No doubt social media is being plagued by spam bots. If there is traffic to be had, people will do what it takes to get their piece of the pie.

Right now everybody's talking about a "marketing strategy for Twitter". Why can't Twitter just be Twitter? Why do you have to build/market your brand with it?

I have yet to play much on Twitter...mostly use it for low level public relations junk. But even without me doing anything on it I still have hundreds of people subscribed to my Twitter account. That means hundreds of connected people *may* spread my best ideas if I post them there...it is just another way to help saturate the market.

Not having been around the search atmosphere for long enough to know.. I know that your recommendation is generally to generate stellar content, push it a little bit (essentially just to get it "out there"), and get links that way.

But, should we take advantage of some of these not-so-white-hat tactics in the short term to get the number of links up there?

Should we do something like take a video of our physical products and post them on YouTube (which I happen to think is a good idea for other reasons...)? Should we link to our sites from our LinkedIn profiles?

Or should we just walk the higher path? :)

~NickB

No need for the higher path until you are already a market leader. If you have no brand you have little to risk by being a bit aggressive.

I definitely think the idea of how to videos on YouTube and product feature videos on YouTube (as well as other social media pushing) are all worth doing, especially if you are new to the game.

But they should only be one piece of the overall strategy.

I think marketing on social media sites needs to be subtle in order to be effective (e.g conversation/interactive marketing).

There is no value in creating a facebook/twitter/myspace page for your product/organization if there is no substance behind it.

the value in social marketing lies in the user's ability to truly speak the consumer's language. there is no value in creating different profiles, if your inability to speak the lingo is evident. great read, it places an emphasis on speaking the vertical versus having no friends on your profile page.