Please Slow Down With The Quality Content

My feed reader (I use NetNewsWire, the Newsgator product for the Mac) has been blowing up with great posts on the nature of social networking, and my usual strategy of marking a story unread until I can post about it won't work.

So here's a round-up of stories I'd like to write, but have already been written, by authors who blog better than I do.

1) Jeremiah says there is no Field of Dreams for entrepreneurs who want to build a social networking community.

“I want to build a community”
Many an entrepreneur are seeking to create vertical communities, monetize on ad sense, or some other hook. Also, folks from large corporations are hoping to launch these communities, let customers self-support, and attempt to centralize the community in a decentralized world. For 95%, it’s not going to work.

The reason it won't work is most of those entrepreneurs aren't willing to do the work needed to make a community successful. Communities, and blogs, are not websites you can pay someone else to build while you reap the benefits. No matter what you read in Ad Age.

2) Rohit points out what people hate about social networking sites.

Unfortunately, everything he lists are the things sites use to make money and lock in users. Good comments on this post as well.

3) Techdirt says that your social networking site is scaring away advertisers.

The problem is advertisers don't want their ads showing up next to embarrassing user-generated content, but it is the content which creates the large audiences the advertisers want to get to.

This is a serious concern for many businesses, which don't want to be seen as supporting or associated with certain groups or types of content. But it's a potentially bigger problem for Facebook and other social-networking and user-generated content sites. These sites' major challenge is figuring out how to monetize the massive amounts of traffic they get, and their poor click-through rates are already one factor that holds down the rates they can charge. Couple those low rates with a dearth of quality advertisers scared off by the sites' content, and it sounds like a vicious cycle for social-networking and UGC sites.

4) Buzz Bin says astroturfing isn't always astroturfing, and explains how astroturfing came about. This is a great link if you know what astroturfing is, but as Buzz Bin points out, most people don't know, and don't care.

Yet, while we discuss these ethical issues in serious fashion (because how our profession conducts itself professionally in the blogosphere matters to us) no one on the outside world really seems to care. On a recent trip to Canada, I asked twenty people about their opinion on these matters… No one — not one — had heard a thing about any of these three blogodramas.

Personally, I think that our definitions of astroturfing have gone too far. It's like campaign finance laws. Don't regulate it - just make sure know one is hiding anything. That's the point of transparency, to own your words. My major problem with fake blogs and fake comments is that they're insulting, and the lazy marketer's way of billing large amounts for very little work.

It's hard to join a community, but effective. It's easy to leave lame comments and create fake blogs, but they are so easily sniffed out, what's the point?

But....most major companies I've spoken to in the last year have had some agency give them astroturf pitches. The problem, is these agencies don't understand social media, and are casting around for something to keep the client happy.

5) And Scoble, who has been on a Facebook promotional rant last week (or so it seemed), says that we don't need need new killer social networking apps, and that Facebook has already won. I don't think that's true, but will let time do my arguing for me.