Many social media destinations such as social news, social search, social bookmarking and wiki’s generally have a dim view of self promotion. I personally think if the submissions are of good quality, beneficial or are potentially interesting to others, they should be submitted, regardless of who wrote them.
If the item is informational or helpful rather than being an obvious sales pitch why should there be a problem? Many bloggers and small site owners often have limited resources to get visibility for the knowledge they want to share with others. Social media is about sharing, promoting, discussing information, knowledge and even at times entertaining. Who cares if the item submitted is the author or a random surfer that happened upon the item? What matters is that interesting, entertaining, original content gets in front of those that are interested in it. After all, isn’t that what “sharing” with “friends” is all about?
Imagine if you will an author or content creator who is writing great material that has good value, but no one is reading it. Why is no one reading it? Possibly no one thinks of submitting the item to social media sites. Since several of the popular social media sites often penalize self-submissions it can be quite difficult to get in front of readers. What a conundrum this is for up and coming authors wanting to share knowledge, expertise and entertainment with others.
I think the sites that have a disdain for self-promotion are only limiting themselves in terms of accepting quality user generated content. However, there are popular sites that embrace the self-authored submissions and these sites are flourishing. It’s too bad that there are social media sites that are so shortsighted that they penalize authors for promoting their own content.
One of the worst offenders of punishing self promoted items is Newsvine. You can bet if you submit an item and you are the author you can expect to get lambasted by self appointed (user) censors. By contrast Mixx embrace users and their submissions (as long as it isn’t pure commercial or spam). Anyone want to take a bet that Mixx becomes more popular than Newsvine, or possibly already has because of the way Mixx encourages its users? I did a quick check on Alexa.com and Compete.com. I ran a query including Mixx and Newsvine. From what I see on the graph below is that Mixx has in less than six months become as popular as Newsvine, and it appears that Mixx is on its way to becoming more popular as a social news destination than Newsvine. I do believe that Mixx’s overall philosophy and encouragement of its users are one of the reasons for its rapid popularity. Mixx encourages quality submissions regardless of who submitted or created the content.
Don’t get me wrong, pure commercial submissions, affiliate articles and useless spam submissions need to be policed. These types of submissions have no place on social media, and for the most part the site’s community will police these types of submissions. I dislike seeing Hubpage type article submissions, Squidoo pages and useless generic articles that can be found in various incarnations all over the Internet posted on social media sites. I generally skip over them myself as I imagine many others do the same thing, submitters of such content will eventually give up once they see that these types of submissions don’t garner much attention. At least that’s my hope.
What matters to me is quality. I don’t care who wrote it or who submitted it. I am a knowledge and entertainment junkie and want to learn as much as I can about things that interest me. If the author wants to submit his own work, far be it for me to complain. If the submission interests me, I will read it, comment on it and quite possibly promote it on my blog or on one of my online publications.
Just because an author doesn’t write for mainstream media such as the New York Times, Time, USA Today, c|net or other popular news media doesn’t mean that what they have to share is of less value. So why is self-promotion seen as a bad thing? I think there is a misnomer between self-promotional items and commercial junk submissions. As with anything self-promoted content can be good or poor quality, I say leave it up to the submitters peers to decide rather than the site owners or a small group of self-righteous, self appointed content censors (instaBury Diggers at Digg).
I can’t wrap my head around why some social media sites have such a dim view on much of the self-promoted submissions. I think those that do are severely limiting (and effectively censoring) what their visitors can read. Again, I am not talking about commercial sales pitches or spammy content submissions, but good quality content submitted by the author directly.
Even MyBlogLog has the right idea regarding self-promotion, they encourage it as a matter of fact and encourage you to share it. I see sites such as MyBlogLog becoming extremely popular in time. They have the right idea regarding social media.
A word of advice to social media site owners that enforce draconian rules against self-promotion: Lighten up a bit and you will see an increase in submissions and visitor traffic. If the submissions are of good quality, it should not matter who submits them. Ultimately, it is up to your user community to decide (within reason) what should be promoted or “voted up” or not.
Related
Social Media is about subtle marketing
Mixx.com
Newsvine.com
MyBlogLog
Alexa.com
Compete.com