Are you familiar with social media spammers? They never contribute to community, they just hundreds groups, invite everyone to be a friend, and send messages like: “Vote for me and I’ll vote for you”.

Social spammer is always use other members in their own interest and the only thing they want from you is to click their link. Most of them don’t have real profile, they have no avatar or they use their company logo, website link on spammer profile looks like list of keywords.

Social spammers are headache not only for popular networks like Digg or MyBlogLog. Less popular sites like SpicyPage, Bizzlo, or Zimbio are also receive spam submissions and messages. People spam social media not only for traffic, but also to increase link popularity and search engine rankings. Many spammers gave up to terrorize free directories and blog comment fields because most of them require human approval. Social media sites approve links and deliver comments automatically hoping that regular users will block it by clicking “spam” button.

  As shown above, these spammers used 2 accounts to submit Viagra spam on Digg and vote for it. All links are came from the same user and the same domain, in comment field they submitted information about prices and extra links to order. We count at least 740 Viagra links which still bookmarked on Digg.

MyBlogLog spam comments for ShoeMoney:

Shoemaker is the one who got 20 public comments in past month (Shoemaker and God only knows how many private comments arrived), 15 of them are spam. Now I am not surprised why Jeremy hasn’t checked his profile since last June.

To decrease amount of spam, owners of social networks have to make hard decisions. Here some changes which was made recently by different social sites:

• Delicious added “nofollow” tags for all submissions.
• MyBlogLog doesn’t allow to join more than 15 groups in 1 day.
• Sphinn gives all new members limited access for 7 days.
• Reddit set up 5 minutes waiting time between submissions.
• Zimbio allow to post only in 1 group.

 Digg, Delicious, and MyBlogLog already received best compliments from webmasters and web searchers. In less than 3 year they got millions daily visitors and billions daily page views. This success created tons of copycat networks which are trying to cover some niche to get at least some visibility.

 Through my friend bookmark on Digg i found another social network called Zimbio. in the beginning i was little sceptical and it took me 2 weeks to come back and register. I created my profile really fast and forget that i ever visited this site.

 In less than a week my Google Webmasters account indexed every link to every article which was pinged by Zimbio through RSS feed. Typing my website name Google and MSN placed Zimbio account right under my site on position #2. Checking Google Analytics i found that i received some clicks from Zimbio as well.

 It was hard to ignore fact that Zimbio improved my website link popularity, search engine rankings, gave me deep links to my posts, and improved my traffic a little. It mean that i finally found another good social site which an improve web visibility and social presence.

 Good features from Zimbio:

•  Zimbio slogan “Where stories take shape”.
•  After blog ping it allow to sent posts directly to web communities who interested.
•  ”Kudos” - ranking system on Zimbio which remind me Diggs.
•  Every member can join or create Wikizines (topics).
•  Allow to create polls.
•  Allow to create rich profiles.
•  Browser buttons available.
•  Messaging with other members.
•  High chance to be featured by group or administrator.
•  Ability to rebuild content from RSS feed in to user friendly summary.
•  ”Promote blog” feature automatically send new article to members with the same interest. 

 Zimbio is a good example how professional team looked on situation in social media and created one network which allow to do everything. It took best things from Digg, Delicious, Furl, Simpy, EzineArticles… 

Zimbio Founder: 

Tony Mamone (Palo Alto, USA)

 Ways to submit content on Zimbio:

1.  Ping RSS feeds.
2.  Bookmark link.
3.  Bookmark link using browser.
4.  Write simple story / article.
5.  Create poll.

 Zimbio just one year online and their traffic grow on a daily basis (check Zimbio Alexa Rank).  

   Building backlinks and targeting keywords to rank high on search engines is not enough to build traffic for a website. With newest web technologies, search engine marketing and general search engine optimization services became less productive than it used to be. Using Web 2.0 social services, content publisher can spread information within a seconds reaching only targeted audience. Today it doesn’t matter how long it takes for search engine to find and index new document.

  Posting information online, every publisher are interested to spread the world with idea, share information, provide service, sell product etc… There are several features and services which can deliver your information to audience instantly:

• RSS feeds, XML syndication will deliver your news to subscribers, social networks, feed readers, news sites. General users of Web 2.0 social networks with certain interests create groups where they share information, subscribe to feeds, bookmark, receive e-mails from each other with lates news updates.
• Trackback - automatic service which inform website owners that you made quote, wrote, gave feedback to their resource. Almost immediately another webmaster or partner know that you featured his online resource.
• Tagging. Helps social networks and search engines what your site / blog. Through networks like Technorati people pick tags they interested and subscribe for new information which appear. Information about your site could be delivered through user accounts or e-mail notifications.
• Social bookmarking. 10 years ago only media companies collecting statistic was interested what people bookmark. Today regular people bookmark links through social networks and after this share and exchange this links with others. Page with quality content could reach hundreds and even millions people with interest in certain field. Through “word of mouth” product, service, or idea could reach every person who are interested in this service.

 There are still many sceptics who belive that active usage of social media are profitable only for rock bands, movie makers, and companies who sell supplies for iPod accessories. Not true, if you log in on FaceBook or MySpace and make search of people who are older than 25, 40, or even 80 years old you will be quite surprised. There are hundered millions active users of social networks with different education, hobbies, interests.

  Benefit of social optimization:

• Fastest way to spread information, press release, idea.
• Easy way to reach targeted audience.
• Ability to turn on “word of mouth”.
• Benefit for traffic and web recognition.
• Independence from search engine rankings.

  What should be done to optimize old website with Web 2.0 social media?

 It is always depend on how old your website and what type of software you use to build pages. Social bookmarking is easy process which requie to copy and paste URL. You can submit on Digg or Delicious old HTML documents as well as new dynamic documents. If you use old software which doesn’t provide RSS / XML feeds, trackbacks, pings, comment notifications, tagging etc you can update your software, open blog or news folder, or hire someone who will rebuild your site transferring content to newest pages which will allow you to use latest technology features.