Muhammad Saleem shared his views on Two Ways to Market Yourself on MyBlogLog today at Pronet Advertising.

In his post, he shared:

Look at the average blog community member’s avatar and more often than not you will just see the person in the photograph. If you are going to use your photograph as your avatar, keep one thing in mind, sex sells.

I think this is and soon will become a problem in social media marketing – its a known fact that “sex sells”, and with the increased use of avatars and photos in social networking site (which are meant to be photos of yourself!), more people will be putting up more “mature audience” pictures on their sites – hoping to attract eyeballs… and clicks.

The challenge becomes tougher for the authorities, because while search engines can read and filter text (usernames, descriptions etc), categorization of images is still largely done using meta data.

I would think the only (and the best solution) to this is really a good education. I mentioned my concerns about increased spam and its detriment before. Users of the web need to be more aware of the consequences in the long run.