There’s a battle in the agencies over social media. Doug Walker at Webwalker blogs about this battle, and looks for the middle ground between advertising people and public relations people doing social media marketing. I’m not sure either community should be doing this.

Social media (blogging, really) belongs to the people and the community, and more often than not, the heavy hand of marketing (advertising and PR) tromps into the social media sphere like a herd of elephants. And everyone trembles when the CEO blogs. Actually, Seth Godin makes a good point. Blogging is based on candor, urgency, timeliness, pithiness, utility and controversy. Not a typical CEO. And the calculated words of both advertisers and PR people fail at several of these points.

Blogging and social media by it’s very nature is entrepreneurial: quick and driven by personality rather than policy. Bloggers are single people giving their voice, their opinions and sometimes, bucking the trends. Microsoft doesn’t have a blog; Richard Scoble blogs, and happens to work (have worked) at Microsoft. Google doesn’t have a blog; Matt Cutts blogs and happens to work at Google. For many in SEO/SEM, Matt is the face and voice of Google. And, surprise, surprise, Matt is not a marketing guy. He’s an engineer. Scoble is not a “marketer” per se (despite a title of “Director of Marketing”) - he is best know as an evangelist.

Keeping up a regular blog (not a “blog campaign” - ugh) takes the passion of an evangelist. It takes the desire to be involved - not because you are told to (or paid by the client), but because you need to. Please keep in mind that these techniques - journaling, media bookmarking in the form of sending links to friends, etc. - have all been around long before “Social Media Marketing”. Are marketers are seeing this passion, and trying to force feed it to their clients? Are the clients seeing this passion amongst their people, and trying to turn it to bottom-line goals? Does the passion become dilute when applied commercially?

And I tremble at the idea of the “SMM Campaign”. That doesn’t get more calculated and unnatural - all of the things that social media isn’t.

 Update: Doug Walker summed up the post a little too accurately (is it warm in here?). Should marketers stay out of the blogosphere? Um…

My response on his blog:

Unless they are talking about marketing. That’s interesting.

Maybe I should step back a little tiny bit and ask the question: How can marketers find the evangelists with the organization to blog, and how can marketers facilitate blogging, including convincing the upper levels of management to go along with this.

Marketers-as-bloggers (unless they are talking about marketing) is scary IMHO. If I said that marketers don’t have a place in SMM, I’d be shooting myself in the foot. But is the role a traditional advertising/PR role? I don’t think so; it’s a new channel looking for new approaches.

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Yesterday, many of the big blogs woke up to find their PageRank lower by up to 3 points. And here I thought Pagerank became irrelevant two years ago…

Google PageRank is (theoretically) used by Google to weight pages in their search engine. The higher the PageRank, the better a page would do in the search engine. However, the PR system has been gamed and abused time after time, and Google’s Jaguar update in 2005 reset the criteria for PR, killing link farms and a lot of black hat SEO. When I wear my SEO hat, the last thing I look at is PR; it doesn’t tell me much. However, evidently many site sell advertising based on their PR. The Neilsen ratings system for TV has many of the same problems - see James Surowiecki’s analysis in his book The Wisdom of Crowds.

The remarkable thing about this PR shift is that (on one day’s data) these sites do not seem to be losing traffic.

Is PR, or even search engine marketing/optimization, even relevant in the social media sphere anymore? Yes and no, depending on the site. I’ve argued before that SEO is not dead, but there are better ways to get qualified traffic.

Many commerce sites still rely on the search engines for their traffic - the organic and paid listings are critical to their success. Strong organic optimization and good AdWords campaigns are the lifeblood of most businesses. But how relevant is this to bloggers, and are bloggers relying on the SEs for traffic? If they are, they’re hooped.

Referrals from other sites accounts for over 75% of my traffic. StumbleUpon is, by far, my biggest traffic generator, and Digg is a solid second place (I’ll talk about my traffic sources tomorrow). Admittedly, my numbers are not huge, but for a two-week-old blog and minimal marketing of the blog, I’m pretty happy. Social bookmark sites and referrals from other blogs have helped me far more than the search engines, and I’ll bet that other bloggers with strong SMO and SMM will say the same things.

Optimize for the search engines, keep the Google in mind, but don’t rely on them - there’s better ways to generate traffic.

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