When you think of services offering to get you more fans, followers, and friends on social media sites, a few of words come to mind: spammy, scammy , and sad . Purchasing fans is taking the easy way out. Instead of building up a community of followers who actually appreciate what you (or your company) has to say, you can give off the appearance of popularity with a store-bought set of fans. While no one in their right mind will come out and say that the social media "marketing" services that deliver followers and fans are worthwhile, the truth is that many people and businesses are using them anyway, even if they won't admit it. But can any of these services really be trusted? Sponsor One of the most notorious companies involved in the "fans for sale" business is USocial . Earlier this year, they were cited in an L.A. Times article regarding their service for gaming Digg , the social news website that relies on user votes to promote stories to the homepage. Stories that make it to Digg's front page end up receiving massive amounts of traffic - tens of thousands of visitors within hours. Those numbers are tempting. In fact, they're too tempting for some to resist, apparently. According to USocial's founder, organizations like a Darfur foundation, the U.S. Marines, the Mormon Church, and the Korean Department of Tourism had all signed up to used the service. In addition to gaming the social news sites, USocial also offers services for gaining more followers on Twitter, more fans on Facebook, and more recently, more views on YouTube. This latest offering flat-out guarantees your viral video's success by delivering more traffic and more views to your video pages. Does all this sound too good to be true? Well, it probably is. Only last month, Facebook sent USocial a cease-and-desist letter to the company after an investigation revealed USocial was breaking multiple laws, including illegally accessing the Facebook website and violating the Terms of Service. Among the violations, Facebook stated USocial was sending spam, using web tools to harvest pages, and getting login names and by accessing accounts that did not belong to the marketing firm. Yes, that last one sounds a lot like hacking, doesn't it? Does your business really want fans who were obtained in that way? According to Dominic Holland, founder of Viralee , a new competitor to USocial, his business offers a better way. In an article on Facebook-watching blog AllFacebook , Holland was quoted as saying "We do not take control of any users account at any time. We create a page for the user and market it within and externally to Facebook." One the surface, that sounds more on the up-and-up, but Holland, whose service sells Facebook fans at 10 cents each, won't say exactly how those fans are acquired...and the Viralee website doesn't explain either. What it does show is the company's past efforts which include fan pages for "Kisses," "Hugs," and "Pizza" as well as ongoing efforts which include various sports teams, Australia, and the charity Movember . In the comments of the AllFacebook post, Holland responds to those questioning whether these "fans" are actually from the U.S. by responding that the service can provide targeted fans. Not that it does by default, just that it can. He also defends the "pay for fans" model by explaining that once you've acquired a good number of these purchased fans, you're then exposed to the friend groups of those fans as well. It sounds like he's saying store-bought fans are just a kick-start method for generating a fan base. The initial group is there to help start the organic growth that comes from natural discovery. Still, it's hard to feel anything but skepticism for a business whose Twitter account looks like spam bot, filled with keyword-based updates like "performance based advertising," "pay per sale," and "pay per lead," instead of any actual conversation. And considering that Holland was responding on AllFacebook as Viralee's founder using Facebook Conenct, you would think he would have updated his Facebook photo to something a little more... uh ...professional. While there's nothing wrong with posting "party pics" on Facebook, if you're publicly representing a company, this is not the sort of image that engenders trust...especially if you're asking for people's money. At the end of the day, companies like Viralee and USocial keep their "marketing" techniques under wraps and undisclosed. They promise fans but not how they'll get them or whether they're legit. And that's because they're probably not. But the argument for using these services - as scammy and spammy as they seem to be - is that they let you get a head start on building your social media profile. First come the store-bought fans, then come the real ones. Or so they say. Although few are willing to go on record admitting they're involved with services like this, there's no doubt that many people and businesses are. But the question remains: does any of this really work? And even if it does, is this how you wanted to achieve success? Discuss

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Are Store-Bought Fans Worth It?

Recently I was the keynote speaker at the Unlimited Potential W2W (Wellington to the World) event in Wellington, New Zealand. The topic of my presentation was running a virtual company . In the presentation, written by our Marketing Manager Elyssa Pallai , I spoke about the unique nature of ReadWriteWeb's virtual business model and culture. Watch the video of my entire presentation below, for details of how our company is run and the Internet tools we use. Sponsor As I explain in the video, ReadWriteWeb is a totally virtual organization. We have no head office, or any office for that matter. Our team work from home or on the road, around the globe, in multiple time-zones, 24/7. Being totally virtual is about a cultural change - a mind shift. Presentation, video-taped by Spring TV and available on Viddler : Slides, via Slideshare : Discuss

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Totally Virtual: How ReadWriteWeb Operates

Twitter's default URL shortening service Bit.ly announced steps today to stop phishing and malware attacks from being passed around online through its service. If effective, the effort should help a whole lot of people save face and prevent those moments of panic when you're afraid you may have lost access to your Twitter account forever. Really, though, people who take tech seriously don't fall for those kinds of things, right? Wrong! Below we offer the job titles of some of the most surprising people we've received phishing direct messages from over the last several months. It's a pretty surprising list. Sponsor May this serve as a memorial and a reminder that when new communication media emerge - even the most savvy people can get on board and fall for the oldest tricks in the book. Remember also, this could happen to any of us (apparently, perhaps) and thus the old saying "there, but for the grace of the Fail Whale, go I." "I made $300 today with http://ifortune4u.com" - and assorted variations... Bio: Market analyst following datacenters, energy efficiency, and blade servers. That's complicated stuff but probably pretty mechanical. No wonder a little human-engineering was able to overcome this person's defenses. Bio: Enterprise Comms Analyst That's Comms as in communications? Bio: Industry analyst: enterprise communications [Different person, same analyst firm as the above] Oops. Why are these analysts, some of whom charge up to $1000 per hour for their work, falling for a scam that promises relatively small sums of money? Bio: Consultant in large scale data warehousing. Looks like just a little bit of your data just got warehoused! Bio: Strategy planning at [Giant European Firm] Enterprise Communications How's this for an enterprise strategy? Know a phishing scam when you see one. Bio: Customer Interaction Analyst at [Giant Marketing Research and Analyst Firm] / Speech Reco and UI Geek / Trendspotter Oh my... Bio: an investor and co-founder of [common web 2.0 term].com; a founding partner and Vice-President in [big Web 1.0 company]...8 million page-views and 1 million unique visitors per month...with zero marketing budget. Surely there were people pulling scams like this back when you were...building a website with 8m monthly pageviews...with zero marketing budget... Want to brush up on your social networking skills, so you can stay off of lists like this? Check out Sarah Perez's post from October How to Avoid Malware on Facebook and Twitter: 8 Best Practicies . You can find the whole ReadWriteWeb team on Twitter here . You can follow us with the knowledge that we aren't going to spam you with scammy Direct Messages - or at least if we do you can write a blog post teasing us about it. Discuss

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7 High-Tech Twitter Users Who Fell For Phishing Scams

It's only late afternoon and we've already got a Thanksgiving mystery. API strategist Ben Metcalfe and former SVP of Marketing for Tesla Motors

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Building Better Bloggers: The Dream Communication Pipeline

Twitter turned on its long-awaited Geolocation API today, meaning that users can opt-in to having their messages annotated with their exact locations. The significance of this is made clear by comparing it with last week's release of 500 million time-stamped Twitter messages for analysis. "You take this data, mash it up with any other very large corpus of data with timestamps," Flip Kroner of data marketplace Infochimps told us, "and you've got a web app." Today's announcement of the availability of location data means the same thing: you take this data, mash it up with any other data with location information and you've got an app. From Digg or StumbleUpon for your favorite coffee shop to political and disease tracking - there's a whole lot that's possible. Sponsor Exposing location data is an opt-in feature for users, but 3rd party app developers are being told to "encourage your users to enable it by sending them to their settings page." Users will have to be both prompted and incentivized. Fortunately, a location-aware Twitter experience is something that will enable developers to deliver value to individual users immediately and in isolation - it doesn't have to be one of those situations where "this will be cool once other people I know are using it." With the announcement today of Twitter search results being added to Yahoo News searches, Twitter data is now being used by all three of the major search engines. (Google's implementation is still forthcoming, but the deal is done.) It might be one of the big players, but it's more likely to be small innovators that make creative use of the new location data. These are possible Twitter use cases, but the standardized Activity Streams spec that Facebook, MySpace, Netflix and others now support also includes a geolocation field - so if the walls around Twitter ever fall to interoperability then we could be seeing innovations like these across all kinds of networks. Here are some of the kinds of things we expect, or would like, to see. "Party Over Here" Bot: Automated Geo-Replies Want to know when you're near a certain type of public event, great wine shops or deals at Macy's? How about when friends, close friends or friends-of-friends are near? It's not hard to imagine a bot that you subscribe to on Twitter, that then auto-subscribes to you, notices when you "check in" at a new location and automatically sends you a reply when whatever or whomever you're interested in is near that location. How about a bot you can Tweet "@whereami" to and that @'s you back with a link or stats about the location you're in: nearby restaurant reviews, notable landmarks, crime rates, apartments for rent. Talk about augmented reality! How about a bot you can Tweet "@whereami" to and that @'s you back with a link or stats about the location you're in: nearby restaurant reviews, notable landmarks, crime rates, apartments for rent. Talk about augmented reality! There are all kinds of bots built on Twitter already, but one that can mash-up your physical location with its data store is going to be a lot more useful than a bot that tells you when a sensor noticed your plants need to be watered. These are the kinds of services that will incentivize Twitter users to expose their location data. Assuming a substantial number of people make that choice, here are a few other examples that come to mind. Articles Being Shared From This Coffee Shop Today Include... Imagine being the location-equivalent of Digg-submitter of your favorite coffee shop's hottest online articles each day. Most Twitter search engines index not just the 140 characters in a message, but the text in links being shared as well. If you think people like being the Foursquare mayor of a popular coffee shop, imagine being the location-equivalent of Digg-submitter of your favorite coffee shop's hottest online articles each day. Think people just stare at their computers in public these days? A service like this could shake that up. How about a StumbleUpon implementation that lets you stumble and read articles from people who've Tweeted from the same place you're in. Imagine walking down the street and considering two competing coffee shops; what's been on the reading list of each today? News at 11: Local Interest Survey Tool Think local TV news and newspaper companies would be interested in a stream of hot topics in their local area? They'd be foolish not to; what a great way to discover breaking local news to report on. Does your local newspaper print a selection of letters mailed in each week, but list the number of total letters received on the hottest topics of the week? Imagine capturing that local chatter from a much larger sampling of people. Local tweets plus an entity extraction algorithm. Cop Watcher Imagine taking a map of tweets discussing criminal activity, or police misconduct, in a city and comparing it with a map of the same from local police agencies. Some places that warrant more official attention could be exposed. Inventory Forecast If people in a certain city are twittering like fiends about a new product hitting the market, store orders, marketing and other parts of the supply chain could benefit from an earlier warning about it. Politics & Marketing People in Oregon are sharing a Huffington Post article about today's health care reform announcement a lot? In Seattle, Washington perhaps not so much? Political organizers of a certain persuasion could find that information actionable. Want to know what news outlets are on the ascent with people of a certain political persuasion? Cross reference your shared links from users in a location and a map of political contributions for the last election. Want to know what news outlets are on the ascent with people of a certain political persuasion? Cross reference your shared links from users in a location and a map of political contributions for the last election. How about unearthing Twitter users posting about environmental issues who also live in areas with environmental issues that an organization is working on. Want to measure local effectiveness of marketing campaigns? Imagine Radian6 or ScoutLabs using the location API. That's only a mater of time. Flu Trends+ Think Google's use of search data to map out global disease trends is cool ? Why stop there? How about pro-active messages (via Twitter) when there's an increase in messages about being sick in your area? Of course all of this will work better if more people are using Twitter and if people expose their location data, but that may very well happen. Prompting and individual incentives could be big drivers. The degree to which Twitter data is open for analysis by outside parties is a huge asset. What would you like to see cross-referenced with Twitter location data? Thanks for visiting ReadWriteWeb - we want to thank P2P-powered real-time search engine Faroo for making it possible for us to bring this site to you. Faroo is an innovative way to find out the hottest, freshest content on the web. Like SETI-at-home, Faroo's distributed architecture is indexing the real-time web while ensuring user privacy by avoiding centralized storage of data. The company says it can do things with Chinese-language content that no other real-time search engine can, too. Check it out at Faroo.com. Discuss

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What Twitter's New Geolocation Makes Possible