Not Everyone Loves Social Network Marketing

Sometimes when everyone in the room spends their lives focusing on the same topic you do, its hard to have perspective. That's why I try to keep my feed reader packed with great blogs that talk Internet Marketing but that aren't necessarily "in the fold" when it comes to search marketing. Today I ran across a post at Alice Seba's site that did a reasonably good job of summing up some of the backlash against social network marketing.

Alice is known among the work at home mom community for her easy to understand advice about online marketing. She talks copy writing, she talks public relations, she talks email marketing...today, she talks Web 2.0.

When I think about what Alice writes, it makes me consider that even those of us warning against overzealous social network marketing may be missing the boat.

In general, when I warn companies about the problems with relying on social bookmarking sites as a marketing strategy, my focus is on the fact that these sites often fail to convert visitors to buyers. As I've pointed out, social bookmarking and social networking sites seldom reach a qualified target audience for anyone selling mainstream products. Thus, all that time and effort spend trying to land an article on Digg or snagging links from del.icio.us would be better spent figuring out how to increase the ROI on your pay per click campaign, or adding new content to your web site.

Alice's post subtly brings up an even bigger concern for most companies. What happens if your attempts at social network marketing not only fail to send you conversions, but actually create bad will against your company? What if the community figures out your intentions and your attempts to game the system and begin posting scathing reviews of your company on both the network and their own blogs?

It brings up the general line of advice that I try to stick to here on Search Engine Guide. Stop worrying about finding the "next big thing" in terms of marketing your site. Fads are not a marketing strategy. Spend your time focusing on building the best business that you can build, take the time to make sure that your sites are search friendly and properly optimized, go about your life building both business and personal relationships on and offline and use common sense and creativity to come up with solid marketing plans.