23
Mar
maximize your roi with del.icio.us spam
did i say spam? sorry, i meant trusted, targeted marketing messages delivered automatically.
i love delicious. if pressed, i'd say it's my favorite website. everyone knows i evangelize it. that being said…
gaming delicious popular
delicious/popular is exceptionally easy to game. after just a measly 10 or so posts, any url can make it to the list. PR8 site whose domain has 100 million backlinks. yeah i know they are nofollowed but its naive to say that nofollow will always have meaning in all contexts
at any rate, there's no doubt it gets a lot of traffic, and its content is distributed far and wide to sites like popurls.com. not to mention the bloodhounds of the social bookmark surfing scene check it regularly, looking to find something that hasn't yet made it to reddit or whatever. a url's appearance on del/pop is an easy way to see a few thousand visits.
del/pop has a lot of reach. but reach isn't necessarily what the smart online marketer is after.
delicious allows users to drill down to another level - where you can discover popular links by topic. i love popular/asp.net, for example. i will actually check the del/pop drill down before i check google for a lot of topical things i am interested in. for this post: spam and delicious. when i was buying my house: realestate. now that i am shopping for a grill: grilling. grilling??!
i have to assume i'm not the only person trusting subtopics in delicious popular. it's a wonderful resource for people, very trustworthy and highly targeted.
and useful for publicizing websites. one of many examples: speaking of real estate i unintentionally managed to get one of my lndngtree affiliate sites to del.icio.us/popular/realestate and noticed a difference.
it's not driving a lot of traffic but it's driving trusted, targeted, gather-the-paperwork-lets-fill-out-a-loan-app traffic.
there's an interesting thing about these subtopic popular pages too: it's much easier to get links there and they stick much longer.
the threshold for pop/realestate seems to be 6 recent posts, as opposed to 10 or 11 on del/pop. on scrapbooking it's 6. ditto for banking, camcorder and wii. that's 40% easier!
my little realestate site stuck around for days. days! the "recently" metric is much more forgiving for the subtopics.
imagine the results of your large-scale intentional campaign. seeding delicious with the medium-term goal of real and valuable presence on the popular subtopics.
delicious network spam
anyway, i started thinking about delicious spam because my delicious network has been getting spammed. i checked my network today and 
noticed an interesting fan: delicious_mailman. that just looks fake and i don't know them. after checking it out, indeed, spam for some hypnosis garbage.
delicious_mailman's tactics are not effective. mostly because it's so obvious that this is spam.
but here's how i could take this tactic and radically improve it .. turning it into "ego spam" or "flatter spam" ..
- flatter
"wow! i have a new fan! someone likes my links, i wonder what their links are!
make the fake fan a real (looking) user. - trust & target
"wow, this person who likes me and has links like mine also has a lot of links to hypnosis, nlp and other self-help topics"
seed the fake fan with plenty of real bookmarks AND your spam bookmarks. DON'T spam everyone on delicious. separate and automate. inject, don't interrupt.
- maintain
"lemme check my network, i love it when fakefan posts new stuff"
it isn't hard to maintain bookmarks automatically. just take them from a real, authority user and automate it. but every third or fifth one can be a spam bookmark.
it's the same for myspace, stumbleupon, stylehive etc.
what are some other tips for using social sites to send trusted, targeted marketing messages?