I first learned about Michelle MacPhearson’s Social Media Daily from a colleague on facebook who naturally thought it was going to be a wonderful resource on social media – guess again.

Michele MacPhearson has created a pdf that will not overwhelm many new to marketing on the Internet but also demonstrates why many soical media communities may come to feel it would be better if Internet marketers didnt visit them and why some of them may eventually boot out known marketers. Frankly, if this happens, I can’t say thtat I’ll blame them, or that they won’t be better off for having done it.

MacPhearson’s document is a great example of the attitude displayed by many that communities like digg and StumblUpon exist to be exploited for their potential backlinks and possible traffic. I say possible because the type of abuse MacPhearson advocates will ultimately lead to fewer visitors from these sites than you might otherwise have gotten from them.

How does MacPhearson deonstrate this exploitive attitutde? She begins by telling readers that before they “get stated with social media web site promotion you need to understand a few principals.” Personally, her use of principles strikes me as ironic given that her idea of the principles she needs readers to understand are backlinks, anchor text and nofollow tags. Not a word about what it means to be social, to engage in a community, nothing about giving back, putting in time to learn the community norms, or any other asspect of being a good community member. And why should she, after all in her opinion and the opinons of many IM types these communities exist to give backlinks – period.

This isn’t to suggest that there is anything wrong with social media marketing. What’s wrong is the way so many IM types go about it. And since MacPhearson’s document is clearly targeted at novices and has had thousands of downloads there are many more who are being indocternated with this view.

Unfortunately for newcomers who read the document they may not even realize that there’s a difference between bookmarking a page in StumbleUpon and submitting a story to digg and MacPhearson does nothing to enlighten them on these crucial aspects.

If you’re going to use MacPhearson’s document I urge you to try and be a part of the solution by becoming a community member before slamming your website links around.

Update: 

I hadn’t ever even heard of Michelle before a few days ago, so I’d never read her blog.  But in light of the above I found this post http://blog.michellemacphearson.com/social-media-marketing-and-spam-concerns/

interesting.  It would seem that to MacPhearson there’s no such thing as spam when it comes to SMM.  I assure you there is.  However, if you read down her post a guy named Justin Palmer makes a great point about what is and isn’t spam.

I think it all comes down to whether or not there is a meaningful contribution to the community. I too think it can be relative to the social networking site. For example, posting links to your jewelry store on Digg would probably be considered spam, while creating a Squidoo lens about your jewelry would not.