Before I get started, let’s get two things straight.
- I’m not saying you shouldn’t offer to fairly compensate the people whose advice you’re seeking. Just the other day I requested that a well-known social media personality help me think through a tough scenario for another party, and I demanded that said party kick in the dough to compensate this person for their trouble.Effective advice? Is worth the price. In this article I’m saying referring specifically to Votes.
- Personally?I will take a look at just about anything submitted to me in the way that I prefer. Like anyone who gets a lot of incoming requests, I have a completely un-straightforward, quirky, but extremely effective way of organizing incoming information so that the right thing gets my attention at the right time, which I’ll talk about later.
Okay, so now that we’re on the same page…
Just in case you’re a newbie to social media.
Do Not.
Ever. Offer to buy a vote from Anyone who contributes to social news sites.
I know, if you’re a regular reader here, you might feel like this doesn’t need to be said. Just remember that if you leave the building where you are now and ask the first ten people you find what a social news site is, they may not know. In other words, this isn’t obvious to everyone. If it is to you – Tell Others. Be blunt.
So this is how it came up.
The other day I was in the… path … of a *wink-wink* chat message of a not-at-all-well-known marketer to someone who gets many stories to popularity on a regular basis. They offered money for as many votes as that person could help them get, quite plainly and in view of all those gathered. The solicited party left the call immediately. I was later asked why this person was so “sensitive”.
Maybe because they could get banned from the site they helped build content for by accepting your offer.
Perhaps it’s just against their personal code.
Or it could be that their more than two brain cells told them that buying and selling votes in a community where the unbiased community opinion is supposed to rule the day just doesn’t make any sense!
That’s right – I said it. Offering to buy a vote is flat-out dumb, besides being wrong. It shows that the person requesting it doesn’t understand how this world works. These news stories are being promoted because that’s what that community would most like to see. Your job is to see how your story might fit into that paper, just like it would be for traditional print media.
Would you submit your story about what to look for in the perfect pair of ballerina slippers to Sports Illustrated? Not if you’re not an idiot. You wouldn’t waste thousands of dollars promoting to an audience that mostly couldn’t give a crap. It’s the wrong demographic.
Just because social media publicty is free doesn’t mean the same rules of publicity don’t apply. Rules like, if you have to pay people to say how cool you are, you’re automatically not cool.
Rallying your network, friends and fans around your cause is one thing. Offering to pay them to support you isn’t really support, is it?
