Damien Mulley

There’s been a rush of late for agencies and marketing people embedded in companies to get higher numbers on their Facebook Pages to justify their time/money spent being all amazing social media ninja-y for clients.

As long as systems are in place that reward people for numbers, gaming will happen. If you just look at numbers only as a company, you will get gamed by some agencies. It’s actually easy for a business or a model to get 100,000 fans on Facebook very quickly. Or 30,000 Twitter followers. Or even more traffic to your client’s website after you “worked” on it.

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is a computer to human being interface. You write a mini-program and it gets executed by human beings for a few pennies a go. The example of the 10,000 sheep a few years ago is great. In World of Worldcraft and other games you can hire people in net cafes in the developing world to gold farm for you: Play the game for hundreds of hours to build up you points in the game so you don’t have to.

And so now we have the same for Facebook Fans, Twitter followers and so on. There are probably 1000s or 10s of 1000s of people in developing countries sitting in net cafes who are paid to create GMail acccounts, Facebook accounts and Twitter accounts and then are tasked to Fan or Follow accounts. Automated scripts can create traffic surges to sites or manual refreshes are done. All in the name of numbers. The same people who run dump and run spam campaigns are also hiring out their Fan services.

It makes sense (if you are morally compromised), sad sense that agencies in Ireland are boosting their own numbers in order to tell prospective clients that they will use their huge followings to get them traffic and fans too. The trouble is as Facebook does their purges, all those zombie accounts are killed off and off you go and start again.

How to spot bullshit:
Look at the Facebook Page without logging into Facebook. Is the Irish or UK company big in Malaysia and India? Look at the comments left on the Page, if any.
Look at the Twitter account. Same number of followers and following? 40,000 of both. Software is used to follow any account that auto-follows back. Zombie Twitter accounts. Check their bit.ly type links. Generally they get about 14 clicks, bit lame for 30,000 “followers”

I’m not pointing out the services but there are a lot out there where you too can avail. But hurry, the gaming has already moved on to Quora.

Forget about numbers
No, really. Get real people. That should be the endgame. Find genuine fans, be genuine with them. That spreads faster than fakery.

Simon Palmer from Republic PR, come on down. People are saying things on the Internet that he can’t control.

Simon wants a code of conduct and a watchdog for those that blog. I bet he’d also like women to lose that vote that we gifted them with recently.

Ideally, the Irish blogging sector should have a professional membership body with a code of conduct. Even better, they could come under the remit of a watchdog for blogs that would have a role similar to an ombudsman.

Simon suggests he contacted Irish bloggers to have coverage about a client removed. Can those bloggers he contacted step forward?

These days, though, news spreads fast, so the story was quickly on the blogs. When I started to contact those blogs, I presumed they would also want to ensure the information they were covering was correct.

The reaction, however, was surprising. The majority of bloggers couldn’t have cared less whether the details they’d printed were accurate or not.

How many bloggers? I’m thinking he contacted a dozen the way that’s phrased.

They seemed to think they had turned into Ireland Inc’s answer to Perez Hilton just because they were writing a blog. Others justified passing on inaccurate information by saying that they were repeating what had been written in the papers, which is simply passing the buck.

So come on folks. Can the Irish Perez Hiltons step forward and show us the emails that Simon Palmer sent you? No comments by Simon on any blogs either. Blogging relations 101?

The bit of the article I find most troubling and actually sinister is how Simon goes about his business with the media:

It allows me to bring them closer to the story by giving them‘‘ off the record’’ information, or details on an ‘‘unattributable basis’’, confident that I am protected by their professional standards and that what is agreed as off the record and unattributable will remain exactly that.

Unfortunately, this is not something I can feel confident of when dealing with most blogs.

Yeah bloggers have a low tolerance for bullshit and fakery I suppose. How sneaky is that? What a cynical way of dealing with the media. That’s the complete opposite to transparency and openness.

I’m not at all surprised it was someone from the PR world that wrote this. If ever there was an industry all about control, it’s this one. Well it used to be actually. Thank god this is changing though. It’s great to see so many Irish PR companies embrace the new ways of doing business and communicating. Many of those that have yet to do so are asking how to do it and are going about educating themselves. Not all though. Some seem to want to lock the doors and windows of their firm and hope that web thing will go away. Slightly embarassing too that the PR Institute of Ireland was all hip and cool by including a Twitter question in a recent exam. And getting it oh so wrong. Still, they tried.

I know, let’s censor and create a special code of conduct for PR companies that they have to tell 100% of the truth and can’t do the shadow lurking off-record bits anymore just because one of them is clueless. Yes, let’s rail against 1000s for one of them being a fool. Oh right yeah, that’d be stupid.

The Republic PR website is a hoot too. Check out their balog. Love this phrase too.

Marketing over the internet is a critical part of any companies marketing

Who the fuck wrote it? Marketing over the Internet. Is that MoIP like VoIP?

Update: The PRII have their AGM next week. Head along to Jurassic Park and spot a brontosaurus.

Tommy has his say.