Marketing Ninja

Today I read on RW/W about “How to Make Facebook Useful Again.” Speaking as someone who just graduated from college a week ago, I can tell you that Facebook’s utility has plummeted drastically since I was a freshman.

A few weeks ago one of my college friends installed an application which spammed my feed every day for three days until he uninstalled it – he didn’t even know that it was contacting me.

Recently though, something more disturbing has been getting spammed at me via my Facebook account, and I’m not talking about the massive Facebook Inbox spam from events and groups that I’m not even a part of – no, I’m talking about full-fledged “male enhancement” spam. Take a look at this:

ok guys heres the update on the man enlarger pills that mike and his bro have been taking, you know the ones i told you about that actually worked for both of them and they have been the hottest thing since sliced bread with all the girls around town? well they have been getting them from [SPAMMER URL] and if you read the site carefully like i did, they actually have a 100 percent money back guarentee, that if it does not work fully on any man, you get every penny you paid back, including the shipping. with an offer like that and the proof i seen for my own eyes with mike, his bro and a certain someone else, i am convinced enough to order 6 months worth for you know who. this is not a joke, go see them at [SPAMMER URL]

I deleted the post from my wall, naturally, but I saved the message in its entirety. This was posted on my wall by a friend and he’s someone that I know wouldn’t send out this kind of crap. I assumed that the posting on my wall was the result of some sort of unethical Facebook application, even though that I was pretty sure that Facebook’s REST API doesn’t allow any applications to interact with users’ walls.

However, a couple of days later I received another Facebook spam message, advertising something totally different – I left that post sitting on my wall but my friend went and deleted it later. As it turns out, his account was hacked and someone used it to spam their wares using poorly written English.

I guess this is a sign that you’ve made it big on the Internet – when spammers are lined up in front of the gates waiting for an opportunity to capitalize on any weakness, even a handful of users, and try to leverage them to get some traffic for their wares.

Honestly though, how different are unsolicited wall spam messages from the unsolicited Facebook News Feed advertisements that Facebook sells? Is “official” spam somehow better than unofficial spam?

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