By B.L. Ochman
What price influence? Pretty cheap, at least on eBay.
Take a look at how some “influence” is gained.
Like the street sellers with dozens of “gold” watches inside their coats, eBay sellers peddle everything from Twitter followers and list, to Facebook Likes and Google+ invites. Here are a few of the favorite watches for nurses. In this case, searching for the best watch, you can wear to work.
If you’re making media buying decisions, creating marketing and advertising plans and budgets based on influence research, you need to take a good, hard look at the platforms you use to monitor social media. And have a look at what some companies buy on eBay.
“>Buy Google+ invites
The top-rated seller, whose eBay rating is 98.8% positive, promises:
If you want to buy Facebook fans, this top-rated seller promises you that “these are 100% guaranteed fans and not just Invites. The number of fans that you purchase from us is the minimum number of fans you will receive, you will nearly always get a few more fans then you’ve paid for.”
And he asks:” Why would I want to buy Facebook Fans? Using social media can be one of the most effective and easiest ways to interact with potential new customers and grow a database of people interested in your brand! You could have your brand in front of a potential customer each time they login to their facebook account for free, why wouldn’t you want more fans!”
There currently are more than 350 platforms that can be used to monitor social media, count followers and Likes, and identify influencers. They can cost up to $10K a month. The truth is, you may not really know if your marketing dollars are being spent wisely, but you definitely can make lots of pretty charts and graphs.
This is… terrible… but at the same time there’s still demand!! I actually had a conversation just recently with a potential client who needed “social media consulting” but in reality just wanted to increase the number of likes from 500 to 5000 because “if we close 10%…”
This kind of thinking is beyond archaic and I’m glad to see some of these ebay folks are cashing in.
Thank you for posting this! I’m sharing it with my network right now.
Ernest.
This is… terrible… but at the same time there’s still demand!! I actually had a conversation just recently with a potential client who needed “social media consulting” but in reality just wanted to increase the number of likes from 500 to 5000 because “if we close 10%…”
I’m quite agree with the idea that everyone could be an online publisher with social media and everyone has the power to influence the brand. Any consumer may post a blog or something else to talk about your product which will definitely have positive or negative influences on your brand and your company. That’s the situation PR2.0 has to deal with.
I’m quite agree with the idea that everyone could be an online publisher with social media and everyone has the power to influence the brand. Any consumer may post a blog or something else to talk about your product which will definitely have positive or negative influences on your brand and your company. That’s the situation PR2.0 has to deal with.