Social Media: Are You in Danger of Being Scalejacked?

Amassing a Massive Audience Is Rarely the Right Strategy

Posted by Dave Balter on 07.17.09 @ 08:00 AM

Dave Balter

In the world of social media, scale is everything. Media darlings Twitter and Facebook boast, what, 30 sextillion members? It's enough to cause marketers to practically foam at the mouth.

But is scale really everything? After all, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Friendster enjoyed unprecedented scale. Now try to find someone who'd so much as admit ever having an account. Some observers predict MySpace may follow, despite attracting a staggering 63 million monthly visitors.

Scale for social media is fundamentally different than scale for traditional media. Social scale and the content it brings are user-generated, which creates a set of hazards that never existed for traditional media -- and we're starting to see signs of turmoil for marketers. Just as brand managers are frantically trying to carve off their slice of Facebook and Twitter's scale, they're stepping onto the landmine that can't be ignored: scalejacking.

Scalejacking is the ability for social media's scale to be hijacked and tapped into by anyone, at any time. In essence, the strength of the social-media channel -- the ability to aggregate consumers instantly and effortlessly -- is about to become its greatest weakness. It takes just seconds to update your status and a single click to become a fan of a brand. Before we watched, listened or read only what was produced for us. Now we create our own audiences, and it's as easy to build one as it is to "jack" its scale.

You can see the faint embers of the problems starting to glow red hot. Many of us have already received of our first social spam and viruses, but those are expected annoyances. The issues we're about to face threaten the momentum of the social-media industry as a whole. The instances this channel, quite simply, being hijacked. Here are a few recent examples:

In the past few weeks, we've seen spate of fake celebrity death notices. Yes, Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson have all passed on. No, Britney Spears and Harrison Ford have not. These relatively harmless (to all but Britney and Harrison, that is) hoaxes were propagated by the rapid reproduction of status updates and retweets, with the intent of siphoning traffic to other areas of the internet.

One marketer boasts a Facebook fan-page audience of more than 2.5 million members, yet his brand is still struggling to figure out exactly how to manage that audience within its corporate guidelines. The dilemma presented an opportunity for one plucky consumer, who decided to judo the massive community into a virtual storefront for his available-for-purchase, Dali-influenced surrealist paintings, complete with melty heads and spacey moonscape horizons. One fan page, officially scalejacked.

Twitter's trend list is ripe for scalejacking. Want a shortcut to getting a tweet read by tens of thousands? Watch the daily trending-topics list and append those hashtags to your own tweets. Presto: massive-audience time.

Speaking of Twitter trending, Pete Blackshaw recently highlighted concerns about Twitter Trend-Spiking. Here's how it works: Nefarious bastards create multiple accounts and then generate a concentration of tweets about the same subject, thrusting the message to the top of Twitter trends, thereby creating a false impression of organic buzz.

An advertising-agency CEO once shared this advice with me: "Until you can impact 40 million consumers, the top 40 advertisers won't be interested." The desire for scale at any cost is exactly why social media's massive audiences are so appealing to marketers. But it overlooks social media's fundamental value: The fact that people are exponentially more engaged than they ever were with their TV, radio or newspaper. In other words, it's not about how many people are present, but rather how present the people are.

So what should marketers do? First, they shouldn't spend all of their energy building scale for scale's sake. Creating an 800-pound gorilla of a social-media audience is valuable only if you have a cage to put it in (and can then teach it cool tricks). Rather than try to wrestle their humongous pet to the ground, marketers should direct their energy toward identifying and managing smaller subsets of true advocates. The opportunity in social media is the partnership that can be created between marketers and the consumers who truly care about the brand -- people who will do more than state they're a fan solely to get a coupon or have something relevant to say in a status update. Engaging those who want to be a part of a brand through meaningful one-on-one or small-group interactions may look like an ape of smaller stature, but this is one chimp with superhuman strength.

When Robert Scoble had about 90,000 Twitter followers, he infamously tweeted, "I just looked at my followers numbers and said to myself, 'Where did all these people come from?'" That wonder may just turn to aggravation if someone else jacks that scale for his own agenda.

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Dave Balter is CEO of BzzAgent. He is a co-founder of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association and author of "Grapevine: The New Art of Word-of-Mouth Marketing" and "The Word of Mouth Manual: Volume II."

10 Comments

By JudyGShapiro | new york, NY July 17, 2009 02:00:26 pm:

Well said! Any marketing pro should always prefer quality tactics (even if they have smaller numbers) versus a straight quantity play.

I'll even go thought more. I would even argue that agencies often push vehicles with mass numbers because it is far easier to do one Facebook promo than to have to find multiple quality outlets to reach the same volume. So with the easier "low labor" approach, it takes agencies less time to execute and so they make more money.

We will see this type of issue come up again and again until clients and agencies come to a new way of doing business together. The old model of agencies being "labor fee based" serves no one well anymore. How to move forward though is the question.

That's something for another post :)

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By Gaganpreet S | Bloomington, IN July 17, 2009 03:42:06 pm:

The basic issue is that markets are not looking at their online presence as a strategic initiative and are instead trying to compete in whatever is the latest fad.

They should spend their energy in finding how to make themselves sustainably interesting, reachable and trustworthy.Instead we are spending time on every other fad which might not be relevet to our market at all.

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By freshpeel | OKLAHOMA CITY, OK July 17, 2009 04:55:01 pm:

The key here is working for sustainable growth and not growth for the sake of growing, like Gaganpreet points out.

Hosting contests and giveaways may be a good idea for your brand, but what are you going to do with your audience after they get there. Most marketers don't consider this until it happens. Then it's "Oh crap! Now what?"

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By ROBERT | CHICAGO, IL July 17, 2009 06:39:33 pm:

Nicely done treatment. Helpful especially in addressing the various dimensions of what scalejacking is all about. Of particular note: it is hard in some cases for marketers to forego the relative perceived security of larger audiences. For national consumer brands, an almost over-riding sense that success can only be connected with large audiences being exposed to a message.

What's missing from this paradigm is engagement. So social media, more about conversation than "pushing" messages at an audience requires a different mindset -- one that doesn't see consumers only as walking transactions. Relevance, meaning and value occur more authentically when brands can participate effectively in an environment that is more peer to peer.

Different point of view. Different skill sets. Different approach. And counterintuitive to those who see scale as an attribute and table stake for spending decisions. Published an article on this recently. You can read it here: http://www.wheatleytimmons.com/pages/the_gravitational_pull_of_push_/102.php

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By jmiles | Grapevine, TX July 18, 2009 03:08:26 pm:

Very well done. I would like to add that I beleive the future of social networking is in niches. High quality monitored networks of people passionate about that particular niche. If the brand positioning and desired consumer fits the niche then engagement is natural and more long lasting.

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By cjrullman | Birmingham, AL July 18, 2009 10:54:30 pm:

I recently created, for the first time, a Craig's List account in order to sell some furniture in Birmingham, AL. In doing so, I learned through its terms of agreement that there is a limit to how many times you may post your listing in a certain time span, and only in one community. As I read this blog post about Twitter, I was reminded.

This is not to say that the Twitter creators should or will follow suit, but perhaps Tweeple (isn't that what we're called?) should consider these guidelines when deciding when and what to post. If you've got something to share, tweet it, but don't dig (twig?) for ideas just so you can constantly show up on your followers' feed. As a tweeter myself, I have discontinued following people or companies because they were tweeting too often and they practically overshadowed the quality posts I look forward to seeing.

Again, it's all about quality...not quantity, not to mention practicing a healthy balance between discretion and transparency. With that, I enjoyed reading http://www.scoutbrand.com/scout-blog/

Thank you for your blog post, Dave.

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By dearadvertising | Toronto, ON July 19, 2009 02:38:03 pm:

What surprised me is the comment from an unnamed CEO stating 'that until you can impact 40 million people top advertisers won't be interested'. Its surprising to me that there are still people out there that still think this way. Its clear that some still don't understand the idea of social media and the level of consumer you attract this way.

Passive vs. participant. What type of consumer do you want?

http://www.dearadvertisin.blogspot.com/

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By brantcollins | little rock, AR July 20, 2009 12:11:54 pm:

As marketers we understand quality and building long term relationships. The problem is clients want there results measured in ROI and usually equate that with large page views, millions of impressions and thousands of followers. We have to educate our clients that just because a million people saw their message does not mean anyone cared or was engaged.

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By MrGamma | Burlington, ON July 20, 2009 07:11:40 pm:

It's entirely non-sustainable... Marketers by default are lured into the prospect of high exposure and instant gratification... All you have to do to gain followers in Twitter is to attach yourself to another who may or may not have high exposure.

It typically a pyramid scheme at best like most "exposure" tactics on the web... first one in to the next best free thing wins...

Who loses? Everyone looking for sustainability. It devalues the role of an advertiser and the ROI they offer their clients.

Everybody wants to retire safe right?

It won't happen when the general public is eco-conscious rather economically responsible.

Just my two cents

I mean who is to say that facebook will be here tommorrow? Your links and hours invested could dry up instantly overnight when another player comes to down. Social media is protected behind a password, or in the case of myspace and twitter, the links simply to not count towards a search engine... and for the most part... that is not a free web...

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By MrGamma | Burlington, ON July 20, 2009 07:23:10 pm:

Besides... A Marketer is very different from a consumer. A consumer wants privacy... Until a social network offers them that piece of mind, a social network filled with marketers does nothing but re-invent the forum, where everybody shouts at the top of their lungs to get attention. Might as well be a news aggregator. Correct me if I am wrong.

Whose listening? The consumer?

The marketers and directors, and that's about it...

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