MyBlogLog - People Who Live in Glass Houses…
So according to MyBlogLog social media optimizers are spammers.
Tonight they introduced tagging and a bunch of related features, one of them being a way to tag spammers…
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). Tag anyone who spams you with the term schmoe.
That’s a pretty low-blow for those of us social media marketers that DO NOT spam. I don’t understand why they couldn’t just use the word ’spammer’ as the actual tag instead of giving us another black eye. It’s hard enough distancing ourselves from the word ’spam’ as it is.
People that spam social media are not social media optimizers, they are spammers, simple as that.
The ironic thing is MyBlogLog recently hired their own community manager, which is somewhat equivalent to a social media marketer.
Cameron Olthuis is the Founder of
Wow, that’s a bunch of junk but not entirely unexpected. As with SEOs, it is going to be pretty hard for those engaging in “white hat” SMO/SMM to draw distinction with their “black hat” cousins.
It’s getting harder and harder to stick with MyBlogLog. Here’s the thing, us SchMOes are the ones who were pushing them to everyone we knew, writing about them and propelled them to success. It really seems like they need Scott Rafer back ….
I was waiting til our redesign was finished before taking them off, but it was always part of the plan. They will be off my blog by the weekend. That is stupid, I bet well over half of their first users and promoters were SchMOes.
Not true Cameron. We called people who spam and game the system spammers. These people ‘optimize’ social media sites by writing software to make themselves appear on sites’ widgets that they don’t visit, they create hundreds of accounts and they send automated messages to everyone on the new member pages. Those are the only people we called spammers.
I’m an Social Networker (not a schmoe) so I would never sign off on calling SEOs or SEMs spammers. MyBlogLog loves social networkers, heck we’d be nowhere if people didn’t like to connect! Spammers suck, but that is NO reflection on SEOs/SEMs who play by the rules and build communities the same way others do, by writing great content and making great friends, and lots and lots of networking.
Robyn - Nice attempt to justify it. Usually the word ‘optimize’ is used in association with improving things. When someone writes software to spam a system they are not optimizing anything, they are spamming it. Its very simple.
The people who optimize for social media don’t spam. They take something already in existence and refine that to improve it so that it’s optimal for social media sites.
Bottom line is that you have pissed off a lot of people by associating spammers with them. I know I haven’t been the only person who has blogged that this didn’t sit right with them.
My suggestion; if you care - admit that you guys were wrong, apologize and then change the tag to something not associated with a group of non-spamming people.