Social Bribery, Empire Avenue & the Story of Buying Engagement
What would be your first impression be if someone with 60,000 Twitter followers followed you? Or someone with 40,000 Google+ followers circled you? Would you be impressed?
What is your first thought if you see a Facebook fan page with 20,000 likes and each post has dozens of comments and likes? Impressed by their popularity and importance?
To me, buying likes, followers and engagement is obviously not a good idea. I also see more and more people seeing that it doesn’t pay to pay for boosting your social metrics. I’ve been surprised at how popular my article on 4 Reasons why you should NOT buy Followers has become: http://iag.me/socialmedia/4-reasons-why-you-should-not-buy-followers/
I wrote it a few years back, but it’s now my 2nd most popular article.
In the article I give 4 reasons:
** Low Engagement / Low Edgerank Score
** You end up spamming your followers
** Loss of Integrity and Reputation
** You’ll get found out!
If you want to buy followers, it’s easy to do so- just head on down to Fiverr and use one of the plethora of dodgy follower packages people are selling. You’ll end up with an army of zombie spam robots though and potentially be a victim of one of the four points I shared above.
I hope that most people agree with me that buying followers is bad, but what about trading social metrics? What about using virtual currencies? And at this point, I’d like to introduce you to Empire Avenue.
Empire Avenue
Empire Avenue has been around for years, and is a virtual social media stock market. It’s a way of earning virtual currency based on your social activity. Back in the day (and when I had a little more time) I was an active user- selling and buying social stocks and building up a community with interesting people. I used it purely as a game, and an interesting way to measure my activity across my social networks. It was kind of fun, albeit in a bit of a sad way!
However, the longer I played it, the more the darker side of Empire Avenue reared its head. Empire Avenue missions. To begin with missions seemed to be an interesting way to share your content and get people to read it, or even share and leave a comment, but something about it wasn’t right.
Let me explain EA missions. By completing a mission, you can earn virtual currency (known as Eaves). The mission creator would allocate a budget of their virtual currency and part of that would go to me on completion of the mission. The mission could be visiting an article of theirs, or it could be leaving a comment or liking it- or perhaps following them back.
I started to see how so many people could get so many +1s, likes and retweets on the various social networks. By setting up a Twitter mission, I could easily get a tweet retweeted dozens of times. I could get posts on Google+ +1’d 40 or 50 times. I could boost the number of Twitter followers I had, or boost the number of comments on my blog.
I would be effectively paying for these people to interact with my stuff!
The Power (and Danger) of Social Proof
There’s nothing new about this. Back in the 18th and 19th centuries, theatre and opera house owners would often pay for people to shout and cheer at the end (and extras for standing ovations!). Restaurants would pay for people to sit at the front to appear busy (and popular).
Nothing has changed. It’s another example of social proof being manipulated. Social proof is powerful psychology- we investigate the validity or true worth of something when you can look what other humans are doing. If 200 people like a Google+ post, then surely it must be good?! If someone has 120,000 Twitter followers, surely they must be influential in their field and worth listening to?
So, what about Empire Avenue?
To be honest, it wasn’t until I read what was to be become a very popular article by Rob Zaleski called “How Empire Avenue Crushed my Soul”:
http://www.businessesgrow.com/2014/01/08/how-empire-avenue-crushed-my-soul/
The article was on one of my favourite marketers’ blogs- Mark Schaefer.
After reading the article, it suddenly all made sense to me- aren’t Empire Avenue missions all about social bribery?
I won’t repeat any of the article here (because I highly recommend that you read it). It’s over a year old, but it is still relevant- because social bribery is still rampant on the web!
Is social bribery all that bad?
Am I being too harsh? Isn’t “bribery” too strong a word to use in this case? I’d love to hear your point of view.
And what about other tools such as ViralWoot? ViralWoot is a tool where you pay (again using virtual currency) for other people to like you, repin and like your pins. You earn credits by pinning/liking other people’s pins or following them back- or you could pay with real money. There’s also JustRetweet which works in a similar way. Do these tools fall into the Dark Side of Social Media? Let me know what you think!
This article came about after chatting with various other people recently. I’d also like to ping some other people who might be interested in the discussion: Ileane Smith, Carol Lynn Rivera, Ralph M. Rivera, Jason T. Wiser, Alisa Meredith, Liz Jostes, Mike Allton, Dustin W. Stout, Mark Traphagen, Brooke Ballard , Mike Brooks, Mallie Hart, martin shervington, David Amerland, Christine DeGraff, Mark Schaefer, Alois Bělaška, Lee Smallwood & John Dietrich
Let me know what you think!
#SocialProof #Pyschology #SocialMedia
http://www.businessesgrow.com/2014/01/08/how-empire-avenue-crushed-my-soul
