MediaVidea

It is Paid Media, not Social Media

For every success like Obama, Susan Boyle or the Battle at Kruger, there are millions of tonnes of social media spam. Social media experts have taken over social media from genuine social media users.

The abundance of cheap server space and mass availability of bandwidth has made sure that advertising remains as pervasive and sometimes deceptive as before.

In the Old Media Age, we all could identify advertising.
In the New Media Age, everything is promotion - Including the medium.

For every genuine Fan page on social networking sites, there are 100 Fan Pages created by overpaid so-called social media experts , populated by fake fans bribed with freebies, if not money.

For every genuine link posted on Twitter, there are services like Twtad.com that pay users to put links in their accounts.

For every tweet from genuine experts (like Jay Rosen or Dave Winer) or a passenger on a plane that has just crashed, paid hacks at PR firms are tweeting for their celebrity clients. Celebrity Tweeting is worse than Celebrity Blogging.

For every genuine complaint on consumer sites like Mouthshut.com, there are fake reviews on especially created blogs and fake forum accounts by people from so-called Digital Ad Agencies. There are Ad Agencies in India who are experts at pushing down negative reviews.

For every genuine link for tag such as 'bike' there are 100 repeated links to empty pages for the same tag.

For every genuine consumer review at sites like Yelp.com, companies are being pressured to pay for positive reviews.

For every forum post by a genuine young gamer, overpaid interns are posting fake praises for dumb-ass games.

Related:
The Confused Person's Guide to Web 2.0
Social Media is dead in 2009

Labels: social media

posted by Pramit Singh @ 3:11 PM