Humans are social creatures. We are wired to share information and learn from each other through a process of "Social Syndication".
Our decision making process places a high degree of relevance and trust in the knowledge, opinions and feedback from those we consider to be our "social peers". It is fundamental to our survival strategy. Because our self-preservation instincts are so strong, our reliance on social validation dominates even our most trivial decisions. It is why word of mouth has always been the most effective form of advertising.
How is this Important to Online Business?
This aspect of human psychology has been a driving force behind the rise of Social Media and the proliferation of "social validation" and bookmarking sites such as Digg, Delicious, and Reddit.
Search engines are continually seeking for ways to ensure that their output is relevant to their human clients. Therefore it is only logical that they would place a significant amount of weight on data from these sites in calculating their rankings. This makes these sites extremely important to marketers. However, there is a right way and a wrong way to go about leveraging this behavior in your marketing efforts.
Dancing Elephants - Marketers and Search Engines Respond
When these sites were new, any exposure was thought to be "good exposure". It takes some time for significant exposure to happen naturally, so early marketers looked for ways to jumpstart the process. Because it is fairly obvious (and very spammy) to continually promote yourself on a single platform, savvy marketers began by blasting bookmarks on as many sites as they could find in order to make their content "appear" popular, and therefore relevant.
This process initiated a dance between marketers and search engines like Google. Just as the search engines figured out the tactics site owners had used to create the illusion of relevancy with tactics like "keyword stuffing", they have caught on to this "social self-promotion" as well. Today your site will be penalized or even removed from the rankings if the search engines find evidence that you've been "stuffing the ballot box" in your favor.
The search engines have also adapted by placing far less weight for rankings on content with multiple, single bookmarks than on content that has been ranked on only a few sites but by multiple people. There is even evidence to suggest that greater weight may be placed on comments from people with a history of bookmarking a variety of content. This would minimize the impact of "artificial buzz" coming from new accounts created by people to pump up their own volume.
The Rise Of The Tribe
Bottom line: Ten people bookmarking a single piece of your content equates to ten votes on that content and that is the kind of "social buzz" that generates SEO benefits. The same ten voting for you on 10 different social sites is even better.
So how do you accomplish this and still have time to produce content in the first place? That is the purpose of the Tribe in social syndication. Build a network of people who you can work with in a group to regularly bookmark each others' content across 10 or more different bookmarking networks. This is your Tribe. The bigger the Tribe you can create (and effectively manage), the more social buzz you can initiate and all of your rankings will benefit.
The Human Touch Is Better For Everyone
The Tribe Syndication process also has a self-policing mechanism that serves the interests of both Google and the broader online community. Your name and reputation are associated with every flag you raise on the Internet. As a result, you are less likely to promote spammy content or to ask your Tribemates to do so on your behalf. So the overall quality of content available online increases. This benefits us all.
The formula is straightforward:
Build your Tribe. Concentrate on creating content that is Educational, Enlightening and Entertaining - and relevant to your market or niche. Support the efforts of your community through social syndication. Focus on converting the meaningful traffic that will follow.The process is simple, repeatable and authentic. After all, humans are social creatures. The Internet will never change that.
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