Let’s face it. To be called a ‘troll’ is an insult.
And spam is –in theory- punished by Law in most of the world’s civilized countries
So why is there so much spam and trolling everywhere?
Why are our Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts flooded with unwanted, not requested, and plain annoying content?
It all began with a spam business model…
To answer this question, we should look at the reasons behind this behavior. As with almost any illegal activity, the majority of the sources can be tracked down to an easy way to make a profit out of it. Law enforcement agencies have successfully destroyed illegal activities just by simply “following the money trace”. Once the identity of the person or company that benefits from the activity is found, taking it apart is easy.
I am taking spam as an example. Not so long ago, many e-mail chains with funny quotes, jokes or anecdotes where soon replied and re-forwarded to a large number of contacts. Simply by following the added e-mail addresses of the e-mail chain, a vast amount of contact data was easily obtained. Selling valid e-mail addresses in a grey market was a lucrative business for a while, allowing the spammer to receive a few cents per address.
A few cents per e-mail quickly added to an interesting sum, so there was a clear incentive to create, or re-create, “shareable” content and voila! The spammer got a hold of a nice source of income.
With the implementation of stricter laws, anti-spam software and educated e-mail users (that reply and forward using the BCC option for example), this creative business model started to decay. Even after the advent of robot-spammers and other automated forms of spam, this was soon fought by new anti-spam tools and programs that also created a new business models for many antivirus and anti-spam software developers.
Spam Statistics for 2012
Source: spamcop.net
The Social Media graph…
A few years ago, some people even thought that the spam era was coming to an end… until Facebook started a new communication revolution. After MySpace and other similar initiatives created a social media need among the Internet population, no one denies that FB managed to hook almost everyone into this new form of social gathering. With slight differences, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, and less successfully Google+, soon followed the trend and became social media behemoths by themselves. While few people are concerned by e-mail spam anymore, a raising fear of social media spam is slowly increasing to become the ‘new Internet problem’.
The easiness of sharing a post or re-tweeting creates the spam effect over and over again. And very likely, the same reasons behind e-mail spam are also behind social media spam.
“
This journey is one percent done, which means we realized there’s an enormous opportunity to do more in this space.”
–Soren Lassen, manager of the search infrastructure team at Facebook
Marketing companies are no longer interested in a simple e-mail address to target random messages to unknown recipients. Internet evolved, and social media created a new ‘marketing paradise’. Even without knowing someone’s identity, we are now able to know key statistics such as age, gender, geographic location, purchasing habits, political stands, social concerns and, above all, a social graph made by a network of common interests and profiles… exactly what any marketer will pay big money for!
So how far will you go to obtain this information? Reputation and ethics aside, almost any company will be interested in obtaining vital data to push their businesses forward. Marketing experts and the new ‘social media experts’ are now ready to harvest this vast amount of valuable data, turn it into information and, ideally, create the ultimate product: market knowledge.
And the trolls?
Trolls are an interesting psychological area of study. While in general they are referred to as ‘internet sociopaths’ and visualized as bitter individuals that spend an awful amount of time bashing everyone and every product, company, and institution, interestingly, some of them do have hundreds, thousands, and even millions of followers.
How do they manage to receive that amount of attention when they are just spreading negativity? Why people read their posts and are eager waiting for their next move? Are followers as sick as the trolls they follow?
While I am not a psychology expert, it is easy to relate the human ‘Schadenfreude’ or ‘I-laugh-when-someone-fail’ attitude, to the inner satisfaction of reading a negative comment that probably we also wanted to make but lack the courage to do it. Yellow press, gossip magazines, and not a few politicians have succeeded by doing exactly that. If there is a demand, there is a supply.
And what about the connection between trolls, spam and marketing? Easy. User generated content (USG), even when negative, generates attention. Attention generates engagement. Engagement generates a social number of followers… exactly what spam and marketing is looking for. There is clear evidence and plenty of examples of paid trolls: users on a payroll whose only objective is to generate discussion and engagement, usually taking the other side of the general flow. Even bad press is good press. Trolls are good business.
Business ethics and Marketing
So we recognize the need of companies to understand a market and their honest objective to obtain a profit to increase shareholders value. Marketing experts are paid to research these markets and obtain information to make sound business decisions. The grey area is how far they will go to obtain this data before their competition does?
I know some marketing experts and even a few social media experts that bluntly offer this to their employers or customers: “Don’t ask how I will deliver, just be happy that I do”. No need to know, so no business ethics or even legal issues interfere.
So the next time you are annoyed by a shared post, unwanted message or a disgusting troll, take some time to think about who may benefit from this in the end?… and please, stop the chain with you!