Does the local dry cleaner really need links on his site so others might "Digg" it...?

There's a discussion I've been lurking on elsewhere about the role of Social Media as used for corporate Public Relations.

I shared my two cents: Social media, tagging, digging, furling etc. is a very cool Web 2.0-ish phenomena, and the instantaneous one-click-to-share approach is awesomely powerful. The Web equivalent of the "impulse buy."

But what can happen is in our zeal to make it easy for people to share content (or in this case, press releases) we encourage social media spam in the form of "illogical submissions" to venues that aren't really appropriate. Thus embedding quick submission links to certain venues can create a stream of inappropriate submissions.

Look at these search results:

"submit to slashdot" -site:slashdot.org
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&as_qdr=all&q=%22submit+to+slashdot%22+-site 3Aslashdot.org
Results: 54,100

Now that is a lot of potential junk just a click away from Slashdot's submission form, and if you look at http://slashdot.org/submit.pl , you can see from the pull-down menu they have a specific set of topics they want submissions to conform to.

Slashdot isn’t the perfect example. But the above search results illustrate what I would term as potentially spammy if not irresponsible use of social media quick links. I use the brilliant Socializer tool on my URLwire service, and it's an awesome tool, but I'm having to take a closer look to make sure I don't encourage the very thing I'm describing above.

Have a click right here to see how easy it is to seed your content at the various social media venues...

I'm 100% for making it easy to let the reader share a page or a link quickly and easily. It's crazy not to offer this feature on your content, but does the local dry cleaner really need links on his site so others might "Digg" it?

Eric Ward
http://www.ericward.com