Buying friends isn’t social, it’s antisocial

September 4th, 2009 by Lloyd Gofton

There has been much discussion around an article featured in AdAge earlier this week, which profiles some of the services offered by a company called uSocial, which is an odd name for a company that appears to offer a service that is in fact antisocial (anti social media that is).

As AdAge put it, ‘Pay them (uSocial) money and they’ll make you at least appear to be very big on Facebook. In fact, they’ll deliver you 5,000 Facebook “friends” for 7.6 cents per friend ($654.30), or up to 10,000 Facebook “fans” for a mere 8.5 cents a fan ($1,167.30).’

The article continues:  ‘USocial has been in the Twitter-follower game for a while but is adding Facebook friends and fans to its offering today, per a press release declaring the adage “You can’t buy your friends” to be incorrect, at least when it comes to Facebook. It claims that since each Facebook friend or fan is worth $1 per month, buyers will make back their investment many times over in the first month (it’s unclear how it came up with that number).’

uSocial also sell you votes on Digg, Yahoo Buzz, StumbleUpon and Propeller.

On the face of it, I can see why a company, brand, individual might think - more followers, equals more potential business, which equals more money - right? Wrong!

As anyone, with even the smallest understanding of social media, will tell you, at the heart of social media is a number of basic elements such as listening, conversation, openness, community, reputation, trust…I could go on. So how does buying followers, friends or votes help?

Oh hang on, so the more votes, friends, followers you have the more important your business seems, the more traffic to your site and the more opportunity to buy your product/service, right? Wrong!

If I pay 50 people to go to a shop, let’s say the shop sells babies clothes, and they all turn up and make the shop look busy, how many people are going to stay in the shop for more than five seconds? Or listen to what the shop keeper has to say? Or tell their friends about the shop? Let alone buy anything? Not many because we didn’t check to see if those 50 people were relevant or even interested in buying clothes for babies. They’ve been paid to go there and they have zero interest in anything other than fulfilling that limited contract.

Ah but what about the people passing the shop, who see it’s busy and go in to see what the fuss is all about? Well, as soon as they find out there is nothing relevant and the people in the shop aren’t even interested, guess what, they’re off too!

So, I have purchased my 5,000 friends on Facebook, what do I do with them now? They have no interest in what I’m saying, no desire to engage in conversation, and will they even stay there?

But hang on, perhaps I’ve been too hasty, a look at the uSocial website tells me: ‘How we get you friends is simply by finding out exactly what industry, niche, or target market you are wanting to find people to target and then we go about attaining relevent friends for you and adding them to your Faceboook account. Every single person we gain for you will be real users and exactly relevant to what you are looking for — this is our guarantee.’ (BTW: the text is taken directly from the site, so forgive the typos)

There, doesn’t seem to be any confirmation of how they go about ‘attaining’ these relevant friends, and i fear the paid element may in fact tell us all we need to know, in which case I refer you to my example above.

This, in my personal opinion, is another example of old media rules being applied to a social media world. E.g. If I stick an advert in a newspaper with a readership of one million, I’ll get a massive return, easy! Advert placed, sit down and wait for phone to ring…you’ll be waiting a long time.

I’m afraid the bad news is there’s no quick win in a social media environment, and while this service may, and I stress may, get people to your website, I doubt they are interested in what you have to say, and on that point I agree completely with Chris Norton’s point in his post on the subject where he said: ‘Social media is about relationships and people need to remember that.’

Exactly.

      

Tags: buying friends, facebook, Social media, Social networking, twitter, usocial

This entry was posted on Friday, September 4th, 2009 at 3:19 pm and is filed under Blog, Digital communications, Digital media, PR, Social media, Social networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.