How to Kill Social Networking

Over the past couple days I have seen various people discuss various challenges they face in using Social Networking in their marketing efforts.

For example John Reese Posted this to twitter yesterday:

While I am sure that there are many having success with social networking and there are some really good examples of viral social networking that helped build stars like Dane Cook and his use of Myspace...

I am wondering if a more effective form of social networking is where it is actually truly social.

For example... we know the social power of this forum and what an impact it can have on forging business relationships, partnerships, and for many new client relationships.

Blogs likewise can do that with comments and publishers chatting in comments with their subscribers. Or even with live video streaming networks like Chris Pirillo, Gary Vaynerchuck, and Leo Laporte do when they ask their audience to give them feedback or have conversations with them live on the stream in the chats...

However, there is a form of social network marketing that is is acting like rust and cankoring the social systems to the point that many of the networks have had to enact policies or start enforcing policies or create new strategies to combat the problem in order to improve the legit client's experience.

Though I think that this form of social network marketing may provide limited benefits in the short term I think it may be less effective than true social networking where the social aspect plays the central role.

For example... lets say you sign up on twitter, then you use some auto friend adder or spider to crawl around and mechanically add friends or you just go and add every person who is somone elses friend. You set up your twitter auto responder to trigger twitter to send a promo email to every person who starts following you. Then you set up your twitter auto poster to post links to your latest blog entry etc.

Then your twitter home page is mucked up with piles of nonsense posts from all the followers whom you are "following back" who for all you know could be complete blithering idiots.

Where is the social aspect?

Where is your personality?

If you are not chatting with your buddies on your myspace page or blogging to myspace where is the social aspect?

There are other benefits of course to these social listings like links back seo and syndication of viral media etc...

However, the rampant "anti social" marketing automation and automated fake social publishing seems to be taking its toll on many social publishers who now find that their own "friends" lists are filled with random wierdos and marketers they do not know or care to hear about filling their inbox with stuff they are not interested in.

This is not good for the social networking sites in general. In fact I bet the people that get the most enjoyment and satisfaction out of the social networking sites are those who have natural social relationships or at least some real interaction with their friends, fan base, or client base.

So I am wondering... if you were to act more naturally when doing your social marketing... adding your friends naturally or even having an assistant with a discriminating eye do it, following only those you are truly interested in, and participating in the social networks in a more natural way...

Though it may take you longer to build up your own network will it be a higher quality network?

And if it is a network you market to in some way or another will they be more responsive?

In other words could a network of 100 or 1000 high quality contacts who enjoy the relationship and are there because they were networked naturally produce 10x the profits vs a network of 10,000 robot added imbeciles who have no clue why they are there or whom may have created their account with a robot and not actually be real people...

These have been my thoughts over the last few days as I have contemplated the nature of successful social network marketing.