The Final Frontier for Advertising?
A hired tweeter has earned $3,000 for pushing a button. He finds ads he likes and is paid to post them to all his friends and followers on Twitter. Is this the final frontier for advertising? Intercepting people’s conversations and taking part in their relationships to push forward a brand?
Twitter and Facebook have been developing systems in which users are paid to send ads out to their friends every now and then or having adverts on their Facebook page. The idea is that consumers disregard everything excepting word of mouth recommendations. Amazon has recently started paying commission to people who refer friend on to Amazon via Twitter posts. The biggest challenge is tapping into the twitter users with influence. Meaning that the most popular bloggers, Tweeters and Facebookers (?) could earn an impressive sum with celebs such as Kim Kardishan and Russel Brand earning around $10, 000 per message.
Are advertisers shooting themselves in the foot though? Joey Caroni, a founder of Peer2 has said ‘We don’t want to create an army of spammers, and we’re not trying to turn Facebook and twitter into one giant spam network’… ‘All we are trying to do is to get consumers to become marketers for us.’ It seems to many people that these type of ads would be turning customers away from the social media phenomenon that is so perfect for adverting. These ads will undermine people’s credibility as bloggers, interfering with your relationships with friend and followers and one blogger, Robert Scoble has said he stops following people who send him adverts on Twitter.
A more authentic and less interfering idea is being worked on by Likes.com. They plan to encourage bloggers to write about their personal tastes in things such as books, TV shows, and products and then publish these on their pages. This retains the authenticity and transparency that the web is so valued for by consumers. Likes.com can then pay people for advertising what they genuinely recommend. However this equally could turn into a way of bribing people to advertise, bringing down the quality of social media, by offering enough money for people to recommend every product under the sun. However they are trying to limit it to stop people loosing their popularity online.
It seems to me though that advertisers are taking advantage of social media. By exploiting peoples relationships with ads may be the final frontier for marketing but sites such a Twitter could quickly loose popularity without authenticity ad transparency which will deprive advertisers of one of the best marketing tools around.
Images by FranUlloa
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This is the very reason i just closed my facebook account. I counted, out of my 516 friends, 249 were posting all shit on my wall or spamming me day and night with invites to fan pages.
It just shows how desperate these social networks are getting. They can’t find a mature revenue model so they become spammers. What’s the difference between these guys and the ones who send spam emails? Both should be hanged!