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How Much Would It Take For You To Sell To Your Friends; Apparently Very Little!
As we all build larger and larger "friend" lists on the social services (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.), how much would it take before you are willing to spam your friends for either direct money or the promise of a cash payment? "Everyone’s got a price" is a phrase we’ve heard for a long time – what’s your price?
I started to think about this topic when Robert Scoble broke the Facebook rules by exporting his contacts for some "test" with Plaxo. Scoble says the data wasn’t used in any bad manner but what if it was? If it’s easy to pull data from a contact list, could it be a spammer’s dream? Using Scoble as an example (I am not suggesting he is doing this), he has 4.999 friends on Facebook and 6,900 followers on Twitter. Even without exporting the data, how much would it take for a marketer to pay Scoble to put an advert into his feed? Could there be a price?
This week we had the launch of NotchUp – a site that will make you money when you go on job interviews. Part of the signup process allows you to spam your contact list to join as well. If you do the spam, you make 10% of whatever your contacts make by using NotchUp. Apparently that’s enough for some people to sell out their contacts because I’ve received six spam messages so far. The selling pitch from NotchUp is "get to your contacts before someone else does!" I’ve been seeing a large number of new users to CN via a search for Notchup – Cyndy believes it’s due to all of the spams and the spammee wanting to know what the service is about before clicking the link. Louis Gray and Stephanie Booth have some additional thoughts on the NotchUp spam.
Will we see a PayPerFriend type service? "Send our marketing messages to your friends and make 1 cent per message." Would you be open to getting some marketing messages in a Twitter feed or Facebook news feed? Beacon is already selling you out to your friends it and Facebook is profiting – why shouldn’t you be able to get some of that revenue as well?
You purchase a shirt at the Gap and then can save 10% by sending a note about your purchase to your Twitter stream. Might sound horrible but is it?
Would you sell out your contacts? Would you stick a paid message into your stream? Would you scrape your contact’s emails and sell them? If so, what would take? Feel free to reply anonymously in the contacts below.
Now I know to keep my contact info as far away from Mahalo as possible.
Well i wouldn’t say I run it! Also I approach social media marketing a bit different these days but yes those talents go into my mahalo work as well :) Now its less about automation /shire numbers and more about the “human touch”.
might as well stop using all social networks, in fact anywhere you turn over your info! Actually that’s a bit tin-foil hat, your data is relatively safe on most social nets, while the connection or network can be sold your personal info is typically hidden. Even our our site, as a guide I can not see any personal info about you other than your username.
Also with scoble, if you are a “friend” with him on one of the various sites you just became a friend with fast company as well. :)
Sean
Many moons ago I was able to buy myspace profiles from users who were tired of the site but had 5K-25K friends on their profiles. The cost was normally around $150, I could then use those friends to market various products to via bulletins. After building up to around 100-200K friends it was actually very profitable.
Most had no idea they had even been “sold” :) Evil?
and now you run mahalo? coinkinky dink?
I hate these formulaic canned invites from any kind of social networking site, in which people send the standard text with their own name on it. LinkedIn, Plaxo, NotchUp, whatever — if you don’t care enough to change the text, my opinion of you and of our relationship went down.
As for “selling out one’s friends” — if it’s coming over your signature, what you’re really selling is their time and your credibility. It costs a lot to get me to do that. Offer me $7,500 to write a short white paper or do a webcast, and I’ll explain what else you have to give me in addition for me to be willing. And I’ll only do it if you’re content with me saying what I truly believe, even if that isn’t nearly as useful to you as you’d want.
CAM
All those pitches remind me of the spiel you hear from some of the network marketing schemes — “all you have to do is tell your friends about these great products and you make money!”
The aggro you get from subjecting your actual friends and family to these lame sales pitches is not worth the minimal amounts of cash the whole scheme generates.
Of course, for someone like Scoble, whose list is 99% contacts, not real friends, it might be a different story.
Interesting. I don’t think I’d want anything to do with this, but it’s not quite a black and white issue. If there was something I would recommend anyway, I might be willing to accept some dosh for pimping it. But even then, only selectively and it would have to be something I believed in anyway. And I think I’d want it to be distinguishable in some fashion from “organic” content.
Actually the more I think about it, that’s too much crap to worry about. Nah, I don’t think I’d ever do it. :-)
Seriously. NotchUp lit up the Java community and has apparently spread out larger than I would have given it credit for. It looks like a huge pyramid scheme and when I saw the LinkedIn bit I closed right out. However, even Twitter is going this route, from what I’ve seen. I noticed one of my Facebook friends uses Twitter, and went to follow, only to discover that I can’t seem to SEARCH until I connect to my Gmail contacts.
If this is the future of data portability, I’m going back to my stone tablet and chisel.
@rslux Thank you for actually verbalizing what I’ve been trying to distill. Scoble does have a lot of contacts who really aren’t friends. I may have a small number, but I actually have conversations with the people in my lists. ;)
@cn “coinky dink” made me actually LOL.