I had an interesting run-in with someone in Facebook this morning that made me realize that people still don’t “get” social media. To put it in as few words as possible to explain the situation, I basically had someone run up on me and slap a sticker on my ass essentially turning me into their billboard.
I’m not speaking in literal terms of course, since this occurred on Facebook, but it was equally offensive.
I often talk about the benefits of someone new to their industry hitching themselves to the star of someone who is far more successful and established. Learn from them, ride with them, educate yourself based on the actions and successes of that person.
The dark side of this are the people who merely hitch to that star to be “in”. To be considered cool. These are the people who name drop, and it’s a vile practice. It makes social networking a fugly practice.
The individual in question found me through another group I’m a member of on Facebook that I “liked”, a group that related specifically to SEO Copywriting. I accepted his add request because I’m someone who loves social networking. Within seconds of adding him as a friend, he slapped a link to his copywriting company on my Facebook wall for everyone to see… and that was it.
Not a “Hi, how are you” nor a question of “Can I do this?”
As stated before, I got a slap & tickle (without the tickle) and he tried to use me as a billboard for his company.
Unacceptable practice to say the least and it’s the Facebook equivalent to forum spam. This person is contributing nothing to a conversation, nor attempting to generate any social buzz about what it is he does. His entire purpose behind social netoworking is merely to dump as many links as he can to generate some kind of traffic.
Social networking, regardless of the channel, is about engagement. It’s not a place to hard sell, and nobody wants your business card when you lick the back of it and smack them in the forehead to make it stick. When I say engagement, I’m talking about the good kind of engagement. When you’re sharing something of value that is useful to people.
It’s neither useful nor valuable to run up on someone and expose yourself. The “look at me” mentality has the smelly undertones of a social networking strategy that completely lacks strategy. This is what happens when someone decides to “do” social media without understanding its form or purpose. They aren’t sure where to start, or what to say but they know that any exposure buy cialis online is good… right? Hence the link dropping, the mass friending, the poor decision making and in the end – the negative branding.
After I got the link stamped on my Facebook wall, I sent him a message and told him that it’s bad form to do that type of thing without first engaging the people. He took his link down.
5 minutes later he put the link back up with a message attached to the link that said “Hi!”
I looked at his own Facebook page to discover that I was simply one aggressive linkstamp in a chain of kamikaze social networking.
</facepalm>
