Social Networking. Is It Just Organized SPAM?
The recent enormous growth in the phenomenon that is social networking, from public member personal information sites like Facebook and MySpace, business linking sites like ecademy and LinkedIn, content sites like Squidoo, blogs, and broadcast sites like Twitter, have made this media a hot number on marketers action lists. But has that same rapid expansion turned the whole thing into just another source of junk content?
Looking at my last 200 received tweets I see mostly blurbs from those who use it as a live diary, “just got up and made coffee — mmmmmm!”, and from those who use automated bot software to post famous quotes on the hour and half hour. In between there are the spammers who want me to sign up for yet another get-rich-quick scheme that they “really are making $thousands without doing anything!” and the social media experts flogging yet another must have tool to make the whole process even easier.
Are there any real gems in there, messages that will be useful to me or might lead me to an information source worth keeping? If there are, they seem lost in the sea of spam.
The growth of the Internet is, perhaps, the single most important factor of our time. It has affected more people in a shorter time than any other major watershed event of the modern era. It has provided the path, the vehicle, the means, for more people to reach out and touch each other, to share, to explore, to develop. But with the wonder of all this has come a price. More disinformation, more bad information, more junk content, more spam, has entered our life than ever before. Sorting through it all becomes a task in itself.
The biggest irony may be, as people strive for top position for their bit of the heap through SEO techniques like article marketing, they add their own volumes of content to the increasing noise level and, thereby, reduce their own chances of success. The resulting proverbial vicious circle is self-feeding, self-generating, constantly growing. Does it end with the Internet being overwhelmed by it’s own content? And is this blog post just another contribution to all that spam?
