Social Networking Fail

Yesterday I posted a blog titled "Would you race if there was no finish line?" The idea behind it was to point out silly things I see companies doing in the social networking space along with 5 basic ideas to help avoid failure. I was happy to see that the piece received solid traffic today and has been re-tweeted a couple times. (Thanks to @ocdqblog for being the first.)

While I was reading through the re-tweets I came across the one below from @SocialMediaNew and found it to be a great example of how not to use twitter. A large part of community participation is rooted in trust and I believe in order to add value to your community you need to act in a trustworthy way to gain respect and to positively effect your business. This lesson seems to be lost on SocialMediaNew.

This screen capture is from my TweetDeck application and as you can see SocialMediaNew is re-tweeting my post.....or are they? In reality the shortened Bit.ly URL goes to the page below. This my friends is exactly HOW NOT TO USE TWITTER. I visited the twitter site before writing this post and followed a bunch of links from their page and everyone I hit redirected me to this page so its clear its not a mistake its a "business practice".

Feel free to bookmark this page or print it for your next meeting, share it with the folks in your marketing department who are struggling to understand the need for trust in social networking. And finally if your one of the 117 people who are following these guys you may want to reevaluate your own strategy.

And a quick note to the owner of the SocialMediaNew account please stop re-tweeting my content with bogus URL's.