Sleazy Linkbaits

This was easily the most entertaining session... "Auditing Sleazy Linkbait, a Social Media Marketing Discussion" with 3 great panelists.

Dawn Foster of Fast Wonder had some excellent material on how companies can participate in online social media without being sleazy. She went over why a company should participate in social media, some guiding principles and some guidelines. She also mentioned my friend Gillian at Keen, who I believe hired Dawn as a blogging and social media consultant. You can check out Dawn's slides on her blog.

Next up was Neil Patel. His material and delivery reminded me of Ze Frank's RailsConf keynote a few years ago, though I think Neil dropped more F-bombs than Ze. Neil is the owner of Crazy Egg, one of the coolest, if not the metric visualization tools available. I'm not a marketer, and so I hadn't heard of some of Neil's ideas, like giving out bags of crap, branding gimmicks, etc. And while he went a bit far on some of his techniques in terms of ethics, scaled back a bit they were all decent ideas. The interesting part was the crowd's reaction. A gentleman sitting behind me railed on Neil for having unethical and despicable business tactics and for not maintaining a brand's image. Whether I agree or disagree is of no value, yet I felt the man didn't quite understand that Neil was acting the part, and acting well.

Lastly was Matthew Inman who created the online dating site Mingle. He talked about his linkbait methods like zany quizzes and joke sites such as How Many 90 Year Olds Could You Take in a Fight? and zombieharmony.com (35 and no thanks.) A few tips of his were to keep it simple, appeal to a sense of ability, and don't make things look commercial at the beginning. His design work is really nice, as can be seen on 10 reasons it would rule to date a Unicorn

Who comes up with this stuff?