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How to free and quickly promote a social network? I tell (by example).

He has already written a little about it, but the thing is really sophisticated and worth a separate post.

So, you have a new super-functional, but empty social network. An empty network is always a pain, as there is no sense for users in it. Before you always have several already known options for promotion:

- Online advertising in the form of articles and banners (moikrug, odnoklassniki).
- Offline advertising (odnoklassniki).
- Advertising PR actions “Invite a friend” (vkontakte, comby, liveinternet).
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All of these types have one drawback - expensive. To attract the user with advertising against the already-promoted social networks, you need more and more money. You must either attract a lot of investment, or make a network so ingenious that everyone will go there in full swing.

But! If you do not have large investors, and a brilliant idea, too, has disappeared somewhere, do not rush to sprinkle ashes on your head. As we managed to find out after a little research, there is a very simple way out.

The story began with the fact that a couple of weeks ago I received a very sophisticated example of spam from another new social network - faculty.ru. The net itself is nothing new, but spam in the form of an invitation as a marketer interested me greatly.

At random, 20 newly registered users asked where they found out about this site - everyone has the same story.

Note that this is not the usual Buy Viagra spam. Such spam should be very tricky. The subject of the letter you receive in the mail looks like this: “Alenka Vetshanskaya added you as a friend on the site fakultet.ru”. It turns out that she, this Alenka, has already practically registered you on a certain resource, so you just have to go in and provide information about yourself. At the same time, you have never heard of Alena Vetshanskaya, or of such a site. Suspecting yourself of senility and sclerosis, you still come out of curiosity to this site and after a long and tedious procedure of knocking out all the information you need for a social network, you finally find out that you don’t know any Alena Vetshanskaya.

You already want to swear loudly. However, this Alenka usually has pictures in a cool swimsuit and is a student of a pathetic high school like MGIMO and MGU. You melt before the eyes of this charming woman and write her "Hello". After that, you have the opportunity to talk with this bot for a couple of minutes (which, according to the assumption of the deceived users, is one of the embodiments of the retired bald marketer, heh), and replenish the base of the social grid.

What is the most cunning thing: male victims are invited by girls, and female victims are male (2-3 handsome guys from the set). Images must be carefully crafted and be attractive.

At the forum of this site, new users obscenely swear at spam, that administrators barely have time to rub. One such less censorship topic - were you also invited here by spam? where users swear at spam, they decided to leave to live, although I, let's say, could not add an answer to it (apparently closed).

So what is it, spam of the 21st century. Climbing on this topic, as well as on the pages of inviting bots, I learned, in particular, about where they get the addresses of the victims.

It is clear that if you start spamming with a regular spam mailing to one of the spam databases sold, you will fade away in a day. In addition, sending spam on a regular basis, you have a chance to run into some boring old fart or, at the same time, a lawyer who heard about article 13.25. Traditional spam is too risky, forget it.

Therefore, they do as follows. A spammer (= marketer, either the admin himself or the owner of the resource — anyone) sets himself the Mail.ru Agent program, popular among lamers. After installation, he presses on "Add contact" and searches for all contacts of the desired age, gender and region. The results vail him - what do you think -
OPEN POSTAL ADDRESSES ON MAIL.RU!

When I first saw it, I had the feeling that everyone who spends money on traditional Internet advertising is an amateur who understands nothing. This is where the real treasure is - a completely free spam base where you can target your target audience for all the main parameters! Well, what could be more effective? Subway advertising? Pfffff! :)

Began to dig further. It turned out that this resource has been engaged in spam for a long time, but earlier they tried to send spam not through Mail.ru, but through regular databases, and Gundel users more often. One of the participants Habra 2 months ago published a note Fakultet.ru spins with the help of sophisticated spam . Of course, even now in the blogosphere, perplexing questions of the victims arise: what is it? an attempt to promote, or something worse? , Scam part two , but who cares about individual complaints?

Apparently, Mail.ru will not do anything about this (as one of their users explained: “Mail.ru Agent was created for spam”), and spammers eventually achieve their goal - the reputation deteriorates, but the base is replenished . Therefore, we can talk about the emergence of another type of promotion, dirty, but apparently working.

Almost forgot - an important detail. To send spam in the form of invitations openly and brazenly, you need some kind of cover in the event of a mailer hitting. After all, users like me, though they suffer from marasmus, and the “Report Spam” button is tight.

Therefore, you always need an option in order to justify yourself and to blame everything on users - they say, these are not our three bots, this is where our zealous users invite thousands of people here. Any cover will fit to dump spam on the users themselves. In this case, the owners of the resource did not begin to puzzle: there are certain “pots” for which you can give each other virtual flowers. Spocks give for invitations. If that is not us, these are three hardworking users who spam several hours a day to be able to give 100 thousand virtual flowers. It will not matter here that the user on the more frequently visited privet.ru for a completely real Apple iPhone invites to the site a hundred times less friends than Alenka Vetshanskaya for the opportunity to give flowers to other girls and boys.
It is not the plausibility that is important, but the very fact that there is an excuse for which you can hide in case of problems and calm the mailers. Because the domain ban by Mail.ru is the death of any project; They will not go into details, but less likely excuse can roll.

What else attracted attention was spamming regularly somewhere from 10 am to 5 pm and only on weekdays (it was at this time that thousands of invitations receive victims, and, judging by the reviews, one person can receive 3 or more invitations to the site from unknown people ). That is, it is about either hiring a couple of employees, or about attracting the services of a separate spam office, of which a lot has been divorced. The base of the site over the weekend in the period I observed practically did not grow (which is funny given the fact that the target audience of the resource is students who have a vacation period now. It turns out that no one goes to a resource without spam).

But exactly how you will do it - through your employees or through a spam agency - does not matter. The main thing is the principle. The principle that struck me with its simplicity, arrogance, and relative cheapness.

Summing up, colleagues, are there any serious disadvantages to this new type of spam? A new word in the promotion or a game on the verge of a foul?

UPDATED 0:28 July 6, 2007: In the light of the appearance of a few strange comments from people working in the faculty. I hurry to apologize to them and assure that the post was not written in order to “blacken” their work. If respected gentlemen have a feeling that something of the above is slanderous, I will be happy to provide my passport information so that you can sue me for libel: I offer it with readiness, because the fact of spam can be confirmed by tens of thousands of spam recipients and it will be easy for me to answer for any of my words. For the rest, please remember that I am more interested in PR moves than all these new-fashioned social networks and the fussing between them.

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/11915/


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