As one of my many interests, I feel etiquette and manners deserve a spot on this website. Why? Because I suck at coming up with new and interesting things to say, this blog is already all over the map in terms of topics, and because this is the first relevant thing I’ve thought to say on this blog for a while and it looks lonely. So I have begun a new series: Rules of Etiquette.
For my first entry, I have chosen rule #796, which concerns writing on the Internet and spam.
Anybody who reads the Internet frequently and has even the most passive interest in writing, promotions, public relations, marketing, or earning revenue online has probably read approximately 14,000,000,009,321* top 10 lists of social networks which promise to boost viewership and get omg so much money for you. Around 99.8%* of these lists mention StumbleUpon at some point, mostly as #3*.
* Fact-checking is for pansies and newsroom directors.
Twitter version: StumbleUpon allows users to click a button and view a random article submitted by anybody.
Marketers seem to think this is the holy grail of viral promotion.
I think this is nonsense.
Two things here: I am an almost-daily StumbleUpon user. I don’t like spam.
Sometimes, there are many interesting things. Sometimes, the articles are trite and overdone and give a sense of, “Didn’t I read this already? Yes, I did. Five times. On five other sites.”
Sometimes, however, a website has little readership and its author has a hankering for some attention. A would-be innocent article comes up. The author clicks the “Thumbs-up” on this website, and so opens a theoretical can of worms exposing the topic to thousands overnight. Something to note, however: this doesn’t usually happen. SU has done well to narrow stumbles to specific interests of users. If they aren’t interested, they don’t thumbs-up, and the article dies off relatively quickly, especially if nobody picks it up within the first few days.
Now, the effort behind marketing is to generate interest and eyeballs, so I won’t name any names here, as their purpose would be served and they would continue their abuse. All I will say is I’ve seen an increasing number of spam-tastic sites which are so blatantly commercial even Aphrodite would want to hit somebody. I report them as spam. Most people just hit the Stumble button again. Few are banned, but the ones who are serve as a good lesson: don’t spam.
But rule #796 is not about the spammers. It is about the marketers and the authors of those would-be innocent articles: Don’t encourage them.
Spammers are stupid. They take a very niche or otherwise useless product, fail to get any juice behind it, and then decide it will be brilliant to send a million emails to nobody in particular, hoping even one will buy a $350 Kirby vacuum cleaner hose cozy.
Spammers don’t come up with ideas on their own. They desperately search Google hoping even just one page will give them the magic answer. More and more, the answer is becoming social media.
SU can be used for great promotion, as long as the promoter has truly taken the time to target an audience, meld the content into something genuinely useful for the audience, and successfully reach said audience (and only said audience).
Don’t encourage them. Keep my service clean and useful. And for spammers, if you didn’t come up with the idea on your own, you probably can’t execute it correctly. You are wasting both my bandwidth and your own. Stop.
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