Small Business Marketing

Recently I found an interesting article discussing the pitfalls of buying an audience and their potential  conversion rates and immediately thought about The Tragedy of the Commons. The analogy applies on many levels for B2B and B2C marketing out on the internet.

Communities like Facebook or LinkedIn are currently being hit by this, despite the spam being fairly obvious to spot, it is still cluttering up the networks. It’s debasing the currency we use to evaluate worth (such as follower counts, or active postings).

Think of it like air pollution, air is a common commodity and in many countries (even first world) polluting the air is not considered a crime. The common commodity of fresh non-toxic air is destroyed by an individual company’s short-term gain. The same analogy should be used for the internet with spammers and marketers looking to exploit and manipulate the platforms for their own gain.

Buy buying an audience on Facebook or Twitter it will look like you’ve got a solid following. You will look credible for a few seconds. But when you see that the audience you have is either not engaging with your content or trying to pitch their own, the whole ruse is blown.

All this spam selling is a false market much like the internet boom of 1999-2000 where investors were throwing money at a false reality built on poorly thought out concepts. After the Dot Com crash the internet still survived, it didn’t end when the bubble burst. The internet was and still is a world wide phenomena that changes the way you communicate to a wider audience and still exists despite the Dot Com crash. Social Networking is also a world changing phenomena and will exist despite the business plans of how they are being utilised being wrong.

This spamming and market fixing is filling up the space on the social networking platforms. And they will eventually break these platforms by users being fed up with all the BS and clutter. Once they become too much, people will simply migrate to a new platform because new ones are emerging all the time and becoming popular because of their lack of spam. Sure, once they get popular enough the spam will start up again and the whole cycle will continue.

I’m creating some communities like this, and am doing them inside LinkedIn. Setting up solid connections with real people and with real expertise so when a new platform emerges and current ones become too cluttered to be effective, I’ll be able to migrate not just myself, but also all my connections across without hassle.