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Friends For Sale

It sounds remarkably like the application on Facebook where users get to 'sell' and 'buy' their friends like some form of digital black market trade. However, the friends for sale implied here is the one offered by the marketing firm, Usocial.

Friends and Followers should not be bought, is the message from Facebook. Connect only to those who want to connect to you and we will stop those companies who sell online friends. USocial is a web-marketing firm, operating form Australia, providing Facebook, Twitter and FrontPage marketing services. Their Facebook marketing service states "For an investment of only $197, we'll bring you 1,000 brand new targeted Facebook friends to your existing account, or we'll set up a new account for yourself or your business at no charge in order to deliver the targeted friends." USocial has package of buying 1000 to 100000 Twitter followers at varying price range. If such kinds of activities are allowed to run under the banner of web advertising then the thin line between web promotion and spamming, disappears.
(Friend shopping not allowed: Facebook
Mon Nov 23 15:17:16 IST 2009, by Abhishek Mehta)


This case marks the line where social network advertising begins to slip into the internet black market. Advertisers flock to successful social network platforms like Facebook and Twitter to sell the users to marketers like freshly gutted pigs. Due to the sheer amount of users, and the availability of data harvesting tools on facebook, it is a gold mine of information for advertisers and marketers alike.

There are tons of applications on Facebook that actually helps with promotions and advertising of all sorts. It's a wonder how anybody can keep up with all of this.
Though it may look like a rather bleak future in terms of keeping our lives from being commercialized, I still hold to my Honours year's research that the work of advertisers will eventually be one of managing communities, niche communities, and trust will be the currency.

Social marketing is a dangerous game. Where is the line between customer care (because you have to care) and to con your customers. Both involve a form of superficial relationship to extract benefits. Chaos theory.

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Thanks for the OMG!s

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