Anyone been spammed on Facebook yet? I don’t mean signing up to a list or group and getting multiple emails. I do mean getting spammed with “friend” requests.
   People like Robert Scoble will be familiar with that, but some of us with only a fraction of his presence on the web aren’t quite as used to it.
   A few months back, I received a bunch of requests from strangers in the fashion industry. I won’t get more specific than that, but their timing was suspect. I did learn that most of the requests were orchestrated by one or two people and they were not actually sent by the persons named.
   I still linked a few of the people and put them on limited-profile access, giving them the benefit of the doubt, but when I realized that they were going to other team members at Lucire, as each was added to the Facebook group there, I considered them to be spammers. This may be targeted better than most spam, but it plain didn’t feel right if the campaign is hitting to each team member in turn. Lucire editors et al do not join Facebook to be spammed.
   I did not care about these people’s updates on the first page of Facebook, because whatever they added was no better than an advertisement. And there are ads on Facebook already. I didn’t need any among my friend updates.
   I’m sure they would have still got a few links from people like me, unaware that this was happening on a wider scale. But at a small company, people talk. And when we all get requested by the same strangers in an orchestrated campaign, then it doesn’t look good. I advised team members to reject those requests and broke the connections I had.
   Facebook should be a personal tool. Yes, companies are on it. Some are even signed up as people (the American edition of Marie Claire, for instance, is signed up as a person, rather than a group). Some people might have their staff update pages, but I can deal with that if that person is someone I actually know. Or if I actually sought out those companies myself. But there’s nothing personal about targeted advertising from strangers. You don’t even need to be a big corporation to annoy people on social networks.

Tags: advertising, Facebook, spam, campaign, social networks, ad Posted by Jack Yan, 01:01  permalink

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