Social Marketing Strategies from Social Marketing Expert Peter Lenkefi

Jared Friedman, co-founder of Scribd, left a polite but concerning comment on our “Social Marketing With Scribd” video post.

Here’s what Jared said along with my follow-up:

From Scribd

Jared Friedman on January 13th, 2008 at 4:47 am

Hi there,
I work at Scribd, and we happened to notice this blog post. While I’m glad that you guys like Scribd, I’d like to point out some things about our policies.

Scribd is a website for the noncommercial sharing of documents. By “documents”, we mean things like poems, stories, homework, academic research, magazines, and that sort of thing. We provide the Scribd service free of charge, and don’t advertise on users’ documents. In return, we ask that users not use Scribd for promotion or marketing.

Our users don’t like seeing commercial content on Scribd, and so we have taken measures to protect against it. We don’t allow links on documents anymore, and we filter our content and delete documents which appear to have been created to promote a product or website. Scribd is good for a lot of things, but it’s not a good place to promote your website.

So we wish you the best of luck in your social marketing efforts, but we suggest you try sites other than Scribd to do it.

My response

Jared,

First. let me say that I appreciate your genuine comment and interest in keeping Scribd free from documents that have no value to any potential visitor. (aka spam) I too get frustrated by the amount of “junk” littering the internet, especially in blog comments, social sites and adsense portal pages.

This is not what we do or recommend to anyone. In our definition, social marketing is all about being REAL and becoming part of the community. The “weekly video” that you watch was meant to quickly explain to our loyal readers how to set up a Scribd account in a way that makes sense for social marketers.

You made the point above:

We provide the Scribd service free of charge, and don’t advertise on users’ documents. In return, we ask that users not use Scribd for promotion or marketing.

I would like to challenge you a bit on this based on what I read in your FAQ:

It says:

Can I make money for my work using Scribd?
Not directly. While Scribd does not allow you to charge for access to your work on the site, you can use Scribd to promote your paid work. For example, if you have a blog with ads on it, you can upload one of your best entries to Scribd as a way to get more readership. If you have a book in print, you can upload an excerpt (or even the whole thing!) to Scribd as a promotion. (my italics)

If you noticed, the video illustrated me seting up an account and uploading one post from this blog. I did actually re-read your FAQ before creating the video and thought this would be a legitimate example of an acceptable use of Scribd. In my mind, I was posting an excerpt of my blog as a promotion. I included anchor text links to more valuable and related content (not spam portals or junk sites).

Even more to the point, I am concerned that you are labeling all “internet marketers” as spammers interested in nothing but making money.

In fact, if I do nothing in this post but make this single point I will have succeeded:

Social marketing, even internet marketing is a legitimate business, completely unrelated to spamming and should be given “space” within any database collecting information people are interested in.

I like the concept of Scribd very much. I am amazed by the level of functionality that is built into it and how well each peice works togeteher. I too would hate to see it over-run by crap content.

However, please don’t (as they used to say) “throw the baby out with the bathwater”. There are some folks who are seeking social marketing “how-to” information about marketing who would be thrilled to stumle upon it while browsing Scribd. Instead of being miffed, they would be happy to see an anchor text link to more content that helps them answer real question and solve real problems.

I wish Scribd the best as well and hope to see constructive dialogue regarding the proper use of social networks continue.

Cheers!
Tom Deeter