Fake Friends, Love For Sale
Recently, Michael Learmonth of Advertising Age did a post about uSocial selling followers and friends to give the impression that a company’s Twitter or Facebook page are wildly popular. Sort of if you can’t make it then fake it.
I know this is nothing new; affiliate marketers have been doing this for decades. I guess for some, the perception of popularity is good enough.
I suppose this type of service was inevitable and we’re likely to see more companies like uSocial crop up. But, as many of the commenters of Learmonth’s post point out, tactics like this fly in the face of what social networking is all about. And the danger to social networks like Twitter is that they become irrelevant to the people who matter most. And the truth is: there is always another social platform around the corner; maybe its Posterous or Netlog or Lifeblob.
There is an inherent risk when a social community becomes too big. As more and more “marketers” (and I do use the term loosely here) jump aboard the Social Media bandwagon (e.g. Twitter grew 1,444% over last year as of May), the more they clog these communities with useless tweets and mindless blog-babble (or blabble). The personalities that make these communities worth the effort of participation move on and you’re left with PR agencies pitching to other PR agencies.
To be fair, I see how tempting it is to “game the system” with so many competitors vying for the same eyeballs and clients growing impatient for results. Who has the time to build meaningful relationships… lets just buy ‘em. The problem with this line of thinking is it is self-deluding. If your goal is to generate real conversion then obviously paying for followers or friends fails to do this. Of course, you might be thinking: I need to appear popular in order to attract real conversion. Maybe but this is a slippery slope (and one I plan to put to the test and report back on in a follow up post). If enough people are gaming the system then these “stats” become meaningless, visitors will catch wise and assume any high number has been jerry-rigged.
The wonderful thing about the Internet is that it is a self-correcting system. Whenever there is a flaw in one product, a new product comes along and fixes it. For example, lets say you are following 5,000 people on Twitter but most of the time only 20% of the tweets are useful and you don’t want to miss them. You can use tools like TweetDeck or HootSuite to group and prioritize your Twitter feeds, making your social media life easier and more efficient. There are more tools like these going beta every month, designed, in part, to address these types of unintended uses (or abuses).
September 7th, 2009 at 4:34 am
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September 7th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
For the record, Simone, I don’t believe the accounts are fake, just the friendships. If people are paid by a third-party to be a friend or follower, it raises the question: How likely are they really to convert?
uSocial does state that their “lists” are targeted but the proof is in the pudding (I’ll let everyone know how I make out in a later post). Nevertheless, I suspect the social communities themselves want to protect the integrity of these stats and, therefore, will thwart this type of application.
As far as the $1 per friend value, uSocial is a bit vague on this. Every industry is different. I suppose you could average it out but it is not an exact science.
January 4th, 2010 at 12:49 pm
Thank you! I would now go on this blog every day and check for new updates!
January 5th, 2010 at 3:24 pm
Andrew, it’s a classic Tragedy of the Commons that some lecturer taught me many years ago in Political Economy. That it paid everyone to put their animals on the public land, until it became a waste land and everyone suffered.
But at least there is TweetDec. Plus a whole new Commons that will magically appear – ‘Twitter Mark 2′. The poor villagers back in ancient times simply lost their shared resource.
This is all just a ‘way station’. Communities that will survive and prosper online will have very strong, self-enforced rules about Spam. And a very tight definition of Spam (in a nutshell, any self promotion at all without huge accompanying value might be a workable definition).
I’m creating some communities like this, and am doing them inside LinkedIn. Not sure how it might work on Twitter, but I’m fairly new there (Toby_Marshall).
Spammers do it because they can. And (in the short term) they benefit. And we all suffer. Time to change the rules.
January 12th, 2010 at 3:57 pm
Back in the 90s when email spamming was so prolific that it threatened to collapse the very infrastructure it exploited (and Congress was forced to create legislation) 20/20 interviewed “professional” spammers and they all said the same thing: They do it because they make money. As long as this is true, there will always be spammers.
But faking popularity is less to do with spamming and more to do with deception (even self-deception). And as we expected, the communities themselves are taking corrective measures to protect their value proposition… such as Twitter’s Lists.
2010 will bring a new generation of integrated tools that will make it easier (and safer) for real conversations to take place no matter where you are or what platform(s) you prefer. Should be an exciting year for Social Media.
January 11th, 2010 at 5:39 pm
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January 26th, 2010 at 12:49 am
I’ve really enjoyed reading your articles. You obviously know what you are talking about! Your site is so easy to navigate too, I’ve bookmarked it in my favourites
January 26th, 2010 at 10:41 pm
Very interesting.
January 31st, 2010 at 10:00 pm
You would be crazy to not use more Twitter marketing.
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