Today’s failure to be surprised moment is that WalMart’s back-to-school foray onto Facebook didn’t ’start a conversation’ on dorm decor. It got them slammed for labor practices. Mind you, they’re claiming future roomies are using the site to coordinate, but it just doesn’t look that way on the surface.

WalMart’s past ’social’ experiments have been a bit lackluster in actual result.

The real takeaways on this are first, it’s risky to be Web 2.0 when you have a lot of bad PR to start with. Second, you can’t change the conversation just by trying to participate. Web 2.0 actions need to be compatible with who you are, and recognize who others think you are. Sure, you can use Web 2.0 to ‘move’ who you are to who you want to be, but depending on where you start… it will take a while.

The basics of the situation is that many of the themes with sponsored links on the WordPress site got nuked. Most theme owners claim there was little notice to get themes updated and into compliance with new policies. Others claim that even themes that complied with new policies got nuked.

Reading some of the justifications from some of those happy about affairs shows quite a bit about myths surrounding the idea of inbound links.

I’ve seen a number of people claim that when you use a sponsored template, with links to the sponsor in the footer, you are ‘giving away your PageRank to this sponsor!’

I really see several issues with that assertion:

1. Most blogs don’t have much in the way of PageRank to ‘give away.’
2. Those that DO tend to create custom designs, or know enough about branding to want to avoid heavily spammy sponsored links.
3. Most of the themes I’ve seen that have 3-4 sponsored links look really bad. Ugly = not likely to be downloaded.
4. Providing a few outbound links on ANY site isn’t going to trash your own ability to rank. It’s all a matter of proportion.

I honestly doubt all that many sponsors of the spammy-class of sponsored themes (ie, themes with 4-5 outlinks on it) see a lot of rank help from the activity. It doesn’t fall into the same class in my mind as the people who comment-spam blogs on Bob Dole drugs, but it’s not altogether dissimilar.

The people who know least about sponsors and themes and etc. most likely use hosted solutions and don’t know how to download themes anyway. Those people also likely have the lowest PageRank, anyway.

Those who know at some level that all the footer links at least look bad, might be spammy, and might be intended as SEO (but kind of fall into Dunce Hat SEO in my book) are the people less likely to have downloaded these themes.

Those who are pretty sure, if nothing else, that the spammy footer links are ugly, and who have high-traffic blogs, are likely also the ones who get some customization done and don’t need sponsored links anyway. And those are the blog owners who could actually help a sponsor.

(And that’s before even calling into question if the links count for much anyway. Footer links are the dead real estate and code zone of a page, and are typically easy enough to discount in an algorithim the way most page code lays out. But I won’t even go there right now.)

But here’s the thing: Search engines aren’t biologically programmed to do the same. In fact, they aren’t biological at all. They’re logical. Tech-no-logical. Robots don’t love you, no matter what watching Steven Spielberg movies, Star Wars, and Terminator films may have had you believing. I know this may be hard, but you need to separate yourself from your fantasies of Googlebot as R2D2.

There are many snowflakes on this cold, icy and loveless glacier we call the Internet. What makes you unique amongst the snowflakes? Do you have prettier edges? Are you more crystalline? Are you whiter? Are you the proverbial yellow snow that should not be eaten?

Make your web site reflect that, even if you’re yellow snow. Some people like that kind of thing — the Internet was built on that kind of content. Search engine logic loves that kind of thing: communities grow around the eating of yellow snow, links spring up, and you become unique. Uniqueness is algorithmically recognizable, and will earn you the closest thing a search engine has to love: attention and traffic referral.

Unique Value Propositions have been the basis of marketing for years. The internet has not changed this equation. If anything, it encourages businesses to engage in true self-reflection on what they can offer that someone up the street cannot. If that means pouring blue liquid on yourself and calling yourself a snowcone instead of a snowflake, that’s what it may take to drive traffic to your business, whether online or offline.

This is a really brief list, relative to what’s in my head:

• Ability to understand human behavior and psychology — both from an optimization perspective, and to be a usability guru
• Knowledge of domain set-up and domain issues
• HTML skills
• CSS skills/knowledge enough to work with design gurus
• Ability to multitask
• Strategic orientation to balance short-term and long-term factors
• Voracious reader (education)
• A strong liver (for conference attendance, a must have!)
• A strong problem-solving orientation

I think there are several nice-to-haves, such as the ability to explain what you’re doing to the ‘normals,’ which can include business sponsors and people with checkbooks. While, in theory, if you’re in an agency where Account Reps are the external facing staff and you’re an SEO-in-the-closet, you’ll still have to educate the Account Reps.

Also, these days I think people who come from a content perspective have something of an advantage on those from other disciplines. Local Search, Public Relations, and Social Media all work best when someone has a strong command of branding and content strategy. However, that’s certainly not mandatory… yet.