Is Social Bookmarking A Form Of Spam?

Now an interesting thing to consider is whether or not social bookmarking (especially adding your own site as a bookmark ) is an attempt to spam. I guess if your intent at the outset was to spam then yes. If your intent is to legitimately brand yourself or your product or service then absolutely not. Again the network is social which means its user controlled content (by the many) and junk don’t last long.

Remembering that web 2.0 is us teaching the machine, social bookmarking your own site is you teaching the machine that in fact you do exist, look at me I am here, not there.

Take StumbleUpon as an example. You elect to join the service and upon doing so you also agree to view other stumblers pages. I proceed to ad my sites, tag it and give it a description, which at this point I am teaching the machine who I am. Is that spam? I don’t really believe for a minute that it is. Now the thing you have to remember about StumbleUpon is that it is a social network and the user controls whether a site lives or dies. If you get the thumbs down all the time your chances of being accepted as valuable content diminish quickly and the value of StumbleUpon is lost to you and your are left to your spam hole.

With all social media the number one thing is you have to participate. Participation has rewards in the form of finding people interested in what you’re interested in which usually breeds collaboration.

Can Del.icio.us and Blinklist also be a form of spam? Again I am teaching the machine who I am. In the case of both of these sites its simple, if your site is MFA (made for adsense), Geoscity throw back or just plan garbage with worthless content full of spam just to drive your ads from Google then again the value of your opportunity to teach the machine is lost to you. and you will soon drop to the bottom of the spam bucket.

The key with any social media is to be real and give content that is both accurate and helpful so that other users value your content enough to add it to there favorites. If they have taken the time to add you then you have sparked their interests. They will most likely come back to you site or share it with their friends. Goal accomplished.

Now using the social bookmarking service the way you should by adding blogs or sites you find interesting enough to share only helps the community as a whole by providing relevant content and giving the users the say in what they like and dislike, versus some search engine results telling them what they want to know by placing a list of top results in front of them. I think by far the greatest form of spam control is user control spam control.

Same goes for posting at or linking to someones blog or site. Could this be considered spam? An absolute yes - if abused. If you come in with one liner comments or your track backs lead to obvious spam on another person Blog with the sole intent to spam your product or service that has nothing to do with the post at hand then yes that is spam at its finest. On the other hand if you find the content interesting and want to legitimately respond to or link to the content in your own way then no I don’t think that is spam, but I guess that is in the eyes of the blog owner to judge what is spam and what is not.

Keeping your intention honest while using social media to teach the machine will go along way in how you will be received by the community of the Web.