In my point of view, all this hullabaloo over black hat and white hat SEO practices should not be here if all Internet entrepreneurs learned how to be honest, creative and decisive in all of their marketing activities.

Honesty tales away the doubt from other SEO practitioners and the dreaded black hat label. Creativity can boost your blog’s or website’s prominence by almost 50 percent and, finally, decisiveness is the key to make it all happen.

Two lessons from this:
1. Don’t edit in WordPress
2. Tell it like it is in the first place.

I think you are right that the views of social media/marketing/PR folks probably don’t resonate with some SEOs. Which is odd to me because social media has a lot to do with SEO, lead generation, online sales, brand building and community (or, maybe that’s just my integrated marketing viewpoint). As I have always said, it comes down to effective vs. ineffective and we all have different backgrounds that affect the direction we head in first.

The bulk of the session then involved you and Dave making cases for youR respective views on social media. If you are stating that your comments, perspective and approach during the panel had nothing to do with your interactions with him at SESNY, so be it. That is not how it seemed as a co-panelist and not how Dave Snyder said he was approachng the session.

I agree that you provided your views on social media. As I stated in that haggis of a post on 10e20, I think a PR perspective may not resonate as well with a SEO audience focused on lead generation and online sales vs brand building and community.

Thanks,
Beth

“I have all the respect in the world for Beth Harte and Dave Snyder and for a while I wondered if they should have been sitting in front of a therapist instead of a conference audience to work out their issues from SES New York.”

I am really not quite sure what your comment means… Perhaps you can shed some light on it?

I barely know Dave Snyder, I’ve only had the pleasure of meeting him twice. As for “issues” at SES NYC, again, I am not quite sure what that means. He made a comment on his panel, I asked a question about his comment and he answered it.

On this particular SES panel in San Jose, I was asked to be on the panel to discuss my thoughts on social media and that’s what I did.

Thanks,
Beth

“As a marketer, I think it’s essential to test things on your own sites and to “push to see what pushes back” in many areas, to see what the real boundaries are. No one gains a competitive advantage by unquestioningly following “the rules”.”

This is true on so many levels other then social marketing, but in regards to social marketing I think you need to take into account the vertical that you are testing. People are going to react differently to video games then they do to health care reform. How do you propose running these tests? Should testing be done with test sites within each vertical? I can see where that would be a problem for an agencies.

Running your own sites or a small network (as is common in the SEO and affiliate world) provides ample opportunity for testing. For agencies, the issue is funding such experiments.

However, I agree there should be data or at least something concrete to support claims.

Not sure I would want to hire a consultant that can’t point out some of the experiments that they’ve run in the past to back up their beliefs.

Sure, using black hat methods for testing is fine. However, developing a black hat script and selling it for use is where things get ugly. Once sold (as a trick or a get-around)…too many people use it as a mainstream method.

Let’s talk about Twitter in particular.

There are several services out there (scripts) which allow you to send various posts with the @whatevernamehere on a massive level in an attempt for people to notice that they are being mentioned…and ultimately to get more followers.

Because Twitter allows you to show up in any valid account if you @ them….they don’t need to be following you to get the message in their personal time line. I’m not talking your home page time line, I’m talking about the time line you check most often…which is your @yourname timeline (people mentioning you).

People generally do NOT use this responsibly and unfortunately (for now) it’s working.

I think you could use the service (sparingly) to test the effectiveness but lets face it. People won’t use it sparingly. Just look at the profiles of people using the script the next time you get a message like this:

“Good people: @example1 @example2 @example3 @example4 check out http://whateverSpam.com”

When you get a message like this, just check their profile to make sure they are using a script. A sure sign that they are using a script is that their entire time line will have nothing but these messages. If that’s the case, do yourself a favor and block those users.

Don’t block them right away because sometimes it’s just a message or two that they do that in. In this case, in my own opinion, that’s quite ok. They may be using “black hat” software or maybe they are just doing it manually but at least you know they are doing it responsibly. Maybe they are even using the method to “test” rather than exploit.

Short answer to your post….

“Blackhat” fine for testing. Fine for developing methods to get yourself out there but not fine if you use the methods exclusively and without caution.