i'm really kinda curious who's doing, like, SEO for midwestern landscaping companies and such on here.
like how does _that_ sales pitch go, exactly?
"yeah, listen, we've added a new feature - we're gonna do you a one shot ad post on a fringe social network full of gay space communists, people who identify strongly with cartoon animals, and programmers who are weirdly intense about ideological shit that we're not entirely sure is even real. oh yeah, and did i mention the sex professionals? that's been big lately."
cc: @yourgreenpal21
@brennen tag urself I'm all of the above
@brennen I would guess that they don't even care if humans see the links. They're written for crawlers by the kinds of folks who don't realize that mastodon outbound links are wrapped in rel=no-follow so that Google and such won't crawl them, and the spammers don't realize that. Or maybe they don't care since their clients don't know to ask.
@brennen I think you'd be surprised at the number of sex professionals, gay space communists and ideological programmers who also have yards. ;)
@brennen everyone has a lawn!
Except people like me who live in units or townhouses.
They probably heard there was a segment of the community on here that is really interested in grass.
@brennen Happy to be part of a social network platform where the idea of commercialization is still literally a joke.
I can answer this!
As someone whose company did that for a living, you actually don't sell the individual network, you sell "we'll get you on all the biggest networks! your brand will be featured on 87 different search engines and social media sites! You get maximum possible market penetration!"
Most people get a giant list of sites they've never heard of. There's also a certain aspect of "the silly dang kids keep makin' these newfangled sites, but we'll take care of it for you!"
@thindol this totally makes sense.
most of the seo spam i've seen crop up here, such as it is, also has this sort of unsophisticated flavor of like the internet of 2005-10 or so. i'm sure those practices live on in countless little agencies and consultants and the weird botnets that still go around stuffing input into whatever form they can find wherever, but it all feels kind of quaint in the here-and-now of our latter-day adtech wasteland.
@brennen There's whole business models that revolve around selling this kind of marketing service to small businesses; it's quite popular.
The idea isn't inherently bad - if you're too small to have a full marketing person, you can get some light exposure with a company that automates it - but a lot of the services are based on overpriced ignorance and slimy sales half-truths.
Most could do the biggest 3-5 themselves in about an hour, but pay us $50-100 a month to do it for you!
@brennen Absolutely. See, in order for the provider company to make it profitable, most of this stuff is automated. At most, a human is involved for either content writing one time or when the system notes an error.
It is absolutely 2005-esque practice, because most marketing companies haven't changed much. They just love this because it's reoccuring income for little effort, and most don't actually understand (or care to) the actual data on markets, network spaces, etc.
@brennen I could go on all day about how bad marketing is, from the inside.
We want to think that marketers are Mad Men-esque creative geniuses, creating slick new viral campaigns, and there are certainly a few that do - but they're by far the minority.
The vast majority of marketing is made either by committee or some old white dude executive's gut instinct on what will work/sell. It's INCREDIBLY rare that market research comes into play for a campaign, except to sell clients on shit.
@brennen Hey nothing wrong with a little online promotion...people gotta earn a living and it earned a nice chuckle from me LOL
But obviously newcomers to the federated Web have a lot to learn about how to go about it and who the audience is. Perhaps they are a lawn care #coop of socially conscious marginalized owner-workers, with eco-friendly practises and a patreon or liberapay 🤔 But let people know what differentiates you though and connect at a more personal level than yellow page copy 😄