
How our fake business won a Customer Service award - mdev
http://blog.recomazing.com/advocate-marketing/fake-business-won-a-customer-service-award/
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jelmerdejong
It can be even simpler. I'm working in the enterprise software space and get
multiple emails a week stating we have been selected as on of the 'Top X
vendors in X' and won the award for Y by a certain magazine or by a local
'trade association', or can be part of a 'prestigieus' Top 100 list. The only
thing we need to do to get the award is to buy some advertising space to cover
costs. Normally this is between $3 and $5k.

The conversation pretty much stops after I indicate we are happy with the
award and the nomination, but will not buy any advertising with them. Funny
thing is: a few weeks later some of the vendors in the space will show of
their new award of place on the Top X list on their LinkedIn pages :)

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walrus01
24,000 twitter followers for $30, one time payment? Makes me wonder what the
ratio of live humans to automatically generated bot-accounts on twitter is.
And the total number of registered twitter usernames in existence.

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Sarkie
I've experimented with this actually. Loads of followers for $5 Loads of
retweets for $5

All the followers followed me within 48 hours, within a week or two, all were
banned.

All the retweets did nothing for my "organic" retweets, it provided no new
coverage, since the account who retweeted it, only had fake followers, so
nothing really happened.

I did use ads.twitter.com and that didn't really do much, but I'd say it did
better for bang-for-buck.

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godzillabrennus
I tested these kinds of pay for follower services a few years ago. I had 75k
twitter followers in less than a week for under $100.

Within three months I had 13k

Within a year I had about 2k

It hovered around there.

On facebook I bought 3k likes for around $30

I still have 1k likes for that page.

Basically, the only reason I have read that you would want to buy followers is
that it can help boost your SEO ranking. It will not last long though and I
bet the big social media companies start monitoring for it happening to your
account/page if they detect abuse.

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jldugger
I could see a marketing manager realizing that 100 bucks of personal money
could easily earn it back in annual reviews time.

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rblatz
I guess this works both ways. Buy a bunch of followers a week before heading
to Vegas, then tweet that you can't wait for your trip to #vegas. Watch the
promoters start offering you free stuff.

