> that's why if you're looking for any info, searching on reddit usually yields much more objective and generally better results.
Agreed, I often default to Reddit or HN for a lot of stuff although there are an increasing number of obvious adverts disguised as genuine posts (see r/hailcorporate for some examples).
More difficult to spot are marketing firms who curate a bunch of fake accounts, make them seem like "real people" by posting random content but interspersing this with subtle ads. There was an AMA recently from someone working at a firm that does this, they even gave their accounts personalities by posting in specific related subs (e.g. hiking, outdoors) in order to advertise boots. Unfortunately I can't seem to find it now, but still my point is that even though Reddit generally leads to better advice take it with a grain of salt.
Although I don't see a reason not to trust this comment, the line about "we have seen great success with this method" had me wondering how they measure the impact of this strategy? It seems this would be quite time and effort intensive, therefore expensive. How do they know they can attribute sales to this since presumably they aren't providing affiliate links as that'd be too obvious?
I dated a woman that had this job, but using Facebook (this was some years ago too).
It was not just marketing, but PR too, for example she bragged about when Whirlpool had a serious problem with one of their washing machines in my country, and it was going viral, so Whirlpool paid the marketing agency to make all fake profiles (even ones not belonging to their campaigns) make other viral posts to drown out the washing machine one. She bragged about two things: 1. It worked, the "counter-viral" campaign successfully made people ignore the washing machine issue. 2. They got paid ludicrous amounts of money (she hinted that each account with 5000 followers, that was Facebook limit, was worth some thousands USD, and that they had many, many accounts, precisely to go around that 5000 follower limit, for example if a company ordered 50.000 followers from them, they would setup 10 fake accounts and try to attract 5000 real people in each, each account with different hobbies to try to attract different people).
EDIT: some other interesting info:
* They had a huge cache of personal photos, to make it look like the person was real, there are even stock photo agencies that create these photos, for example take a female and a male actor to tourist destinations and take pictures to make them look like a couple doing romantic things, then they would release the photos slowly, so people wouldn't notice it was fake, and to stretch their money for photo purchases.
* They would get sometimes employees with real hobbies, and have them take care of fake accounts with same hobbies, so a surfer for example would have some 8 accounts under her care, each for a different company, and write some surfing content that is real, but tweak and then repost on all 8, with differences, and adjusting to fit each profile.
* Another technique at the time was the sale of "instantaneous company profile", you made a fake profile, and made it get genuinely popular with a target demographic, then you sold it to someone, after the sale you could edit the account to turn it from a person to a fan-page, with the category correct for the company that bought it, so a company could buy a fan-page for them with 5000 real followers that actually are about the subject. I never asked how often people would realize what happened and unfollow... but I guessed most people wouldn't bother with unfollowing anyway.
The sheer amount of fabrication is nauseating. I suppose it's not much different than the business model of any common ad company at it's purest essence: customer manipulation
I know of a couple of folks that were in the business. Selling twitter profiles, Instagram profiles or asking users with >10k followers to make content ads that don’t look like ads.
Marketing is a massive business. It makes a shit ton of money. FB and GOOG are ad companies at the end of the day, and there’s ton of little companies that they nurture as side effects.
It makes sense. A lot or traditional ads are drowned in noise and even if they catch users attention, squashed by internal firewall and indexed under bs.
There are difinitely some posters, who are clearly promoting given brand, but.. 9/10 it is pretty apparent, so again drowned in HN sea.
Incidentally, have you tried Xyz vpn? Totally decentralized, easy setup and great customer service.
The next logical step—as terrifying as it is—is automation. Generate those people with GANs, then you 1) don't have to pay the photo companies (and producing photos with real actors in real locations has MASSIVE overhead compared to just some compute time) and 2) the photos can't be found online.
You can similarly generate the history and backstory of each fake person, complete with realistically banal social media posts, etc..
And hence we end up with an internet requiring verification via SMS to prove you're a real person or the stupid Google CAPTCHA images or simply having to upload your government issued photo ID.
IIRC this has already been spotted in action on Facebook. I can't find the article, but about a month or 2 ago there were thousands of profiles being created on Facebook with profiles pictures created using GANs.
The way Facebook works, you never see 90% of the people or pages you are following in your feed, and maybe 10% of the content from those. If I “liked” a page that turned into a washing machine page, I wouldn’t even know for months and when I saw it, I’d be confused about how I “liked” it in the first place, rather than connecting the old page to the new version.
Almost all of marketing statistics/metrics are correlation, not causation. They are mostly just looking at stats over time, trying only one new thing per quarter.
No way to know for sure if the new channel was actually the reason for success, but you can be fairly confident
I'm pretty sure I ran into an MLM that does this. They said they do "network marketing" with "social media" and represent big brands like Nike. I met with someone a couple times, but didn't continue to their seminar or whatever because they wanted me to do more than I was willing to do (in this case, get my wife to read a book and bring her). My guess is that you get paid based on some combination of your number of posts and your connections' posts.
It would be interesting to get an idea of what percentage of posts are from marketers.
Well, unscrupulous advertising and marketing is. I get the sentiment, because we are flooded with it. But there is honest and respectful advertising too... unfortunately, most companies gravitate towards making a quick buck instead of investing in earning trust.
Exactly. Letting people know you have a product/service which will make their life easier isn't a bad thing, and you have to have some way of communicating that to prospective buyers. The problem is when you start lying about your product, or use psychological tricks to get people to buy something they don't need.
It's just easier to trick people and prey on psychological triggers than it is to make totally truthful ads and high quality, reliable products and services.
The best advertising I have ever found is in the Overcast podcast app. I’ve found a few interesting podcasts based on the ads. Marco Arment (the developer) created his own ad platform for his app so he would know who is advertising and he wouldn’t have any mystery meet third party binary blob in his code.
Agreed, I often default to Reddit or HN for a lot of stuff although there are an increasing number of obvious adverts disguised as genuine posts (see r/hailcorporate for some examples).
More difficult to spot are marketing firms who curate a bunch of fake accounts, make them seem like "real people" by posting random content but interspersing this with subtle ads. There was an AMA recently from someone working at a firm that does this, they even gave their accounts personalities by posting in specific related subs (e.g. hiking, outdoors) in order to advertise boots. Unfortunately I can't seem to find it now, but still my point is that even though Reddit generally leads to better advice take it with a grain of salt.
Edit: Found it, wasn't an AMA but just a comment: https://old.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/f9rjh0/he_dressed_up_...
Although I don't see a reason not to trust this comment, the line about "we have seen great success with this method" had me wondering how they measure the impact of this strategy? It seems this would be quite time and effort intensive, therefore expensive. How do they know they can attribute sales to this since presumably they aren't providing affiliate links as that'd be too obvious?