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Digital attention in social media: the power of numbers
// By Simone Janson
Anyone familiar with social media knows that this is a lie that the bars bend. If you are not afraid of legal consequences, you can read the tips below without irony.
Britney Spears becomeâŠ.
Become Britney Spears. At least on Twitter. Or any other celebrity. The main thing is known! Really true! A great way to get as many followers as possible is to tweet as a celebrity. Since Twitter, unlike Facebook, still allows so-called fake accounts, i.e. fake user accounts, this is easily possible: You simply create a Twitter account under the name Britney Spears - of course, any other celebrity is possible - and start tweet as realistically as possible. If you have enough followers - say 500.000 - change your account to your real name. Of course there will be a bit of a waning among your followers, but a few 1000 pieces are sure to get over. Of course, there is also a risk of a warning, even if you remain anonymous on Twitter. But you have to live with this risk.
Using a very similar method, the Vienna MuseumsQuartier has secured more than 25.000 fans on a Facebook page in one fell swoop. According to the Austrian daily newspaper derStandard, it was founded in February 2009 by the student Helmuth Lammer as a private person. As an unofficial page for the MuseumsQuartier. Within two years, Lammer won over 25.000 fans. In April 2011 the MuseumsQuartier Lammer offered two annual tickets and a 'goodie pack' for the site. When the student did not want to give it up, the MuseumsQuartier asked Facebook to merge their own Facebook page with that of the student Lammer. 25.000 fans for free - a successful coup from the point of view of the MuseumsQuartier. The site has over 28.000 fans today.
A well-known American TV broadcaster can only dream of that. There, Twitter users had bought their own Twitter name for a lot of money. Just stupid that the users kept the account with many thousands of Twitterers and were only allowed to rename it. What a business model! The German ZDF was more intelligent: Marco Bereth from SchwÀbisch Hall and Michael Umlandt from Heilbronn secured the @ZDFonline account on Twitter in June 2009. That's how they charmingly tell journalist Richard Gutjahr at Republica 2011 because the account was simply missing. So they did it themselves! And that is very good: @ZDFonline responds to criticism, thanks kindly for a positive response, helps further with questions about the program. You take the account @ ZDF-Neo from another fake user. He is glad that he got away without a warning. In the end it gets too hot for them and they give up their account. ZDF's response: Surprisingly positive. Instead of legal steps, there is an employment contract - because the two did their job so well.
... Or in jail?
Things don't always go so smoothly: Shortly after the catastrophe at the Japanese nuclear power plant in Fukushima, the @Atomforum_eV account became known on Twitter, which made it from under 200 to almost 4.000 within a few hours. However, it was not the real Atomforum, but a satire account that satirized the attitude of the Atomforum Deutschland with cynical tweets and at times also used the logo of the Atomforum. The real Atomic Forum distanced itself from the account and announced that it would do everything to combat the satire account. Legal steps were also not excluded, the satire account and all followers were temporarily deleted. Surprised by the impending Streisand effect, in which the opposite is achieved by trying to suppress information on the Internet, the Atom Forum finally backtracked.
If you are afraid of warnings and criminal prosecution with such methods, you can choose a completely different method. Go to jail right now. A political student from Berlin was arrested at an anti-nuclear demonstration. When he was transported to a prisoner collection point, he tweeted so heartily and polemically about the lack of toilets, bitter cold and lack of drinks that one might think that he was on the way to Guantanamo. His reward: More than 300 new Twitter followers in just a few hours.
Is that too risky for you? Don't want to be arrested in the freezing cold in the middle of winter? I have a better idea: you can cheat right away!
Mass instead of class: click fraudsters and fake accounts
In fact, it's not a problem to push your follower numbers artificially and by hand. For example, by simply relying on the courtesy of those around you. Because on Twitter or Facebook, many follow back out of politeness. Some do it fully automatically! So if you follow such people for a few days, you will follow them again.
Or you can use software or a service provider that can quickly complain to a few thousand fans or followers in the same way. 10.000 fans for 199 euros for your own Facebook page is the best price-performance ratio that I found on the subject - on Ebay. There is also less: 1000 fans for 39,95 euros. And for Twitter you can buy entire accounts with supposedly active followers - 4000 pieces for 49,95 euros. If you don't believe it: Just search for âFacebook fansâ or âTwitter followersâ ââon Ebay.
Agencies and service providers are abundantly offering their services on the Internet without any awareness of wrongdoing, whereby the boundaries between serious advice and fraud are blurred. The website of Twittcoach Stefan Berns, for example, promises its customers: âWith our follower building service, we will build up exactly the followers you need for effective and successful Twitter marketing for your accounts. We are extremely sensitive and harmonious in the context of the Twitter guidelines. â But (apparent) seriousness is apparently not available at bargain prices. 1000 followers at Berns cost 140 euros, for 5000 followers the customer has to shell out 700 euros. And the video platform belonging to Burda, sevenload, offers so-called viral seeding for videos on its website, which ultimately involves nothing other than artificially generated user access. On the company's website, it reads like this: âThe sevenload seeding team researches the right target groups on the web for your marketing campaign. We systematically spread your video message on the sevenload platform and in a variety of social networks. These include, for example, communities, specific forums, blogs as well as fun and leisure portals. For seeding, sevenload also uses the most important social bookmarking and microblogging services to spread your advertising message. With the seeding measures, we guarantee you a pre-agreed number of video views in the desired period. â
Insanity with a method
But that is exactly the crux of the whole story: Even when it comes to real users who, like the more serious providers of such marketin measures like to be announced, voluntarily follow or click: As long as it is all about one before To reach a coordinated number of fans, followers or clicks, the actual benefits remain as dark as the origin of the new Internet friends. Apparently, according to the West, there is a lively "fan" trade, where agencies and service providers cheerfully buy and resell fans. In some cases, it is fake accounts or software that generate fake clicks. Or the service provider can apparently quickly establish contacts in Eastern Europe, India or Pakistan. One of these service providers is the Swiss student Pirmin Steiner. Depending on the number of fans, he collects between 2500 and 5000 francs for a Facebook profile. His best customer so far: The Facebook page of the Canton of GraubĂŒnden.
Insanity certainly has a method, as video journalist Markus HĂŒndgen found out in his own experiments. He wants to push a video on youtube. HĂŒndgen orders 30.000 video views for $ 20 from a Pakistani service provider that no longer exists. Payment is made via PayPal. To make it look more realistic, 40 ratings (including a negative one) and 10 comments, which he wrote himself and which the service provider submits under different account names, are added later. No problem, yes HĂŒndgen is even addressed in the Facebook chat, how such clicks can be generated for the campaign of a DAX company in North Rhine-Westphalia.
By the way, you are in good company: Telekom made the headlines because it had hundreds of bogus customer reviews made by a text agency, which should create a positive mood on a Deutsche Telekom shopping portal. And the SĂŒddeutsche Newspaper apparently bought praise for its iPhone app in blogs and in the iPhone AppStore via the Swiss service provider Trigami - the SĂŒddeutsche speaks of a viral campaign in which bloggers could decide for themselves how to find the products.
When the click madness becomes dangerous
But even if such methods are more than usual - they are by no means honest. And not dangerous at all. Companies like Facebook or Google have very strict rules about what happens to such clickers. At Google, for example, there is a lifelong blocking of the youtube account, which also results in a lifelong blocking of Google Adsense and the related earnings. And on Facebook, people who click the Like button too often in too short a time, for example because they are paid for it, receive the following message: âYou were blocked from usingâ Like âbecause you repeatedly misused this function . This blockage can last from a few hours to a few days. Please be careful if you can use this function again. Further abuse of this function can lead to the permanent blocking of your account. You can find more information on the FAQ page. â
As if the blocking or loss of the account in question were not painful enough for one or the other, the legal situation must also be considered. If you follow the DĂŒsseldorf lawyer Udo Vetter, maker of the renowned law blog, the purchases of clicks, comments, reviews, etc. are clear violations of competition law - and there are threats of warning and injunctive relief. In a conversation with Markus HĂŒndgen, Vetter said: âFalsified access figures obscure the size of the company and the actual interest in products. Fake comments give the impression of satisfied customers who do not exist. These are both references that can lead to a purchase decision that the customer would not have made without the fakes. â
Fan numbers Faken - but how?
Sascha Lobo recently made it clear how difficult it is to fake fan numbers in large numbers on Facebook: When the former defense minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg resigned, the page âWe want Guttenberg backâ was launched on Facebook brought over 500.000 fans within a few days. Sascha Lobo then raised doubts about the authenticity of the fans: In his opinion, there were too many profiles ...
