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May. 25, 2007 at 11:11am Eastern by Danny Sullivan
MyBlogLog Brands All Social Media Optimizers As Schmoes
So MyBlogLog has tagging. Yawn. Then I saw Andy Beal highlighted this part of MyBlogLog's post about the new feature
Spam - If you think someone is spamming you, tag it out loud! Internally, we like to call a user who games the system a SchMOe (Social Media Optimizer).
Internally, you know, I like to call anyone who stereotypes an entire industry by the actions of a small number within it kind of stupid.
Fair enough to ask anyone seeing MyBlogLog spam to tag that with the word spam. But calling an entire industry a bunch of spammers? Not smart, frankly, when some of those in that industry also have communities that thrive on MyBlogLog. Oh, and not smart when MyBlogLog is just one of many Yahoo properties that effectively sit at the top of the social media optimization food chain by optimizing the "social" to drive everything to them.
I'd write more, but I have to go delete some of the spam that so easily shows up in our Search Engine Land community on MyBlogLog because there remains no way to allow messages to sit in moderation and the "Report Spam" feature causes an email to be sent to MyBlogLog customer service rather than yanking that user out and putting them in a queue for review.
No, instead I get to manually "hide" members every week, when I remember to go in and play police force because MyBlogLog doesn't provide the basic tools it could -- and should -- provide.
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By Danny Sullivan
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Reader Comments
How innovative of them. Maybe next they'll add instant messaging or even CHAT! Oh well, they got their money out of Yahoo!, more power to them.
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There's no industry singled out... Unless you are saying all people who are involved in this space are spammers. I am a social media junkie and I don't attempt to spam other users or write software designed to make my avatar show up on sites I don't visit.
Robyn, I'm confused. It's your post on MyBlogLog saying that internally, you call people who spam MyBlogLog "shmoes" for social media optimizers.
To me, a social media optimizer or social media marketer is someone who understands who social media sites operate and specializes in generating traffic from them. That can be as innocent as advising clients that there's this thing called MyBlogLog, which a community, and that if you use the widget, you might pickup traffic from MyBlogLog. That's SMO or SMM and all something I think you'd perfectly agree with. But some SMOs might go to extremes, do spamming as happens with SEO, but also as with SEO, not all SEOs are spammers.
Honestly, if spams an issue for MyBlogLog, make it so that we can set our communities not to show messages unless we allow them through moderation. That'll cut it down far more than tagging will.
Really? Seems they specifically singled out "a user who games the system" rather than labeling an entire industry.
Then again, I'm not sure it's possible to be an SMO without engaging in gaming (unlike pure-white SEO) so maybe you're right about the "entire industry" but they are right for calling them schmoes.