Hippie: Why social media marketing is insidious
Not evil, although the word does imply an amount of wrongdoing. Let’s start from the premise that social networking is simply the amplifications of very old social structures. You always had family, friends, the people you knew from that book club you went to.
Say somebody you know, let’s call her Kelly, is moving New York City. She needs an apartment, but Kelly is not a dolt. She needs to arm herself with information, information of the real sort, before treading into heretofore unknown waters. She talks her extended family, an aunt who lived there a decade back, and some friends in her student film society at the college she just graduated from, who’ve moved there in the past year. She’s trying to find advice, not necessarily an apartment.
One day, she’s on the phone with her friend Iko (from last year’s film society). Iko’s coworker has a friend, who has a friend who is looking for a roommate. It’s nowhere near a done deal, but it’s much more than Kelly ever expected. She feels good that in exchange, one day, she can repay this favor in-kind.
Another calls comes in – Kelly doesn’t recognize the number – but she worries it might be something important. Apologizing to Iko, she momentarily switches over calls -
“I heard you’re looking for an apartment KELLY!” a voice says. “I have special deal on a cute and SASSY apartment in the Village. It’s going fast and the fee -”
Because Kelly is a sane being, she hangs up the phone and gets back to Iko. Iko, of course, was a little put off, but she’s curious. “Who was it?”
“Some telemarketer. I don’t get it, I’ve not signed up for any apartment listings or websites, how did they get my number?”
The story, as Unsolved Mysteries would say, is based on real events. Except Kelly is me, and I wasn’t on the phone. I sent a short message asking for advice on the subject to twitter, a service where I intentionally restrict who and what I talk to. But because twitter is searchable (truly one of it’s better features), some apartment company “helpfully” tweeted back that they had apartments for sale.
Simply: it’s abusing the trust of social interactions through friends or shared interests by adding a transaction and putting it on equal level with the honest, truly interactive conversation, whereever it’s being conducted, by phone or twitter where advice is not for sale.
Maybe this is naive, but it stands that I never asked for any apartment company to contact me, and now they’ve bothered me in the place where 99% of my attention is not devoted towards apartment searching.
And what if, it turns out, Iko calls and instead of offering up the possible roommate, or just general advice, she keeps insisting that I check this one apartment out. I try to ask her different questions, but it keeps coming back to “cute place in the Village” she keeps hearing about. It’s this hypothetical situation that I’m modeling Izea’s (nee Pay per Post) new program where friends tweet me about which brand of cookie or dishwashing detergent they are being paid to promote.
I’m getting information, but I’m not getting all of it. Because the other information isn’t sponsored.
