In a post I wrote not to long ago I spoke of how important being nice can be. I still believe this so when someone takes time to sphinn or digg or (insert social media submit word here) I try and thank that person for the submit and if they are someone I haven’t seen before or are new, I try and give some advice to help them develop their social media profile. You can catch more flies with honey and all of that nonsense.
I’ve hung around social media sites for a while now, seen the ebb and flow of what goes popular or hot, I have read posts such as David Harry’s “How to Dominate Sphinn in 4 easy steps” and Slightly Shady SEO’s Guide to Frontpaging Sphinn and many more good posts like these about digg, slashdot, reddit, and others.
A couple of my submits have gone hot, I have watched the best times for my articles and other peoples articles. I feel I have a fairly good understanding of what will go hot, what wont, what would have if it was submitted at a better time.
So when an article of mine that I knew would go hot was submitted at an off-peak hour, I thanked the submitter and offered up a little advice on good times for sphinn submits.
A few days later I commented on an article over on SamFreedom’s blog in a controversial way, as I did not like the post as much as I had enjoyed his other ones. Figured it would be appreciated as the blog is called Internet Marketing Controversy Blog.
I found out in the reply to my comment that apparently he was not happy with the advice, and was offended I would even think to offer it to him. When the story did go Hot - after I had to ask a few people for help - and even 6 random people (from where I do not know) gamed the system (Side note: Once the story did hit the front page it did recieve 14 more real votes that it would not have since it was burried)
This of course instantly made my advice was “wrong” and he felt he should use this to invalidate any comment I made.
I was kind of surprised that he was so offended. I tend to like all advice, no matter where it comes from. Of course I don’t listen to all of it, but it is still nice to have - some is good, some is bad, some doesn’t even make sense. I try to learn from those around me, what they are doing poorly, what they are doing well.
I’m still going to go on being nice to people, offering advice from my experience when I can, and if it backfires, well it backfires. Such is life, some people are just more sensitive than others.