The dark side of Facebook, how social marketing will go wrong.
Months ago, there was a popular website called idont.com, an anti-ipod website setup by an anti-fan to bash the popular music device. Thousands of people read it, lots of people agreed and many of them took the time to contribute their own anti-ipod opinions to the blogger, or so they thought. In reality idont.com was a setup, a meat puppet, a lark … operated by the SanDisk Corp. to promote their own digital music player.
Brody Ruckus pulled a similar dupe on Facebook about the same time, exposing the trusting nature of the platform. Brody was a typical college student with a typical goal, to have a threesome with his girlfriend. If 100,000 people joined his group he said … his girlfriend “Holly” would do it. 300,000 people joined Brody and when Facebook discovered meat puppet Brody was really Ruckus Networks, they shut down the profile. Sadly, not before the marketing department of Ruckus received email addresses of their marks.
Setting up a fake Facebook account would be remarkably easy. All you need is an email address from a services such as Hotmail or GMail and some photos of your alter ego, easily acquired via photobucket.com or flickr.com.
Imagine just for a second if you had a network of one hundred fake profiles, each linked to 100 real people in a single region, there would be dozen of overlaps which means that each real person could have multiple marketing profiles linked to them. In that scenario, inviting 10,000 real people would receive an invitation to an event, store sale or marketed promotion simply though a posted event or classified listing.
Because we read the status updates of our friends and trust the intentions of these users more than those of displayed advertisements, it becomes an ideal place to post marketing messages. In practical terms, if SanDisk had posted dozens of status messages about broken iPods and the joys of owning their digital media player in the months before Christmas, it would have been devastating for their competition … as long as they didn’t get caught.
So my rather dire prediction for 2009? Direct, corporate social marketing.
I personally have mixed feeling about using facebook for social media advertising since it is such a personal platform. However whta your talking about here is opening an entirely new can of worms.
[...] unknown wrote an interesting post today onThe dark side of Facebook, how social marketing will go wrong …Here’s a quick excerptImagine just for a second if you had a network of one hundred fake profiles, each linked to 100 real people in a single region, there would be dozen of overlaps which means that each real person could have multiple marketing profiles … [...]
[...] unknown wrote an interesting post today onThe dark side of Facebook, how social marketing will go wrong …Here’s a quick excerptThe dark side of Facebook, how social … [...]
Interesting reading, Chris! I’ve often found myself wondering how trustable Facebook is. I mean, anyone who can develop a nice app can have access to your private data, including your name, occupation, email address, etc. Imagine what a marketeer can do with all this information!
[...] day I gave you my rather dire prediction for 2009, that we’re all going to be over run by shadowy Facebook profiles¬†and bad men who pose as teenage girls to see your profile (OK, I left that part out) but that got [...]
You’ve touched on one thing I don’t like about facebook… more information seems to be readily available, i.e. email addresses. I’m sure it’s just like MySpace where people try to have as many “friends” as possible, so that’s exposing themselves to a lot of potential problems down the road.
Upsetting, really. The public is already jaded and untrusting enough with all the BS we’re fed by the traditional media. Pretty soon it’ll only be the personal, one-on-one relationships that we’ll be able to count on.
The power of social marketing. It’s scary though and it really makes you question the legitimacy of everything you see on the Internet. At the same time, it’s interesting to see how these companies adapt to new marketing techniques, and maybe heir originality should be rewarded.
I’ll be honest, after I did a little bit of research into how easy it was to use (and abuse) the system, I was a little concerned but in the end it is impressive to see how marketers adapt so hopefully it’ll also lead to something impressive.
How…interesting blog i read that and got all awesome steps.
I would say solid prediction. It has already started to begin. The sad thing is that it is really clever and you almost can’t blame them. People will begin to be less trusting of what they see online. Right now we all look at the real world and the online one as seperate. I think people will begin to hold the same skepticisms and online life links closer and close to reality.
My initial response as I read this was, “wow!” But then I thought that it shouldn’t really be all that surprising. There will always be those looking to exploit the system to their own advantage, and when big companies start doing it, it’s just spam taken to the next level.
Thanks for this wonderful post! I really can’t belive it’s almost Christmas. Sants and cookies here I come!