Bulldog Reporter has an article this morning saying that Facebook and MySpace have declining memberships according to an article on The Wall Street Journal Online (subscription required). The reason – spam and illicit requests. This from the Bulldog report:
Also, it’s been seen that advertisers are taking advantage of the capabilities of both sites, and sending out mass emails and friend requests, overloading the inboxes of countless users to make their products known. This type of guerrilla marketing has been seen by many as junk mail, and has done the opposite of illicit interest in brands by turning off users to both sites.
Advertisers? Guerrilla marketing? So, I’m guessing that the joker that tries to post a comment to this blog completely off topic with a link to an enlargement product is now an “advertiser” using “guerrilla marketing.” Common Bulldog! The decline in memberships is not because of the Burger King 24 MySpace page – it’s the spammers that want us to join their group to check out their Web cam. It’s from the online “pharmacies” that have tons of Viagra. There is still good opportunities for real marketers and advertisers to use this social media space for legitimate and (most importantly) wanted advertising.
The power of social media is that it can be a great form of pull marketing instead of the traditional push marketing. Unfortunately, there are those in cyberspace who have rotten products that want to push them on us. This isn’t just a problem for MySpace and Facebook – it’s a problem on blogs, forums, SecondLife and anywhere else we can interact with one another. Although I agree that some of the decline in memberships is because of spam, I think that part of the decline is that for some, the novelty has gone away.
