâ€t think we fully understand the social implications and more importantly the social consequences of social media yet. Sociologists have been study cultures for the last 100 years since the “father of sociology” Auguste Compte founded the field. Now what happens when you happens when you add the ability to instantaneously alert thousands, if not hundred of thousands of people with a single video, blog post or twit?

I think anyone whoâ€s read the documentation, FAQs and tutorial videos will be able to use the social media out there pretty easily.

But to be able to use such channels effectively and at the same time, responsibly, is another matter.

As Marvel Comics founder and creator of Spider-Man and the Silver Surfer, Stan Lee coined the phrase, “With great power there must also come – – great responsibility!“

It’s the “thin client” computing discussion which Sam was refering to at the tailend of Geekcast Episode 13. (you knowyou’ve been listening to a lot of Geekcasts, when you’re typing “http://geekcast.fm/archives/category/geekcast/” into the browser address bar – bookmarks are overrated anyway…)

Besides having Sam do a rundown on his myriad of blogs/websites, we also talked about sci-fi, his new startup Big Idea Agency (the site design seems to change every couple of days, and viewing the page source sometimes shows some weird/arcane trivia).

Yes, there’s lots of social goodness ahead (together with a definition of “cloud computing”).

Check out the Friday Podcast below:

31.5 MB | 1 Hour 16 Mins

With the change, MyBlogLog has moved from being a blog aggregator to being a Web 2.0 content aggregator of sorts. It’s supposed to be able to pull in updates from twitter, myspace, jaiku, flikr, linkedin, etc (a total of 43 services) and present them in a “New With Me” tab.

Oh yeah…where all the information used to be presented in a simple screen with all content visible above the fold:

(An old MyBlogLog screen), the new interface means you’ll need to scroll down to look at the content…

There’s a chorus of “I hate it, can I switch to the classic (ie original) interface” and that reasonates with me somewhat.

Granted, MyBlogLog’s Ian Kennedy and the MBL development team have spent some time working on this, but I’m wondering if MBL users had been sufficiently polled to the changes…

Is it a case of Yahoo! developing what it THINKS its users want, or are the changes what MBL users have been clamoring for?

As one of the earlier MBL users, I’d looked at the service as a blogging service. I ignored the other add on stuff and the most useful elements were the “recent visitors” widget I’d put on my blog and the Pro Stats (a sort of lite analytics package for your blog).

So here is my wishlist:

• Let me fix my own space!: Give MBL users the ability to customize their profile, have it like a Squidoo lens where you can drag-and-drop modules.  If the Web 2.0 widgets are not popular, just drop them. I hate digital clutter as much as the next users…
• Evangelize Before Conversion: This is something that Steve Jobs has done a smashing job with the iPods and iPhones. If you want to get something out there, go beyond just a mandatory install on the user’s interface, it will just p*ss people off… Why not do a series of tutorials, do an online launch, recruit internet celebs like iJustine AKA Justine Ezarik to promote the thing?
• Solicit Feedback: Although it’s great to have a corporate MyBlogLog blog, I don’t think a blog comments section is the best way to conduct a dialogue with your users, especially since Web 2.0 services live and die by their consumers (it’s social marketing, isn’t it?) Put up a vBulletin forum somewhere, conduct a focus group, make active use of your existing advisory group or set up a new one…

When I was interviewing dotcoms earlier in my journalism career, I was pretty shocked at the amount of navel gazing that many of these dotcoms were engaged in, their eyes weren’t on the road ahead at all. So while, it’s great to want to change the world with the latest and greatest…sometimes users just want something simple (like an easy to use spam reporting system, MyBlogLog, without having to go through the hoops of logging in and filling in multiple forms… A web usability study or focus group would take care of this…) and they’d be happy.

Yahoo! was and is one of the web’s pioneers in my eyes and part of their existing predicament has to do with failing to listen to it’s users feedback and a slowdown in innovation in the last couple of years.

I’ve switched to using facebook since late last year, but I think MBL still has a chance to capture mindshare if it takes active efforts to put it’s ears to the ground and move in the same direction as its users.

Shawn Collins (left) with new Affiliate Summit intern Jack Collins

Shawn is one of the most experienced and friendliest contacts I have made since getting involved in affiliate marketing and I appreciate the fact that he’s a friend whom I consult over IM and through the email.

It was great to hear how Shawn got started in affiliate marketing in 1997 as an affiliate for Amazon, and how he’s progressed to founding the Affiliate Summit seminar/tradeshow with Missy Ward, manages the Affiliate Tip blog, Authored “Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants”, his annual AffStat report, the weekly Affiliate Thing weekly podcast co-hosted with Revenue magazine editor Lisa Picarille, an Affiliate Manager forum and probably 100 other projects, including one which will be launched soon.

Here’re some of the topics we discussed:

• How to get value out of attending seminars and events (as opposed to staying home and reading blogs and forums)
• Important things you should do BEFORE and AFTER attending an event
• How to catch all the conferences free
• How to gain an unfair networking advantage at ASW
• How to get free consulting from industry veterans and experts at the event

The podcast can be accessed below:

46 mins 36 secs : 22 mb

Affiliate Summit West is from Feb 24-26 at the Rio Hotel in Las Vegas. Last year the tickets ran out and scalpers were having a field day on eBay.

And Shawn has given a special Affiliate Summit coupon code for my blog readers “ANDREW10” which will give you a 10% discount off your tickets.

Here’s the registration link: Affiliate Summit West.

Get your tickets early to avoid disappointment, and if you’re headed for ASW, I look forward to seeing you there.

A lot of people think “money” is the big thing that will give you freedom in life.

That’s not the case.

Think “social influence”.

The most powerful man in the free world, the President of the United States, makes about $200,000 a year from what I’ve heard…yet he’s able to invade other countries, cut off the oil supply to countries he doesn’t like. I’d say that this social influence is way out of proportion to his salary.

Although guys like Richard Branson, Donald Trump and Warren Buffett are probably making about a thousand times more than George W Bush, their social influence is much less. Their ability to shape reality is much more limited.

Let’s look at another example of “social power”, Steve Jobs isn’t in the same category as some of the tycoons, but his social cachet in dreaming up the iMac and the iPods give him unprecedented social power in shaping popular tastes (About 9 out of every 10 MP3 players sold is now an iPod).

On the Internet Marketing arena, you’ve heard me bandy the terms “social traffic” and “social networking” about. Is it the same as Web 2.0? some have asked.

On the surface of it, it looks similar, the Web 2.0 (or social media guys) use Digg, MySpace, Facebook, Craigslist, forums – these are the same tools I use.

Where we differ however, is my focus on the “inner game” of Internet Marketing.

Social power can be simplified in the following manner: You are either an influencer OR a follower.

Influencers tell you to do something, and you’re likely to do it.

Is this the same as power and authority?

Not quite – authority is something that’s given to you because you’re a police officer or a judge or a senator, social power is conferred, it’s informal, and at the same time it can be more powerful than formal power.

Are you lost yet?

A lot of people think they understand social marketing/social power, and they think it has to do with email or site spamming, but it’s actually a whole lot more than that.

I’m planning to get a speaking slot at Affiliate Summit West, where I’ll talk more about the inner game of Internet Marketing.

For the session notes, click “more”

Levels of Social Engagement

• The Seinfeld [Cool! Nice! Wow!]
• The Interpretation/paraphrase [gets zero value] [“Wow, blogging means you write stuff and publish it! Cool! Nice! Wow!”]
• Analysis
• Application

Comment stickiness – Almost all comments i submit get published, they also bring traffic.

Social Noise? – If you aren’t contributing useful content, you’re contributing to the social noise.
Sooner or later the social noise get filtered.

Link Noise? – You’re evaluted not just by the commments you leave behind, but also by links.

You may not see it, but my team goes through every comment.
Check that it’s not linked to a MFA (Made for Adsense) site, or direct to a dubious sales or landing page.

I have empowered my editorial team to vet and if necessary, delete comments which fall into the “seinfeld” or “paraphrase/interpretation” category.

If you’re persistent, your post is flagged as spam and you will not get a second chance to make a first impression.
–
How then to Successfully Engage in Social Networking?

To be a successful social marketer, you need to look at the levels of social engagement. They’re similar to their real world counterparts.

Start out as:

• Casual contacts
• Friends
• Good friends
• Partners/JV

Observe the social rules!
Be sure to clear each level before proceeding to the next.

Trust and authority automatically come as you move up the ranks.

–
Jumping the Social Marketing Gun

Unless you are an established authority in the market, I wouldn’t suggest trying to shoot for a JV with your first email.

99 times out of a hundred, you’ll get the door slammed in your face.
–
Spammers to Friends?
Another tip, most bloggers and webmasters will have a mental notebook filled with the people who regularly spam their blogs and websites with seinfeld and paraphrase type messages.

If you’re one of those, your chances of become a friend, much less getting a partnership are severely reduced.

–
The Bottomline? Engage in Smart Marketing

It pays to be smart in your social marketing.
Work on the law of reciprocity, treat others as you’d like others to treat you, and you’ll do just fine.

In recent weeks, there’s been news coverage from the likes of TechCrunch that some Squidoo pages have seen as much as a 75% drop in traffic, due to lower rankings in Google’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

With a Google PageRank 6 and Alexa 493 traffic ranking, Squidoo is among the Internet’s most popular sites. [You can see my earlier: Squidoo review]

The reason? A number of marketers have been using Squidoo lenses as a parasite host for hosting pages for spam marketing purposes. [The Squidoo team lists their anti-spam measures]
With the drop in Google’s SERP positions, a number of marketers have since moved their pages over to Hub Pages (PR6, Alexa 3,220)

But does adopting a “nomadic” approach of shifting to another authority site solve the puzzle of generating a continual stream of traffic?

It seems more like a “slash and burn” forest clearing measure. You forage in an area, turn it into a wasteland, shift to the next plot – slash the trees, burn it to the ground – and move on.

Sure, there are a lot of “forests” on the Internet, but if we were to take the “Live Earth” idea of a sustainable, long-term and long-tail approach to Internet Marketing, wouldn’t it be better to master the dynamics of social networking and build a brand AND a business from there?

Howie’s interview with Seth provided a number of insights. If you’ve read Seth’s works like Permission Marketing, Purple Cow, the Idea Virus and All Marketers are Liars, the interview will reasonate with you and you’ll see the principles put into action.

 Master Marketer Seth Godin

If you’re not familiar with Permission Marketing, Seth provides a good illustration of the evolution of marketing from disruptive to a permission-based model:

“Marketing has become a consensual process. In other words, you can’t yell at people (on TV, on the radio, on the web) and hope that you can earn enough to yell more. As a result, the most successful marketers are the ones who have a product that people are eager to use and talk about (think iPhone). This is great news for people who have useful information to sell, because human beings are drawn to insight and knowledge and things that help them succeed.

Like Seer Interactive’s Wil Reynolds had mentioned at Affiliate Summit East, building a site optimized for humans, rather than search engines will bring you the biggest returns.

You may detect a bias towards “content development” and “content sites” in recent posts, but that’s only because “content IS king”.

As Seth skillfully illustrates:

Like the booth at the carnival that has a great barker outside bringing people in, but not much in the tent, at least as far as I can tell.

So SERP rankings can bring you so far, but you’d need something substantial inside your tent/website/blog to keep the audiences there.

When that happens, “people flock. They tell their friends. They engage. They give permission. It works.”

Ah, the essence of social marketing/social traffic generation succinctly summarized in 13 words.

The root of Squidoo (which I see as an embodiment of Seth’s word-of-mouth marketing principles) “we give anyone an easy-to-use platform where you can help people understand your little part of the world. A page where you can include links and content and pointers and a bit of community to help people figure out what’s going on.”

How to get the most out of Squidoo?

Build yourself as an authority, the “go to” gal or guy for your niche subject.

If you are building great pointers to great stuff and profiting by being an expert, by engaging people as they look for something to help them, we need you and will continue to work to help you.”

The nucleus of “social marketing”? It lies in:

“What Squidoo does when it does things well: it gives people meaning. Squidoo is not some sort of amplifier where you can place a paragraph or two of text and maybe a banner and get some juice.

A great Squidoo lens is a hand-built piece of insight into a given topic. You list your offering, perhaps your competitors. You point to pictures or videos that teach people about what you do. Include links to customers who are also giving testimonials.”

Implicit in Seth’s statements is the idea of creation value for your readers, and more broadly, your community.

Destroy that value by scraping keywords devoid of any context, or by overly being sales-focused, without being information-focused and you risk alienating your very customers and relegating yourself into a pitch-fest freak.

In case you’re wondering about the duality/dichotomy which seems present in the marketing world, between white hats and black hats (and sometimes gray hats), Seth spells it out very clearly:

There are only two kinds of marketers:

• Marketers who spend all day trying to do more and give more to their customers.
• And marketers who try to do less and charge for the rest.

How would you achieve victory in this war of opposing marketing paradigms?

Seth’s belief is: use your lenses to be the expert and to give it all away. The more you give away, the better you’ll do.

The bottom line in social marketing for me has been in line with eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s mantra “Do No Evil”.

Seth has more nuggets of social marketing information and you can check out the full text of Howie’s interview at:

–>  Howie Schwartz Interviews Seth Godin