Are You Guilty of Me2Me Marketing?

The blogosphere makes virtually everyone a media maker now. If you've got something to say, you have easy access to publishing to a few or many people.

Lots of people and firms are making the time commitment to keep their blogs fresh. This helps keep a site high in SEO rankings and also attracts more attention to a site because content is being published more often to it. When you publish more often, the crawlers from search engines tend to visit more frequently because they're after fresh content to serve up in their search results.

Some large firms dedicate certain staffers to publish regularly to the company blog. If you can staff it and you can publish good quality stuff on a regular and frequent basis, go for it. But if you are a one-man show and all you do is run around from blog to blog posting and trading links back and forth between blogs, technically you should come up higher in search results, yes, but it will also become readily apparent that you have way too much time on your hands. I call this "Me2Me Marketing" (first usage).

In the same vein, have you ever done a vanity search on yourself? Of course you have, and should every so often. Be sure that you are also looking up your competitors just as frequently. Then at least you can tell yourself that you are doing competitive analysis and not just admiring your own online reflection.

In short, I define Me2Me Marketing as spending too much time marketing to yourself and your peers rather than to your real prospects.

While this is a very blatant form of Me2Me Marketing, there's also a discreet, if not underhanded, version of Me2Me Marketing as well...

Underhanded Me2Me Marketing

I have seen creepy marketing blogs out there. While researching for sites to review in Web Digest For Marketers, one of my researchers came across an Internet marketing blog that gave tips rich with marketing keywords (geared for the consumption of those search engine crawlers, no doubt). We were considering this blog for a review in Web Digest For Marketers. However, while this particular blog was written in the first person, there was no name or face easily associated with it. When we checked on who owned the domain of the blog site, it became came clear that it was set up on a separate domain and used to help improve the search engine ranking of the parent company, which happened to be, yes, an Internet marketing company. We shouldn't have to sleuth around like that to find out what's going on.

I understand technically why the firm did what they, but they should have been transparent about it. Instead it only served to raise my suspicions about that parent company.

Many of these blog gambits are temporary. The search engines are smart and getting smarter all the time. They will eventually find out the Me2Me marketers and discount or even banish the sneaky ones.

Don't get me wrong. There's a certain amount of self-promotion, a good amount, that is downright healthy for one's career and company. I am the first to admit this. But if you take it too far, I think it can backfire and cause lost opportunities in many ways that one will never realize.