Am I Alone When I say that Social Marketing is Usless?

Lets say you're some shmuck trying to launch a website or blog, so you decide to tap in to the web 2.0 social networking sphere to 'go viral' and save money. For your efforts MAYBE you get a tiny spike traffic (which invariably tapers off to zero after a day or two). This includes facebook, digg, sphin, twitter, youtube; all essentially useless. Anyone agree?

 

I would - but depends what you're looking for. You make a flash video for a games site and you might get some recurring traffic; but try selling something and your viral ad has to be pure gold...

 

On the subject of viral videos...

Viral videos aren't a typical advertisement. In order for videos to go viral, you REALLY need to bring professional production to the table. The best viral videos often go through a lengthy pre-production process where a script is written, storyboards are assembled and the general "feel" of the video is determined. The actual shooting is done using professional or prosumer camcorders, allowing for a high quality product when encoded and uploaded to the Internet. With the highly efficient H.264 codec, you can have incredible HD videos streaming via YouTube and embedded in your site for easy sharing.

The ability for most people to stream HD video means that your video production efforts must also take a big step up. While FlipVideo camcorders are great for uploading short YouTube clips to share with friends, expect the next generation of viral videos to have professional production value. If you have a hot product or DIY guide... spending $1k on a professional video spot could be an investment that pays for itself many times over.

 

Youtube can send visitors. It's easy to optimize for especially when you consider how irrelevant the videos become after the first page of results.

Also, come up with a widget or something that people will use. The iphone and G1 provide good opportunities to distribute an easy widget you can brand if you are any good at programming. find a php programmer and ask him to take the 5 minutes to use the Twitter API to write a program that sends tweets, so you have the link back to your website. (The sent via myprogram).

You have to be creative, you can't just submit something to digg and profit.

 

I agree with Google, maybe it is true that a quality video will bring a lot of users and money in the short and medium term term. Anyways, content is the king. If you show some really nice and attractive video with great content, the visitors will surf your web for sure.

 

No I actually disagree. Web 2.0 properties are extremely useful in getting your brand name up the Google search results if your niche s rather loose.

But a lot of work needs to go into it, it needs to be unique, constantly updated and have interaction from visitors (eg commenting).

Apart from that it's also useful in building links and if you use, as an example, xrumer, instead of driving traffic/links to your moneypage, you drive them to the blog/social networking site, your moneypage is a helluva lot more secure.

 

It's close to useless if you use it as described... if you use it to point at your site, to point at blogs that point to your site, to point to articles you wrote that point to your site, then you are getting a bang for your Web 2.0 dollar.

 

Definately a waste of time!! I never achieved anything from Bebo or Facebook..

 

I love how people call a certain service or website a "waste of time" just because THEY didn't achieve any success. A lot of people have made a lot of money advertising through Facebook.

Maybe it is you who is "waste of time" who "never achieves anything"?

 

i am actually a big fan of using facebook for viral marketing,
but it comes with its conditions, it has 2 be a well built site with a good overall appeal and i have gotten quite alot of trafic from facebook when i have shared a link to my blog, which ten people who find it interesting might share with their friends again and so on and so on, actually one of my bloggs i would say 50% of the reccuring readers in the first place came from facebook.