Emulate Humans, Not Robots
Emulate Humans, Not Robots
In the world of SEO or in the world of Social Marketing, you should strive to emulate humans, not robots.
Humans are more personal and they provide better quality, and people trust other people more than they do robots — in general for good reason. So when you are putting content on a web page or building a social network presence, make yourself look as human as possible and not like a robot.
What do you mean “I look like a robot”
Robots are everywhere.
- They make websites without logos
- They use default wordpress themes
- They republished content that hasn’t been customized
- They make cookie-cutter websites
- Use logos instead of pictures for their Twitter profile
- They comment on blogs with random words and links
It comes down to quality, and it makes perfect sense.
When it comes to search engine spam, much of the recognizable spam is recognizable because the SEO did not take the care to make it look like a human created it. They didn’t add value. Perhaps they put up a default wordpress blog, just scraped a bunch of other people’s content, or threw up an affiliate feed. When you create any sort of automated or database driven site, the hardest part is to make it look hand-crafted. Humans add value, and robots seldom do.
Add Value
Mahalo has done a good job of this. They are pretty much a scraper site, but with a human touch. Jason Calacanis knows that if he continued filling Google with search results they would burn him and his 20Million seed round. Mahalo adds content to each one of their result pages, and it has saved them. Google and Yahoo have both taken steps to follow suit.
Don’t be a TwitterBot
Social media is all about social interaction, and trust and authenticity is a primary ingredient. You don’t look like some twitter bot, or corporate identity that doesn’t know about friendship because social media is all about friendship. Customize your responses to people, and talk to them like you are a human not some alice bot.
Use a picture instead of a logo for your profile.
If I look through my followers on twitter, I can quickly pick out the real faces from the logos. I follow very few logos. In fact, a user has to try 10x as hard to win me over if they are just a logo.
Robots aren’t all bad
In the business world, robots are necessary to get quantity and scale at a reasonable price. You can’t index the worlds information without a little help from some really smart machines. But, what Google does is strive to make it’s robots emulate human choice, not the other way around. Similarly, I couldn’t survive online without my robots. They organize my content, bring me keywords, and suggest new topics. BUT they have to be monitored and their output has to be put through a humanizing filter, usually a human. It comes down to a balance of what you can do to make things automated, but maintain human-grade quality.
Get your bots to emulate humans and don’t let your humans emulate robots.
Happy scripting.
November 26th, 2008 at 10:28 am
[...] You will look less like a bot [...]