How Companies Buy Facebook Friends, Likes, And Buzz

#1 PCWorld

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Posted 25 May 2012 - 06:14 AM

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#2 DelTheDad

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Posted 27 May 2012 - 12:06 PM

Bloggers even do it for their pages for Alexa traffic. They do it for twitter followers also. Then they use these numbers to make themselves out to be deserving over people who work hard to gain their numbers legitimately. I hope more people speak up in this. I read somewhere that using scripts to reload your webpage or log, can boost numbers in page ranking sites like Alexa.

#3 Evildave

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Posted 27 May 2012 - 12:19 PM

Yes, shilling is a booming class of work-at-home internet career.

Sort of like a human powered botnet. Go onto amazon and post lots of glowing reviews for a store or product, all from different IP addresses. Because there's nothing, or to sweep a negative review like 'It burst into flames and killed my cat' onto the back pages. The best way to do the latter is to post more 'one star' reviews about stupid things, like 'it came with no batteries', while adding lots of higher reviews.

Posting fake reviews, fake blogs, fake articles, fake bids (to drive a price up), etc. Even FAKE political outrage. Heck, some companies are named explicitly in the Wikipedia article for astroturfing.
http://en.wikipedia....ki/Astroturfing

It has another name, of course. Less ill favored than 'shill'.

It's 'Online Reputation Management'.

We'll drown out dissenting opinions, even get them deleted or de-indexed from search engines, make your products and services out to be genius touched by angels, etc.

When someone searches for what you sell, you will look like THE ONE. Just fork over the cash!

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#4 Evildave

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Posted 29 May 2012 - 03:36 PM

40% of social media accounts are SPAMMERS
http://www.businessw...it-social-media

Criticism of Microsoft Criticism of Apple Criticism of Google

#5 ronin7752

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Posted 29 May 2012 - 05:02 PM

Great work Dan! This is the kind of IT journalism we need *lots* more of!!

90% of being smart is knowing what you're dumb at.

#6 JamesEdmonds

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Posted 11 August 2012 - 11:40 PM

Television has done it for years. 9 out of ten dentist agree. Whats the difference?

#7 JamesEdmonds

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Posted 11 August 2012 - 11:41 PM

Television been doing it forever also, 9 out of dentist agree.

#8 jjfenton

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Posted 10 January 2013 - 03:13 PM

Great article! This gives me some clarity into what happened to our fanbase early one when we used an outside agency to help build our social media efforts.

I noticed that our fans grew over a weekend by 224% and most of them were from Eastern Europe. After further investigation, I saw that most of the accounts seemed fake. The agency said this was probably the result of a post to a syndication network that was picked up by some operation in Eastern Europe. Does this sound possible?

Would love to hear everyone's thoughts.