The gradual rise in active online activity since the fall of the “Web 1.0” phenomenon has been extreme, to say the least. During the 1.0 era, the learned, highly educated individuals were the ones surfing the net. Today, we live in a period of history where our grammar school children are learning the concept of web design. Most of our children could give us a fairly reasonable definition of e-commerce, if asked.

In the old times, if one came to your site, there was a very good chance that he or she was there for a specific reason. These were professionals and educators who did not randomly surf the web. Today, we live in a time where you can expect at least fifty percent of your traffic to be inconsequential. Those statistics can be extremely higher if you practice the technique of social marketing.

Social marketing, in layman’s terms, is the act of utilizing other sites (social sites) to garner traffic to your own website. Though this strategy almost sounds dishonest, morally speaking there is nothing wrong with it, as you are not misrepresenting your site, but actually stating what the site is about.

There is, however, some questionability in regards to the success of this method. True, through several sites, such as digg.com, that is very effective at providing traffic to websites. The issue, however, is that if the traffic itself is effective. These sites exist for no other reason than to send traffic to other submitted sites. With this sole purpose, it only makes sense that the actual product or purpose of your site will be disregarded.

What it comes down to is that the only true way that social marketing could possibly be effective is if your site exists for no other reason than to be visited one time by each person and to serve no other purpose than to get passive traffic.

Some would say that the mindset of those backing the supposed effectiveness of techniques such as social marketing are much like those who backed the ineffectiveness of the web 1.0 marketing techniques. Could these be the progenitors of the next metaphorical web-wide holocaust? Many professional web gurus seem to think that these are the people and the techniques that will result in the fall of web 2.0 and the inevitable rise in web 3.0. Ultimately, only time will tell, but the effectiveness of social marketing will never change.