Inbound Marketing University

Right now HubSpot has over 1000 customers who are actively engaged in inbound marketing.  There are many big name individuals teaching, consulting, and instructing many others on inbound marketing (the University section of this site is a prime example).  I've also seen inbound marketing mentioned in traditional media.  In other words, it is getting very popular (as it should because it works exceptionally well).

Now, 2 key componenets of inbound marketing are blogging and social media.  So, lets take a minute to dive into these two items-

Blogging - many companies are realizing they are behind the game if they aren't showing they are thought leaders and branding themselves online through content creation, which is primarily blogging.  They also know they need to create content to improve rank in Google, get links, optimize for more keywords and more.  In time, as more and more companies do this, we are going to start having multiple sources of thought leadership for any product/service you can think of. 

Social Media - to help get traffic to your blog and site everyone knows you need to get active in the online conversation.  This means blog engagement and active participation on social sites.  You need to build relationships and connections and then use them to generate more leads and traffic.  As I recently read in another forum post on here about social media in a business, people are recommending everyone blog and mention projects they are working on, talk on social media sites about the cool things their products and services do.  And as with blogs, we will have more and more companies following this model.

I see a pattern here for which there is historical precident.  Bascially, once businesses realize a channel can be used for money, the channel detoriates as it gets flooded with businesses looking to make money (think of all the ads you flip through in magazines, the tons of commercial breaks on tv, spam email, and there are many others).  So, what happens over the next few years as blogging and social media gets saturated?  It will get to a point where new companies/businesses will have a hard time breaking in and competing with established blogs and social networks.

Also, what will happen as more and more businesses get active on social media sites and it becomes more and more of a channel to promote your ideas in order to generate business (which isn't the true intention of social media).  Will businesses push out the end users as they get too frustrated?  Will the end users just move onto a new social site causing the businesses to start over again in building a new network?  If this happens, then we'll have businesses getting active on every new social site to stay ahead of the curve, but in turn this could kill the social sites as once end users see businesses there, they may want to move on again.  MySpace is a great example of a massive social site that now has a reputation as being very spammy (as it is very spammy).

While I love inbound marketing and believe in it, I feel like it's a bit like the wild west where there is no regulation, so more and more people enter these channels who would never be there if it wasnt for the fact money can be made.  Because these people are there to make money, they will do what it takes to make money.  Sure, we all say you need to create content that provides value as that brings the traffic, and it is true.  But, being realistic, with more and more businesses flooding the channel and trying to be the first with an idea, the avg quality of content will detoriate as not everyone will follow these best practices and instead will treat it as a numbers game so they will throw a ton of stuff up and see what sticks.  Granted, the nice aspect of social media is that people will ignore the junk and focus on the quality content, but if there gets to a point where there is too much junk, it becomes too difficult to filter through this noise.

So, what I want to know is whats next?  Should there be an attempt to regulate this?  Should social sites clamp down on businesses and make sure they aren't just spamming links to their blog content?  Should it just continue to run as it does and let a few companies come out on top and then everyone else will find another channel to flood?  Am I way off base in assuming social media and blogging will go the same path as other channels?  I would love to hear the thoughts of other experts on here.

~Brian