Three symptoms of a wannabe SMM agency out to fool you

While I do believe that Search engine marketing can be quantified and process bound to a large extent, Social Media Marketing tends to be different.Many agencies tend to equate SMM proposals with SEM proposals and this is exactly where one must understand that these agencies are not adept at handling social media marketing.

The symptoms of an SEM extended SMM wannabe agency as identified from a proposal are as follows:

The proposal talks a lot about submissions : Submissions on del.icio.us , submission on digg, submission on reddit etc. While submissions are important, ask your agency as to why those submission resources have been selected and how they intend to drive traffic through the social bookmarking sites.

The proposal focuses a lot on the technology but has no mention of the strategy: If your proposal is filled with "creation of blogs" and "creation of widgets", "Implementation of Rss" and Implementation of social bookmarking buttons and the agency has no idea of what would go in the blog or the what purpose the widget would serve, then you know you're in touch with the wrong guys.

Everything is quantified including the number of comments,reviews etc: I feel this is the giveaway.I have often come across proposals wherein the number of user reviews( to be generated by the agency), comments on forums and other blogs are quantified!!!.
Hmm please look for another agency guys....these guys dont know Social media for nuts.If,for example the number of user comments on the proposal is 10 on a particular forum,then does that mean after my 10 positive comments on a brand if a negetive comment is posted on the forum, I would not respond!!!! Ridiculous isnt it??

So the proposal should help you gauge whether the agency you intend to employ is smm ready or not.

How does Social search get rid of mediocre sites??

I have often wondered as to how social search would affect the dark techniques of Link building.

Initially Google simply ranked pages on the basis of the number of links.This led to a horde of links being built and entire campaigns being outsourced to countries like India and China.In fact more than 90% of the SEO companies in India would attribute upto 80% of their revenues from Link building campaigns.

However,Google,realizing the deteriorating quality of its SERPs decided to have some other stringent guidelines in place namely:

a) Quality of anchor Text being used

b) Preference to theme based site linking

c) Discouraging Reciprocal Linking

d) Penalizing Link farms

e) Penalizing sites that indulge in selling and buying of links.

While this has led to an increase in the number of links being rejected in campaigns, majority of clients still remain unaware of the decreasing prominence of PageRank and still continue to have links of any kind built around their site.It has indeed made the life of SEO companies tough but its commendable that they still manage to pull campaigns through.

Now comes in Social media and the entire web seems to have exploded with Web 2.0 sites. Credibility,authenticity and dialogue being the fundamentals of this evolution,the web becomes much more participative and the power to decide what is good and what is not is passed onto the end user or customer.

Votes now decide the prominence of a content piece/video/image on any social media site.
Prominent among these social media sites are :

• del.icio.us
• digg
• stumble upon
• Twitter
• Technorati
• netvibes
• Youtube
• Flickr

With Google laying down stringent guidelines on quality and Social Media emerging, it seems a herculean task to have links and link campaigns around a site.As such an alternate strategy seems to revolve around having articles bookmarked artificially or should I say unethically.

However, this strategy or most of it will not succeed as I see it.
"Content is King" is the line doing the rounds in Social Media Marketing. This in itself becomes the first hurdle.Companies laying focus on the back link and the votes need to ensure that their content is a good linkbait. A simpler strategy of writing articles and posting them and getting them bookmarked will not work here.

A linkbait also does not work one off.Social Media Marketing is all about linkability and constant creation of linkbaits is a must for it to succeed.Herein lies the second hurdle to companies which are short sighted : Regular creation of high quality content is a must.

Once the articles are posted you need the votes and the votes come from the webmaster network.Granted that you may have a network of 1500-2000 webmasters who will vote your content to the top but what next??The bookmarking site might drive some traffic to your site but if your landing page is not good enough, it will ensure that the traffic bounces off your site. Nowadays more and more bookmarking sites are enabling users to vote negatively as well.If your linkbait gets buried deep within for negative votes again and again, I guess your reputation goes for a toss.People will stop taking interest in your submissions and you'll probably find yourself one among the many wannabes.

Thus the tools at hand for the consumer outweigh the mediocrity of any social bookmarking campaign.As such I dont see link building evolving to accomodate Social Bookmarking.
I havent discussed the presence of underground networks that pay to advertise or get your content popular..will do that in the next post after careful thought on how social media could 'accomodate' them.