Promote My Site

One of the first things that might warn you that Novasoft's SutumbleBot is a social network spamming tool is their blatant ripoff of StumbleUpon's logo.

LogoLicious Infringement

StumbleBot's logo:

StumbleUpon's logo:

Oh, wait, never mind, completely different - one has a blue background and the identical blue/green graphic is 15 degrees out. My bad.

Danger Will Robinson, Stumble Spambulator Coming Our Way

I think the other 'look out' moment is when the sales pitch is all about how to do something without getting caught:

Stumblebot is an easy to use application that lets you create thousands of Stumbleupon accounts, stumble your websites with those accounts and generate thousands of unique visitors from Stumbleupon in no time.

Stumblebot also allows you the option to post randomized relevant tags and reviews for these stumbles. It also includes a username checker and uses rotating proxies and user configurable delays between posts.

I am not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that if you're not violating the TOS doing all that, well, then, they must not have much of a TOS.

Novasoft - Sounds Familiar

Yes, we reviewed their Tag Automater and were not impressed - it costs almost $300 to purchase and then there is a $67/month "service" fee. It seemed like a lot of money for a tool that didn't do much.

Tool Overview

This tool is more reasonably priced at around $150, and even has a $1/2-day demo version. I was about set to pay the buck and give it a try, then I thought to look around to figure out how to terminate the demo period. Nothing. I looked on the support ticket area - this product wasn't even listed. So I decided to NOT get involved in a pay pal hassle.

I sent them an email, but as they did not respond to my previous emails, I don't really expect a response again.

I will say that, given Stumble's architecture, that it would be very possible to patch together a tool that would let you 'fake stumble' your posts with a low likelihood of getting caught.

How Worthwhile is Fake Stumble Traffic?

I had a friend who owned an okay-ish Italian place some years ago. He'd let me eat dinner for half price if I'd sit in the window seat and give the thumbs up to people who stopped to read the menu. But the food was only OK, so the people never would come back. I have to believe that if you're counting on people from stumble coming back after falling for this false-trail system then you've not quite understood what makes stumble traffic work.

Conclusion

I think self-stumbling your content is fine, and if you write good content then you'll get an appropriate level of traffic. I'd avoid this social spamming tool - not only are you violating Stumble's TOS but you're also putting your focus and emphasis in the wrong place.

Not for very long anyway.

I reviewed several manualized social network automators (OnlyWire, Social Poster, Social Marker , EkStreme, Post Toaster, etc) and then summarized the 114 sites they supported. And one of my criticisms was that they either had (a) no monetization or (b) weak but clear. And what fruit does that bear?

Uptime Status for Social Network Automation

Well, of the 114 total sites supported, there were the following errors:

• Excites - 7 minutes to load the home page, etc -> zombie
• Feed Me Links - No registrations allowed
• Feedmarker - No regsistrations allowed
• igool - NSFW Porn
• Linkatopia - No signup allowed
• Musigg - Would not load
• MillionsOfGames - Would not load
• Scuttle - Open source page (duh)
• Shadows - Dead
• Unalog - Dead
• Xilinus - Dead
• Yample - Dead

That is 12 sites, or more than 10% of the list.

I dunno about you, but I can't have a 10% error rate in my business.

List Rot 

Look, we all know there is rot in the list of secondary and tertiary social bookmarking and networking. So you have to check that pages load, that google is still indexing in the primary index (or whatever they're calling it this month), that logins process and links post.

We have a fairly large list of this sort of thing and it really costs a bit in maintenance to keep it up to date. But it's part of our business overhead.

Because "free" isn't "free" when it's broken too often.

Ernst-Jan Pfauth, at The Next Web, does some back-of-the-envelope calculation and figures out that Facebook may be making $15M/year in selling "virtual gifts." And she smartly urges other social networking websites to jump on that bandwagon.

Anyone remember a slightly less scary looking Whoopi Goldberg hawking Flooze in the last bubble?

How long until our customers want to pay us in virtual credits we can use in Second Life to buy private education for our virtual children?

I thought it might be useful to compare the sites that the minor productivity enhancers we've discussed and reviewed actually claim to support.

Social Site Overlap

I thought there was more overlap - very interesting.

Your Own Copy Of This List

And because I HATE it when people put tables up on the web and don't provide an easy to get the farking data, here it is on Google Documents.

Reviews Of These Programs

I recently did five in-depth reviews of what I felt were the top lightweight social network posting automation solutions:

• Post Toaster
• Social Poster
• Social Marker
• Only Wire
• EkStreme Socializer

Conclusion

Well, really the same as in the reviews - there is a lot of potential power in there, if only someone would build a scalable, supported system with plenty of workflow and reporting.

It's a hallowed tradition in technology when you need something: build it. And once built, use it to support your core business. Nowadays big companies call it "Eating Your Own Dogfood." So we know that the Microsofties were tortured with Office/2007 (motto: you thought you knew where things were....) long before any of us.

What do YOU Need to Automate your Social Networking Tasks?

We've looked at minor productivity enhancers and semi-automated tools, but they all lack key elements (automation, reporting) or have architectural issues (RSS Bookmarker's server centric design).

At the end of the day, there is a lack of actionability and ROI. Which comes from solving part of the problem or solving it the wrong way. In the end, what is missing is a technology stack that is focused on solving the end-to-end problem.

Technology Stack

Technology stack is a term of art that discusses the solution's technical elements and their combination, specifically relating each piece of the stack to part of the critical path for the solution of the business problem through technology.

For example, choosing your OS might revolve around current investment, running cost, etc. In this case the choice of Windows/Server over Linux would not only relate to the other technical pieces (ex: VB versus PHP) but to the real world of budget and staff ability.

I believe the minimum technical stack to automate Social Network System usage will look something like this:

Components Included

Client Side:

• Browser (ex: IE, Mozilla, Opera)
• ClientOS (ex: Windows, Linux, MacOS)

Server Side:

• ServerOS
• Database (ex: MySQL, Oracle, etc)
• 3GL "glue" language (ex: Perl, VP, etc)
  
• Reporting (ex: Crystal, Excel)
  
• Workflow and Admin
  
• Web Application Manipulation Language
  

Please note that the server is only conceptually separate from the client. You could certainly run it all on one machine, but if it is built in this fashion you'll be able to bring a horde of minions online when you're swamped with success.

This is the same reason you need to build in your thinking about Admin (user creation, security) and workflow (who does what in which order) from the beginning. You don't have to fully invest in activating it all at first, but if you don't slot it into the design, the retrofit will be horrible. And expensive.

I am certainly not going to get involved in the relative merits of Linux/Windows, Mozilla/IE, language_a/language_b - because we all have opinions and skills there, along with infrastructure and educational investment.

You want to use SQL Server or MySQL or Oracle? Fine, because that means you are solving the database nature of the problem. You want your Workflow/Admin in Nuke or WordPress or Joomla? Fine, because you're solving the problem at the right architectural level with the right tools.

What I want to focus on is the most difficult and arcane piece of the equation, the part that makes this application interestingly different than yet another CRM business application, this piece is the:

Web Application Manipulation Tool

The most basic assumption to start with is that you are developing an application to save you time, money, and to produce a competitive advantage. And that you are not going to write your own web browser with a built in voice recognition and replay capability. In Urdu.

The pointy end of the problem solving spear is a tool that you can use to programatically manipulate a web page: click buttons, insert text from your database, collect results, etc. This is a web application manipulation tool.

It must have the following capabilities:

• Supported application - from a commercially viable vendor or an active OSF-type community
• Mature product - must have developers documentation and have deployment successes
• Flexibile - Must handle a wide variety of web-based applications

Available Options for Web Application Manipulation Tools

We started with a list of over 20 contenders and boiled it down to the the following serious products:

• Macro Express
• iMacro
• CoScriper
• AutoIt

All these products placed strong showings in the above requirements, clearly leaving rivals behind.

To Be Continued.....

The next article will compare and contrast these four candidates and place them on the SEO Capability Grid.

To be honest, when I started reviewing Semi-Automated Social Networking Automation Software, I expected to find more software like Tag To Rank . Software with an ill defined purpose, with a confusing website full of grammatical errors, and with a distinctly dodgy smell about it.

In general, I didn't find that at all - some fairly fantastic claims and some pretty hard sells, but I've seen worse from Microsoft and Oracle.

Overview

Priced at $297, this software, well, it does something. There are no videos, no examples, but, gosh, I am sure it does something pretty violent with Scuttle since it is a "Scuttle Massive Account Creator (SMAC)."

There are six tabs on the top ("Home", "Support," etc...) and three are broken. The "Product" tab worked and took me to a completely different look-and-feel section selling other, SEO type products.

Again, all without documentation, examples, or demonstration videos.

Summary Grade - Not Ranked

I would avoid spending time evaluating this as a social networking automation tool. Had I not come across the name in, literally dozens of lists of social software tools, I would have moved on immediately and never bothered to bookmark it.

The guys at Novsoft have a supercar price on their Tag Automater - it's $297 and $67/month for maintenance. Wow. Actually, no, I mean it: wow. I believe this is the most expensive tool I've found in the SEO world.

Tag Automater claims to support just 10 sites , which makes the price and the promise of "an Avalanche of Traffic" pretty dubious.

However, the software does support some handy functions:

• Automated user/password creation
• Timed submission of entries
• Pr oxy support
• Demo "Lite" version
  

Missing, unfortunately, are:

• Error reporting
• Workflow
• Activity reporting
• Support for RSS feeds
• Documentation
• Evidence of active maintenance or support
  

Un-Cheesy Videos

Kudos to the Tag and Ping guys for providing almost 10 minutes of video showing how the system works and how to "add new scuttle sites." (I do have to note that the musical accompaniment was straight out of, er, an adult film. It was incongruous to say the least.)

Passenger Pigeons

At one point during the video the author shows how to "find scuttle sites for automated posting" and the google (circa 2006) query showed 2,520 sites. I re-ran the query today and found 279.

I don't believe the others are hiding - I believe they have been taken down because of people hosing identical URL's into them with tools like this.

Is this Evil?

I've written before that tools are just that, tools, and that the evil is in the intent. I think it is unfortunate that the video example shows how to take a single , rotate the tags, and shove it through a scuttle API every few seconds.

Demo Version Unworkable

The company offers a Demo version that works with one social networking site (Furl) and is otherwise full featured. Which is a refreshing change.

I was completely unable to make the demo version work. This may be because it is V0.1. Yes, zero point one. Yikes.

By "not work" I do not mean it didn't run, but that it just didn't run with the features and functionality as described in the marketing literature or as shown in the video examples.

Support

Unlike its competitors, Tag and Ping does have a support site. So I went spelunking around to see if I could find out why the demo version did not work. Of course, I didn't find any answers, but I did notice this:

Sales?

Given that this software has been for sale for almost three years, it is not much of an install base. But most importantly I was dismayed at the "last updated" date of 2006 for the production and demo versions. (Remember, the Demo Version is V0.1!)

I hope that this is not accurate, or if it is, that somehow these people are still shelling our $67/month and getting updates. Because 14 months is a lifetime on the internet.

RSS Support

Probably because the software is quite old there is no support for RSS, so the user has to enter every article to "tag" one at a time. If you can imagine doing this for five blogs with two posts/day.....

And, of course, there is no workflow and there are no reports, so the lack of RSS is a real deal-killer.

Capability Grid

While the product is extremely actionable (it does one thing to 10 sites) and, in the video from 2006 at least, seemed to do it well it ends up in the dreaded first grid spot. The ROI from only 10 sites will be very low, given the cost, driving the product to the left, and the support and breadth issues drive it down the axis toward the origin.

Summary Grade: D-

The lack of site support, the apparent age of the product, the lack of workflow and absence of reporting all would have put this product, if reasonably priced, at a C in my book. But if you multiply all that by the astounding price, the grade goes down dramatically.

If you are willing to spend up to several hundred dollars you can (theoretically) get a fully featured product to help you take your content and place it on a number of social networking and bookmarking sites.

The tools that are under discussion are:

• Mass Automateion RSS Bookmarker
• Tag Automator
• Web2Submitter
• Tag to Rank

Invisible Men

Before I start discussing the functionality I should note that I sent several emails to each site's contact information asking some specific questions for this review. I did not get a single answer. I think that is a very very bad sign.

These products, in contrast with the lighter weight productivity enhancers reviewed earlier (Post Toaster, SocialPoster, etc ) promise to:

• Automate logins
• Maintain historical activity tracking
• Free support
• Free updates
• Privacy Policies and and T&C
  
• Money back guarantees

Chicken, Who Me?

Even though all these products promise money back, I was, frankly, too chicken to buy and try to return them. Perhaps the ritualistic trips back to the mall after Christmass are still too vivid.

So let's take a high level view of the product claims and how realistic they seem. First out of the barrelis RSS Bookmarker .

I spent part of this morning writing a wikipedia article and it was way way too hard. Really it was:

1. Another Markup Language.

Yeah, baby, I want to learn something that combines the worst obscurity of Tex, HTML, and C++. Yah know, Jimbo , you could spend less time on the "I am important" circuit and get someone to write you a WYSWIG editor.

Oh, the irony of a nofollow link to you AND the fact that you have a reference to an editor you can't implement.

2. Style Guide From Hades

This is a family blog, so I can't say what I think about your style guide.

3. Writing Workflow Pain

Have you ever watched someone write an article from scratch? Bejebus, man, have pity. I write a new article once or twice a year and it is hard. It's not that I don't contribute to the wiki - mostly I correct silly mistakes in American History articles, which is easy enough.

I reckon new article creation on the wiki takes me 4x as much time as on this blog.

4. Save as Draft

Wordstar had this in 1987.

5. Terrible Examples

Your annotated example is 90% text about a freaking auto-train and maybe 10% annotation about formatting. Isn't that backwards?

6. Overlove of Thyself

Ok, it's keen and everything that you have that graphics dumping ground you call the commons, but forcing graphics into the wiki model, well, it doesn't work. Go look at Flickr. There is a site that works.

7. You're Walking Dead

I'm actually starting to mourn you before you're even dead. Yes, I know you still show up in the top two positions in Google SERPS for, well, everything great and small.

But you have to know that with Google's launch of Knols (and isn't that another ironic link?) you're like the 1900's Bud horse drover looking at a model A for the first time. Sure, we'll enjoy looking at you once in a while, but you'll be gone from the streets before too long.

[I was writing an article on Social Networking Automation Tools. Please feel free to contribute. While the Wiki is still around.]

Post Toaster is the "site count leader" over Ekstreme Socializer (28) , OnlyWire (22), SocialPoster (61) and SocialMarker (28). However, as an automation tool it suffers from the same ills and an unusual UI choice actually drops it back in the pack.

First, let's see what Santa left in our stocking:

• Good UI
• Categorization of postable sites
• Clear monetization
• Ability to shuffle post characteristics

 But there is a lot of coal to be found:

• Inappropriate sites for posting
• Lack of full-site support
• No TOS or privacy policy
  
• Most problematic workflow support

Good UI

Once again, a good designer manages to get a LOT onto one page. Without making it seem crowded. Nice job!

Categorization of Postable Sites

The site adds a nice twist to pligg vs. bookmark split by indicating which ones support no/follow. Which is good because it gets content posters thinking about traffic vs. links.

It may not be clear to people that a lot of the "dofollow" links happen deep into the site so you'd have to find some way to point google/yahoo/etc into that page. Or pay attention to your tag so that the robots can spider into your page that way.

As you might imagine, the author had to include some tier-2 posting sites to make the list so large, so good on 'em! With the included categorization you can ignore them if you like - though you shouldn't!

Inappropriate Sites Setup for Posting

Perhaps in the sites-you-can-post-to arms race the temptation gets too great, but once again, we see sites like Facebook and Twitter listed as posting options. I have trouble seeing where one would want to post the same information to delicio and twitter. It may not be a violation of the TOS, but it's certainly going to get negative reactions almost 100% of the time - so why support it? Especially since he has a....

Clear Monetization Policy

SquareOak owns Post Toaster and they sell SEO/SEM/Webbie services. Finally, an obvious monetization scheme for one of these services. And, as a consumer, I can be sure that there is some impetus for maintenance.

Phew.

So it's even more puzzling to me that the SquareOak guys would include sites (twitter, Facebook) where using a tool like this will always cause agitation.

No TOS or Privacy Policy

This is really surprising as SquareOak are a real business with real clients. I'm not going to go back into what lack of TOS means, it's kind of obvious that this is a real barrier to continual use.

Shuffle of Characteristics

Post Toaster has a wonderful feature where you can shuffle four titles and four post summaries as you post from place to place. Cool.

One thing you might consider: if you are rotating four titles and four summaries around a constant URL then it won't take anyone looking very long to figure out what you're doing. And the best way to look sneaky is to get caught doing something that looks sneaky.

Lack of Full Site Support

It may be that SocialMarker and others have raised the bar a bit with iFrames and buttons, but I found myself getting aggravated by small problems (lack of tag support for delicio, etc) during the posting process. I think this area needs some good attention if they expect good uptake in a crowded market.

In all fairness, the problem with trying to direct-URL post without being logged in is sometimes in the social site, not Post Toaster. But, as a consumer, it doesn't really matter why my diggo post went awry and took four minutes instead of 30 seconds, it only matters that it happened.

Problematic Workflow

While some sites do iFrames and others just run you over to the site, Post Toaster trys another method: a browser page full of links you can click to run through your posting routine. This solves the iFrame/TOS and referrer issues that other services have, so I was interested by this approach.

While I appreciate people taking a different look at a problem, it is harder on the users when the 'new' solution just doesn't work. And this really doesn't work for me. I actually had more trouble keeping track of where I was and what I did.

Maybe they can play with this and give you a page you could mail to a colleague for posting, or a CSV dump of the page for personal tracking, etc, etc. It's a neat idea and I'd like to see it worked on .

Overall Grade: B-

I liked the idea of categorizing sites as having no/follow and trying a new way of letting the user run the workflow. I also appreciated the clear monetization. I gave the usual ding for workflow, lack of TOS/Privacy Policy and inappropriate sites in the post list.

But this site gets the highest grade of its competitors for breaking some new ground around the actual work process. However, they'll have to catch up to the other free services offering rudimentary login/register features if they want to stay at the top of my mindmap.