So in Mark Cuban’s latest rant, he goes on to marvel at the very nature of the blogosphere: very few people (1%) actually create original content, and the rest of us comment on that content / news / opinion / entertainment.
Mr. Cuban goes on to bemoan “new” ways to get traffic … as blogs try to link to each other and get people pegged on Techmeme, and possibly dugg or delicious’d, or reddited or whatever. While earnestly shocked, I think what Mr. Cuban doesn’t realize is that the blog “pimping” he’s witnessing is the very nature of social media optimization.
And SMO is probably the future of traffic generation.
Sure, there’s the aggressive linking strategies, pimping social content sites, and blatant link baiting — and is it annoying? Maybe. But there are a different set of rules when it comes to optimizing your site or blog when it comes to getting traffic from social networks.
Whereas SEO involves “gaming” a search engine — altering what your blog looks like, presents itself, and even what it says so you can dominate some search terms, and thereby attracting traffic — SMO is very very different.
How?
Social Media Optimization involves the “gaming” or exploiting existing social systems or networks. Some are codified in actual websites, news aggregators or feeders such as Digg or Reddit or Delicious. Others are more organic — they’re groups of people aggregating on their own on different topics. These have their own structures under which they are bound. Forums. Blog rings. Blog Rolls. RSS feeds. Social Networking sites, such as myspace.
For people who are interested in promoting their own corner of the web, there’s a different way to juice these systems, and I agree, sometimes its annoying because unlike SEO, you’re not trying to game a search engine.
You’re trying to take advantage of existing social networks that involve real human interaction.
Blogs (and the Internet) may have come from humble beginnings based upon the humble exchange of ideas without any commercial basis; that may have changed with BoingBoing and Dooce being able to earn a living online.
It probably didn’t get any better — some would say, evolved — with the Business2.0 article on Mike Arrington earning 5 figures a month blogging alone.
Blogging is a commercial enterprise now, and its crossed a rubicon. People are making money, and whether its affiliate programs or pay per shill programs, its forced content to change across websites, and the blogosphere will change with it as well.
And if blog pimping is a way to create traffic to grow those enterprises, no matter how humble some of them may be, then hey — that’s the way it is and the way it will continue to be.
The gross irony?
Mark Cuban’s post is on its way to the top of Techmeme as we speak — and probably, will contribute to further handwringing and bemoaning about the echosphere and the commercialization of the blogosphere.
