just reading a post on Forbes today on Digg This Headline, For Google's Sake and coming away with the impression that viral marketers use Social Media (ie:Digg) as an excuse to use link bait in order to create traffic to a site in short spurts:
"...Olthuis' solution? He created a page on LifeInsure's site listing "19 Things You Probably Don't Know About Death," and posted it to Digg. The list--which enumerated "facts" like a person's ability to remain conscious 15 seconds after decapitation--was a hit with Digg's users, who voted for the page 1,332 times. Those positive votes, or "diggs," pushed the list to the top of Digg's home page and drew tens of thousands of visitors to LifeInsure.More important than that traffic, however, was the list's role as "linkbait." Users on Digg and other social media sites created more than 800 links to Olthuis' list in forums and blogs around the Web. Because Google ranks a Web site's relevance based on the number of other sites linking to it, LifeInsure now ranks fourth in Google's results when the search giant's millions of users search for "life insurance." Suddenly, the company had free advertising that put its name right next to huge brands like Metlife and Prudential. "
I don't see anything creative or that interesting in creating linkbait trigger a high ranking; I'm not saying it's not effective, for the short timeframe where it will drive traffic, but it feels more like a gimmick than a real social media strategy.
It's really just a different approach and / or goal to SMO. Some marketers use social media to drive brand and traffic, while SEO's use it to drive links which in turn drive rankings. Google has specifically come out and said they support the use of social media for link building. They consider it a much more white hat link building technique than exchanging links or buying links.
Posted by: Jeremy Luebke | October 18, 2007 1:24 PM | Permalink to Comment