You Were All Warned, and It’s Almost Upon Us Now…

I made two predictions last year about social bookmarking sites within a week of each other, that I’d like to revisit at the present time.

Sphinn: Home of the Most Comprehensive Set of SEO Tools, July 25, 2007. I predicted that spammers would eventually try to manipulate the Sphinn site.

Eventually, spammers and “social bookmark exchangers” will latch on to Sphinn as a place to perform “Sphinn exchanges” and try to manipulate it as a means of promoting their sites.

Why Social Bookmarking Sites Will Die, and Why I Don’t Use Them, July 31, 2007. I predicted that the continued manipulation of these sites will eventually lead to their downfall.

Social media exchanges and their slowly emerging successors, “social media submission services”, decrease the likelihood that sites with legitimate, organic votes on social bookmarking sites will be found. Unfortunately, the process of voting online is extremely easy to manipulate (as the examples above demonstrate), and there are those people who are so obsessed with drawing traffic to their own sites that they forget that social media sites were never intended to be used by webmasters as a submission service; social media sites were intended for users to exchange quality sites with each other in an organic fashion.

If social media sites are ever meant to succeed, they need a means of verifying organic submissions vs. submissions that had to be encouraged or prodded in any way. And that isn’t going to happen any time soon.

I have continued to make predictions of this nature, and will continue to do so, including today’s post. You have the right to be informed if you’re being unethically manipulated, and most of the manipulators won’t bother to tell you.

The reason I chose to revisit these predictions is that both of them, in a manner of speaking, are beginning to come to pass. The first such prediction is coming to pass as I expected; the second has taken a very unusual twist that I have to confess that I didn’t see coming (but will accelerate the process more rapidly than anyone is giving it credit for.)

The “Sphinn Exchanges” Prediction

I discovered that I now show up on the first page of Google on at least some datacentres for the phrase “Sphinn Exchanges”, when multiple people found the post mentioned above via searches for said phrase.

Danny Sullivan et. al, this is the initial trickle. It’s only a matter of time before the flood hits…and in order for you to stop it, you’ll be forced to alienate a large portion of your “customer base” who simply followed your egocentric vested-interest manipulative lead. I’m reminded of when Michael Jackson purchased the rights to Beatles songs in 1985 because Sir Paul McCartney told him it was a wise investment.

That sound you hear in the distance? That’s the toilet being delivered from Home Depot so that Sphinn can be flushed down.

The Social Millionaire

If you have a social site profile somewhere, this may be of interest to you since you’re about to get “sold to” in a rather insidious manner.

This is the “social media marketing” development that I will openly admit that I didn’t see coming. A young “netpreneur” named Pat Hankinson has created the The Social Millionaire, a “site” containing nothing but a bunch of text links to other sites in a random “tag cloud” fashion (by the way, am I the only one who thinks tag clouds are hideous-looking?) The idea is that Pat, via a series of social networking sites including Myspace, Facebook, Youtube (when did this become a social networking site, anyway?) and Twitter, will promote The Social Millionaire page of text links while making a whole bunch of friends that he’ll gladly spread the message of all of his advertisers to.

Pat managed to get over $1,000 worth of would-be advertisers thanks to a paid review (or so it would seem) on self-interest black heart deluxe John Chow’s weblog. If Pat saw any ROI on this investment, and I tend to subscribe to the theory that he did simply because there isn’t a reason to lie about it and say he spent $500 on an $800 revenue stream, then that’s strictly accidental. Watch for Chow to raise his rates after this glowing testimonial from Mr. Hankinson (I’m thinking around the $550-$600 range myself.)

What’s amazing is that apparently only one person thought to tell Pat the truth in the comments in the JohnChow.com blog post:

What a piece of crap.

Hint to Pat Hankinson: If you want to become an online mogul, build something that is at least interesting if you can’t come up with a few ideas that have some semblance of originality. Oh, and stop trying to feed off of other people’s presumed stupidity. In the end, you are the only one that looks stupid.

For those unaware of what the commenter is referring to, there was a similar site set up a while back called MillionDollarHomepage.com whereby the owner sold his site in “pixel blocks” to try and raise $1,000,000.

Pat, your idea isn’t entrepreneurial.
It isn’t useful (there’s no content or anything of real substance to support it).
It isn’t ethical (social sites weren’t meant for this).
It’s just a contemporary adaptation of a link farm, spread via social media sites because they’re not as sophisticated as search engines at detecting spam and spammers. And the real victims are people who use social media sites legitimately (a percentage that seems to be dwindling with each passing day as the novelty wears off and the spammers set in).

Or, to put it bluntly, this is crap. Steaming, stinking, festering, putrid, overwhelming, nauseating crap.

The only good thing about all of this is that Pat probably won’t make a million dollars off of his idea. He’ll be lucky if he gets to $10,000 (although he’ll manage to expose a lot of spammers in the process without meaning to). He made the mistake of telling people such as those who would comment on John Chow’s blog…the same vested-interest spammers who would probably think to themselves, “wow! What a great idea! And it’s so easy to set up too! It takes almost no effort at all, just like writing the lyrics to a Britney Spears song!” The copycats will come, and they’ll come in spades.

Congratulations, Pat Hankinson. You have singlehandedly put into place the process of devaluing Fadbook and other such sites. Not only that, but you’ll eventually be the one responsible for turning them into modern-day link farms.

If you’re on one of these sites, you may want to yank your profile off…unless you like toboggan rides down steep hills. The same thing goes for Sphinn, although it wasn’t much to begin with.

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