“Liking” for a cause! is it?
July 14th, 2011
It surprises me how many social media agencies spread in town, trying to pick on any job just like a tribe of ants that found a piece of bread on the floor. This time, it is different.
After my post, I still noticed some people who are trying their best to bypass the promoting guidelines by Facebook. How so? According to Facebook promoting guidelines, “You must not use Facebook features or functionality as a promotion’s registration or entry mechanism. For example, the act of liking a Page or checking in to a Place cannot automatically register or enter a promotion participant.” which is clear here right?
What these companies do, is basically create apps for voting for someone to win, then at the end to confirm the vote you are asked forcibly to either “like” around 10 pages by clicking on the like buttons or you won’t able to hit the “submit” button. The problem is not the pages you have to like only, but that these pages are probably handled by one agency that is using this method to cut on the advertising budget they probably asked the client for to begin with.
I bet many of you don’t know, but these likes are counted outside facebook, on the developer’s servers and databases, where likes can be faked, and not as trusted as facebook’s official liking system. How can someone be so reliable to give the exact number of likes or votes? I ask of all of you, to refrain from entering any of these competitions.
Being ethical at promoting a brand is something, and acting ethical are 2 different opposites.
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moeys
Great post as usual. I have seen applications created for clients where they are prompt users to LIKE a picture or a video where they were giving away their products, but then again, it depends on how the development of the application was made. You may require that a user like YOUR page where the app is hosted to continue to the voting mechanism, but you may NOT enforce that they like other pages not associated with yours.
As for your comment on Facebooks policy: ” the act of liking a Page or checking in to a Place cannot automatically register or enter a promotion participant.” which is clear here right?” – that means that you may hold a competition, promotion or sweeptakes as long as its hosted on a third-party application. People don’t wanna invest in an application, so instead what they do is upload pics to an album and tell you to vote. Thats just wrong. Bas ofcourse we like to analyze thigns the way they match our interests, and that is not the way it should be.
One last thing in reply to your comment: “likes are counted outside facebook, on the developer’s servers and databases, where likes can be faked, and not as trusted as facebook’s official liking system.” Thats very true, but it is illegal to use the Facebook LIKE system to run an app or a promotion. However an ethical developer can make sure that all jQuery that are run to increase the number of votes can be disabled and banned. Remember the Chili Ways photo contest. Many people’s counters were reset to zero because of the fake likes. Its all about ethics everything from content, strategy and development, but people don’t want the ethics, they want the easy way in.
“Liking” for a cause! is it? #Funny (@Moeys) Moey’s | unusual observations, art, and existence → http://bit.ly/pCiMKe
plz plz plz plz plz plz plz LIKE LIKE LIKE LIKE LIKE LIKE haha “Liking” for a cause! is it? http://t.co/ZavR96t via @Moeys