One of the downsides of the growing importance of web communities is that marketers will attempt to manipulate them to promote their products. That isn’t anything new - people were spamming forums a decade ago, and were probably doing the same since the earliest days of the BBS. The greater the traffic at a site, the more attractive it is as a spam target. Digg.com has seen its share of promotion attempts, as an article that makes the front page of Digg will see a quick and massive influx of traffic. Now, Greg Sandoval of CNET reports in Digg continues to battle phony stories that the social site banned, and then reinstated, one of their most popular users.
The Digg user, Karim Yergaliyev, apparently accepted an offer of free phone services to promote an article about JetNumbers, a firm which offers local phone numbers in different countries. JetNumbers contacted a few dozen top Digg users with an offer of cash and/or no cost services in return for promoting a story about their company. Yergaliyev was the only one who took them up on their offer. His rather lame explanation was that he had just met a girl, and was in the mood to be helpful. Right…
The Bigger Picture. This episode, though trivial by itself, shows some important facets of web communities, Web 2.0, and the idea of user-driven websites. The first is that the subject of this story isn’t a well-known journalist, a corporate executive, an entertainment celebrity, or any other kind of traditional influencer. Rather, he’s a nineteen year old who probably spends way too much time on his computer. New media influencers are a whole different breed, and they may bring far less experience and judgment to the process than old media journalists.
The second aspect is how cheaply influence can be bought. Some free phone numbers? I would hope that any self-respecting reporter for the New York Times would hold out for a more substantial cash payment. Yergaliyev apparently isn’t the only Web 2.0 influencer with a low price tag. Entire businesses are springing up around the idea of paying bloggers to post about whatever product, company, or service is being promoted. I ran into some of these vendors at WebmasterWorld’s Pubcon, and was surprised by both the shameless business model and the ridiculously low rates the firms proposed to pay bloggers. The concept didn’t interest me and I didn’t get into a discussion about whether rates were better for more popular blogs, but at first glance it looked like a blogger would have to do a lot of spamming just to earn beer money.
Unfortunately, all this will lead to an even greater mistrust of Web content. We may see brand names (whether they are big corporations or celebrity bloggers) increase in importance as Web users try to avoid content that may be tainted by promotion.
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