I’ve never believed this old adage – I think it’s an arrogant dismissal by incompetent marketers who can’t manage their public relations properly.  Until recently it has never really been a big concern in the online world, but with an explosion of online communities over the past few years and the more recent increase in link baiting and brand protection services, perhaps online marketing professionals should be taking their branding more seriously?

If I could be bothered hunting down “how to” link bait articles, you’d see that most recommend undertaking some kind of negative efforts in order to spark off some link love to your site.  A war with another blogger.  A campaign against a well known brand.  Posting inaccurate information to tempt righteous bloggers to correct you.  Etc.  I’m sure most people who read this blog have already seen such articles, so no need to rehash them here.

Let’s consider some examples.

A while back, Brett Tabke banned all bots from WebmasterWorld.  While this wasn’t intended link bait as such (it had a technical justification), it did serve as link bait for WmW.  Did they get more links and coverage?  Yes.  Did they suffer any negative impact?  No.

They didn’t lose any traffic (that they didn’t want to get rid of).  They didn’t lose any users over the experiment.  The site and business hasn’t suffered from it – in fact, a lot of people had a little more respect for Brett & WmW at the time for having the balls to ditch all search traffic as an experiment.

While this isn’t a great example (it wasn’t an intentional link bait exercise), it does show how positive link bait can lead to positive results.

On the other hand, 2006 saw countless cases of companies screwing up their branding online by handling their online PR badly.  While not all of these are because of stupid link baiting, the end results are the same.  Perhaps the companies have received more exposure because of it, but what is the long term impact of this?

Zipatoni launched a splog for the Sony PSP and ended up getting slated by pretty much everyone over it.  What’s worse is that their response was grossly inadequate for the scale of their screw up and ended up compounding their failure.  Now search for “Zipatoni” and you find a great deal of negative results in the top 20.

Another example from 2006 is Big Mouth Media’s ban from Google.  While this is an embarrassing slip up in itself (which was rectified pretty quickly), their response to critics in the SEO community was arrogant and badly presented and made the whole affair much worse for them when Matt Cutts told the SEO world that they were in fact penalised from Google (and it wasn’t a mistake as BMM claimed).  Again, search for “Big Mouth Media” and you find negative results (this from a company that offers online brand protection services…).

In both these examples it was entirely within the control of the companies to manage these negative situations properly, but in both cases they failed to do so and it resulted in much more negative publicity. 

Was any publicity, good publicity in these cases?

Well, there is the SEO argument that says “yes”.  After all, they did get a lot of link love from various sources so perhaps it will help them in the long term in terms of improved rankings and traffic.  Notice I haven’t linked out to them just now – I’m not a link scrooge – I just do see any point in rewarding stupidity.  If I thought for a second that these were well planned link bait campaigns and not simple screw ups I’d probably have more respect for them!

However, what happens when clients carry out due diligence before they sign up for services provided by these marketing agencies?  While a Google search might not be the first thing they do, it is fairly likely it will be part of the research.   Will a client want the services of an agency that has caused an international uproar for a major brand client or an agency that have themselves been unable to assure the service they are offering?

The overall impact is debatable and obviously there are many other factors in the client decision making process, but the point is do we really want to throw some negative factors into the mix?

Link baiting is a short term exercise that can potentially have long term positive results, but I think that all too often people neglect to consider the long term negative results as well.

Credit to those who do link bait well – it can be a useful tool, just as SEO can be.  But as with SEO, many take the basic concepts and run with them without looking too deeply into the strategic implications they can have on their site, business or brand.

MG

“When submitted stories are consistently reported as spam and users complain via our feedback email about submission spam, we ban the domain. The domain will not be unbanned. The domain would consistently get reported as spam otherwise.”

Sooo…I thought it would be worthwhile writing a post that looked at social marketing, with a particular focus on Digg.

First of all, some background reading if you feel like it:

• Threadwatch – Growing list of domains getting banned at Digg
• Lee Odden – The hypocrisy of Digg and spam
• 10e20 – List of domains banned by Digg
• V7N – URL banned by Digg.com
• Graywolf – How to be a dirty Digger
• Digg – FAQ

The difference between social marketing and SEO

I think this is core to the issues facing a lot of sites that have been banned by Digg.  An SEO strategy is a very flexible thing.  You can take your broad strategy for any site (or page for that matter) and apply it to other sites (or pages).  Of course, this is an over simplification – there are obviously differences from industry to industry and site to site, but generally, what works for one site can more or less be applied to another site for similar results.

You optimise the same core areas, write content in a similar style and build links from standard sources.  It’s a very transferable strategy.

Social marketing has largely been adopted by the SEO community due to the fact that “buzz” and “viral” campaigns can result in some sweet links, which are great for SEO.  But more and more, SEOs are beginning to appreciate the traffic and brand value from this form of marketing – the problem arises when the SEO mindset is applied to this emerging channel of marketing.

Simply put – a social marketing campaign needs to be tailored to your specific objectives and although certain aspects are “standard”, each strategy isn’t as obviously transferable as SEO is.

Example 1 - an innocent mistake

A blogger who has been banned from Digg had posted on his blog that he had “only” submitted each of his 30 or so articles to Digg once.  Not gonna name names at this point because I do think it was an innocent and non-malicious action intended to “seed” the stories on Digg in the hope that they would “grow” in popularity.  However if he reads this and doesn’t mind being named, I’ll happily add in links, etc to his posts.

The problem here is not his intention – just the implementation.

When devising a social marketing strategy, we need to look at the big picture, particularly when exposing our sites to a large community.  As with forums or blog news sites such as Threadwatch, there are different levels of issues and etiquette we need to consider.  For Digg, I would make the following assumptions:

• They receive a lot of rubbish submissions
• Most of which probably come from the SEO community (or at the very least, people with a knowledge of SEO)
• As such, the Digg community may frown upon SEO flavoured submissions.

So, in this example, submitting every one of his blog posts, the author has applied a SEO mindset by creating a social marketing strategy that isn’t entirely appropriate to meet his objectives.  By submitting so many of his own articles, the community system (a combination of human and automated factors) has flagged his domain as spam.  The number of submissions as a proportion of the size of his site were so high that Digg has banned his site (as most articles would have been buried).

The point here is that not every post made on a blog actually deserves to be added to Digg.  Most blogs cover niche topics and in the grand scheme of things, it’s unlikely that everything you (or I) write will be “Digg worthy” – remember the community out there is much larger than just SEO.

A more appropriate strategy for this type of site (a blog) would be to submit ONLY articles that high quality and are likely to appeal to a broader community, or at the very least just space out your submissions (as submitting an article from your own site as and when you post them could trigger a spam flag).

Example 2 – social bookmark buttons on larger sites

Another domain that has been banned from Digg is the popular business networking site ecademy.  This is an interesting one, because it is an active site with a vibrant community of it’s own.

Of course, I can only speculate as to why they were banned, but I would assume that the following factors are core:

• Lot’s of user generate articles (different authors), each with a Digg It link.
• Authors most likely Digg their own submissions.
• AND / OR regular users Digg the story.

Why is this a problem?

Let’s put it in context.  The site receives 100,000’s of visitors each month and as a networking site, a high proportion are likely to be returning visitors and as such they will be familiar with regular authors.

The chances are that even if the author doesn’t Digg their own story, some regular users will.  Only one person needs to do it, but given the scale of the content being generated this could lead to a lot of submissions on a regular basis.  Again, as with example 1, lots of submissions + low Digg count could lead to spam flagging.

But surely sites shouldn’t be banned because users Digg their content?

No, of course not.  But what we would like and what happens in reality are two different things.  I’d love for Google to not index the site belonging to the guy who is copying my content, but here we are!

As I said at the beginning – we need to look at the big picture.  Where do your articles fit into the grand scheme of things?  Generally, not where we would like, but then that’s why we’re developing a marketing strategy, right?

The reality of the situation is that Digg receives a lot of spammy submissions and as such we need to factor this into our strategies.  Some people will spend time working out ways to get around this – fake usernames, pay to Digg, etc.  Personally I think this is a waste of time.  It is social marketing after all and if you can’t embrace the community for what it is, then you have a larger problem that won’t be solved by a short term burst of traffic from social media sites.

Tips for smaller sites and blogs

I would be inclined to avoid larger social media sites such as Digg until you can get yourself some decent professional kudos from fellow bloggers and industry professionals.

Basically, if you are considered to be a nobody, then your submission isn’t really going to carry the weight that it otherwise would.  But if your site or blog has a lot of blogsphere / press / authoritative exposure, then the articles you write a much more likely to stand up to close inspection.  Plus it’s useful for smaller sites to have an established user base that can support submissions by Digging them – that will mean there’s less chance of your submission fading away into nothingness.

Also, think about it before you Digg something.  Does it really warrant the submission?  Is it a topic that would spark a several page discussion on a forum or be covered by industry news sources (or is sufficiently sensationalist for neither of those to matter)?  If you can’t answer yes to any of those questions, then why would other people Digg your submission?

Tips for larger sites

If your site generates a lot of content (larger forums, sites where users can submit articles, etc), then consider how you will approach social bookmarking buttons.  Do you really want every piece of content to have a Digg button on it?

In my opinion, a good strategy for larger sites would be to have some mechanism to monitor and list popular topics – either by comments, replies, page views, etc.  If you can shuffle these to a “popular page” and then ONLY add social bookmark buttons to these pieces of content, then there’s more chance it will be accepted by the Digg community.

Basically, for most sites, the onus is on the site owner to filter out the crap content and promote selective social bookmarking, instead of broad based bookmarking with a “let them sort it out at their end” philosophy.  This will give you the best return on your efforts, while minimising the risk of a ban.

MG

A nice example of how link bait should be done – funny, topical and doesn’t piss anyone off.

MG

OK Sony.  So you screwed up in the console wars.  You had some idiot develop your strategy and based it entirely on the fact that consumers may buy the PS3 later in the year, missing the Xmas market (and your main competitors’ feeding frenzy) on the sole basis that your Blu Ray crap would be a major USP.  And you were doing so well with the PS1 and PS2….what happened?

There’s no need for this kind of crap.  I’d class “all I want for Xmas is a PSP” dotcom as a bloody stupid and naive attempt at viral marketing.  What were wou thinking?

It is so bloody transparent!

DO SOME RESEARCH!

How many fansites actually stoop so low in branding that they would refer to themselves in such a stupid and inappropriate way?  Oh no wait, sorry, every Metal band does a Xmas song lamenting to some two bit lame hand held.  And yeh EVERY fansite has a “letter” from a 12 year old detailing his quest to help his mate’s mum buy him a PSP for Xmas.

Stupid bloody lame corporate ignorance.

Jeeez – even the stupid post with the “print this and put it in x, y or z’s magazine to give them the hint” has the alt text “Print_Ad”….. Uh..hello?

Your marketing agency (Zipatoni) are idiots.  Yeh, here’s an idea, let’s hire an agency using a fully flash site to conduct our web marketing campaign – that’s a great idea!  They clearly know what they’re doing.

Hmm let’s not be too brutal here – maybe they don’t know what they were doing?  Perhaps I should email them?  That would seem to be the thing to do…

(let’s side step the fact that this marketing agency actually own the viral domain for a second – no need to bring ethics into this…)

So I sent this email to meredith.goette@zipatoni.com and also copied it into scee_presscentre@scee.net (the Sony UK press centre):

Hi Meredith,

I don’t really want to “activate my campaign” as the big, bold text on your flash site suggested as I clicked it, but I thought I would send a message anyway.

I just want to chat about the Sony PSP viral campaign at http://www.alliwantforxmasisapsp.com/blog/ – interesting stuff.  But none of it is really…well…real, now is it?

As a marketing professional, I’ve got to point out that this campaign is highly unlikely to meet it’s apparent objectives before Xmas.  Aside from being insanely transparent, the blog site really only serves to create a vastly negative impression of the PSP since your involvement has been ousted on various blogs.

Obviously, viral marketing is a tricky area – particularly on the web where people are able view information like the OWNER of the site and so forth. 

At this point, you may want to read the comments in the links I posted on my blog – they are very revealing.  You can find the post here:  http://www.fusednation.com/seo/sony-and-bollocks-web-marketing/

Feel free to get back to me if you would like to discuss the proper way to market to consumers online – ie, not assume they are idiots.

Kind Regards
Scott Boyd
www.fusednation.com

Perhaps a little harsh, but they screwed up big time and for a major client.  If anyone from the Sony PR team are reading this – send me an email and get in touch and I’ll happlily show you how to do it properly – maybe even grab some of the vast market share you just lost.

Here is some of the forum / blogger community’s response to the Sony viral marketing campaign:

• Digg – Sony and bollocks web marketing
• Digg – Awful viral marketing site
• Digg – Sony creates a fake blog as viral marketing
• Sony takes viral marketing to a new low
• Sony pays for fake Xmas wishes
• PSP site the new loneygirl?
• Another flog is exposed

What do you think?  IMO, even pretty looking crap is still spam and it doesn’t matter if it is big brand or some piece of rubbish churned out by your average webaster!

UPDATE (14th Dec):  They’ve owned up on the blog, but kinda half heartedly so.  Dean puts it well:

I certainly don’t think they got caught because their speech was too ‘funky fresh’.  More likely it was because it didn’t ring true. Kids are pretty adept at figuring out who talks the talk but doesn’t walk the walk.

One funny part of the statement:

Guess we were trying to be just a little too clever.

Um.  No.  What actually happened is that you hired an agency that doesn’t have a fucking clue how to market on the web.  I don’t think either Sony or Zipatoni were every in danger of being “too clever”.  Their site has to be the most transparent piece of crap I’ve ever seen.

Their l33t sp33k wasn’t even close to the fanboi-esque style they were trying to hit and fails as miserably as their half assed ‘fess up fails to salvage any dignity from the situation.

And I bet it all sounded really great on paper!

UPDATE 14th Dec (again): The site is down.  Guess Sony finally bitch slapped Zipatoni.

MG