Search Marketing Centre

What is Ethical Social Media Marketing?

The first afternoon presentation on the Social Media track at Search Media Expo Sydney was given by Rand Fiskin, CEO of SEOmoz.


  Some do’s and don’ts of social media marketing:

  • Don’t break the law: this one is pretty simple, if it is against the law then it is unethical
  • Don’t hurt people or organisations: this one is a little more complex and can be broken down into a few categories:
    • Hacking
    • Malware
    • Misdirection
    • Email Fraud
    • Email Spam
  • Anonymity: it is ok for people to keep the identities private from the worlds eye
  • Omitting Relationships: not giving all the details to relationships between people or organisations is ethical

He believes that an often overlooked tenet of social media marketing is providing value for clients. The role of a social media marketer is to:
  • Promote good content - The decision of good or bad content is to come from the social media bubble
  • Promote to an audience that can spread the content
  • Participate in social networking - Large brands are often scared about negative feed back

The social media professionals:
  • stay under the radar, meaning that the majority of the time when a piece of content is being promoted the person(s) responsible will not be named or known to the general audience
  • Build diverse networks, such they will have links to hundreds or even thousands of people, but not directly to each and everyone.
  • Rely on strength of content, meaning they let the content do all the ‘talking’ and just send to key people to then pass it on.

Some examples of good social media campaigns:
  • Sean Tavis: Sean Tavis used social media to boost his political campaign. He created a comic that drew people in and then asked them to make a small donation to his efforts. The tag line for the comic: “Running for office: Its like a flame war with a forum troll, but with an eventual winner”
  • Nike: Nike had picked up a video on YouTube that showed a pro soccer player being ‘nutmegged’ by an amateur. This got placed into their TV ad and was a widespread success. According to Rand 10 years ago Nike would never use a YouTube video for promotion
  • Baby Name Wizard: Created a great application that got them 100’s of inbound links within a short period of time

10 tips of Social Media Marketing:
  1. Build simple stuff
  2. Make it look authentic
  3. Expect ¾ of viral efforts to fail
  4. Don’t let too many cooks into the kitchen
  5. Funny SELLS!!!
  6. Funny is hard > interesting is easy
  7. Consider micro sites
  8. Hire professional pushers
  9. DO NO HELP THEM
  10. Use social media to accomplish business goals

Happy Hunting Space Cowboy