Certainly within the colliding worlds of white hat and black hat marketing there's a lot of grey. The degree to which you subscribe to Kantian theory may help you to work through the ethics of some of the approaches being used by internet marketers from either sphere, but it’s going on and so we might as well learn what we can from it.

I am a firm believer in automatic friendships in Social Media because as long as these friendships are well researched, the ‘friending’ will perform a utility function to both parties. For the receiver of the message, it will be something of use to them, to the sender of the message it will be something that exposes the brand and/or raises awareness.

If you don’t research well, what you’ll end up with is a receiver saying “this is spam” and the sender receiving a message from a Social Media Network saying their account has been closed.

There are lots of books on Twitter marketing, and you'll also find quite a few stories on how people made millions from Twitter in a very short space of time. These success stories are rarely accidents and are largely the fruit of a very long and detailed communications process.

Technological determinism theory places human beings under pressure to adjust to advancements in technology, from a simple MS-Office upgrade, to evolutions in existing standards and completely new programming languages. In all the literature and research I have read, among all the strategies I have seen fail, there is an element of this technologic determinism.

Here are some signs that you are going about social media the wrong way.

“We must be on Facebook”
“Do we Tweet already?”
"What do we talk about?"

But the truth is that the success stories come from people holding up their hand and essentially saying

“Hold it tech, let me do some research first”.

While I wrote this post 13 people started following a client's profile automatically. They were all grateful.

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