Banned From YouTube!

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Recently many marketers have had their YouTube accounts shut down for violating YouTube’s Terms of Service.

Not me, but I’ve been reading about it.

YouTube belongs to Google and they can do with it what they want to do.

I haven’t had a problem myself because I probably fly under the radar – and I don’t look at social media like YouTube and Twitter as spamming tools – which a lot of folks basically do and that’s why the are getting HIT!

Kapish?

Don’t Spam!

It’s uncool.

Spamming isn’t just sending unsolicited email. It’s an attitude that it’s okay to exploit opportunities to promote your business beyond the boundaries of socially-acceptable conduct.

I get horrible phone-spam all the time from Dumb-Ass people using Dumb-Ass phone-broadcasting systems to send me phone calls advertising the same Dumb-Ass phone spame system – which annoys the hell out of me and furthermore demonstrates that these individuals are NOT people I would want to do business with because:

1. spamming shows you don’t respect other people – and phone-spamming is cowardly

2. phone spamming is INVASIVE marketing and today we find that offensive and anti-social.

3. Their marketing tactics tell me I have nothing to learn from these bozos.
That’s all the reasons I need. If you are a phone spammer, F$#K You!

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I you seek to exploit YouTube and other social media by basically taking the attitude that since you can get away with anti-social marketing you should do it – then you should expect to get a come-uppance.

Back in 2006-2007 I used a service called TrafficGeyser. It does some cool stuff, but it’s basically a mass-submit tool for video – and the people who built it essentially recommend spamming video-sharing sites with mass-submissions of your videos. They are always looking for loop-holes – because, after all, people join and pay to get TRAFFIC, not to be good citizens.

One of the tricks was to convert your video into different formats so YouTube and other sites wouldn’t notice you were submitting the same video several times. Now admittedly, I did this for awhile and because different people have different prefered formats my videos in some formats got more views than others. I don’t know if it’s wrong or anti-social to offer your videos in multi-format – but it might get your YouTube account banned today if you overdo it.

YouTube is watching services like TrafficGeyser – Google is watching for spammers who want to mass- submit to their site, chew up their bandwidth, and over-run it with repetitive or crappy content.

Can you blame them?

YouTube costs a LOT of money to run. Google doesn’t make nearly enough income from YouTube ad-revenue to cover the massive costs of providing free video hosting.

Is it any surprise that they are shutting down accounts that meet some criteria for being categorized as “abusive”???

I’m not surprised.

I’ll bet we see people with big “auto-followed” Twitter accounts get shut down too.

… for anti-social behavior.

We’ve already seen Craigslist crack-down on marketers by making spamming behavior hard to pull-off.

I’ve never had problems running ads here and there on Craigslist, because I never treated it as a spamming opportunity and I respected why people use the site.

Same thing with YouTube.

Look – your behavior might get your account banned, it might not. I cannot tell you exactly what the yardstick of “good” behavior is – but in my OPINION the best strategy is to use things like YouTube and Facebook and Twitter with an attitude of contributing to the culture – not as an opportunity to spam others.

Just look at your own motives, your own values.

If you can just get clear about offering value to other people, and not abusing the technology we have today at every opportunity, you’ll probably do ok… while your spamming competition gets their accounts banned and has to start from scratch because they behaved anti-socially.

Just be a good citizen.

Loren Woirhaye prefers to play gypsy music on guitar or accordion – but when he isn’t doing that he writes direct-response copy, consults with clients to help them make money with their websites, coaches people who want to fire their employers and blogs about success, life, his personal foibles, and online marketing at http://malibumentor.com

The post author, Loren Woirhaye writes sales copy and creates marketing systems for business clients who want to slash customer acquisition costs and position their businesses For 20%-30% sales growth in the next 12-18 months. He writes regularly about marketing and life at his Entrepreneur Blog.