Where There is Social, There is Currency

uSocial now sells friends and fans to Facebook members.  I am trying to grasp the implications of this from the perspective of Conversational Currency where value is based on net productivity increases.

Net productivity increase is where someone somewhere has found an easier way to do something AND resulting in a greater total time savings than the investment of time creating it.

The key operative is the word “net”; while it saves the time for advertisiers to make “real friends”, it costs real people real money to review a spam-friend request, ignor, accept and ultimately, unfriend the unfriendly Facebook Spammers.

The potential also exists for the next application to read your friends and pick them up with the spam-friend request taking on viral spam proportions.  Next, the data mining opportunities are extraordinary (Twitter, anyone?) The effect is the same as a telemarketer, fax marketing, junk mail, etc., … on steroids.   In this case, value  is not being created, rather, the real value is being transferred from the user to the info brokers in addition to your lost time and productivity. Guess what – that’s the same old game.

There is a way to change this game in the favor of the user and that is one of the key features of Conversational Currency.  Instead of the advertiser giving money to uSocial – they can just give it to you.  It’s your data, it’s your content, it’s your social network – you own it. Watch for the launch of the next economic paradigm.

In the mean time, ask yourself, how much would you charge a brand that you like to be your FB friend?  How much would you charge a brand that you do not like?  Then reverse the questions “How much would a brand that knows that you already like them pay to be in your Facebook?”  And, How much would a Brand that knows that you don’t prefer them pay to be your facebook friend?  The answers to these questions are as different for each person as they are for each product.  Don’t let uSocial sell you short.

Here is the article:

As it became known, an Australian online marketing company is selling friends and fans to Facebookservice to Twitter users. Advertising, marketing and promoting company uSocial said it was targeting social networking sites because of their huge advertising potential.Leon Hill, uSocial CEO, said in a statement: “The simple fact is that with a large following on Facebook, you have an instant and targeted group of people you can contact and promote whatever it is you want to promote.

The only problem is that it can be extremely difficult to achieve such a following, which is where we come in.” members after offering a similarThe company offers packages for Facebook, the world’s fourth-most visited werbsite, that start at 1,000 friends up to 10,000 friends at costs ranging from $177 to $1,167. The company, which counts venture capitalist Peter Thiel, Accel Partners, Microsoft Corp and Russian Internet investment firmSky Technologies among its investors, has more than 250 million registered users. Digital

“All we do is send them a welcome message or friend request from the client. If they decide to go ahead and add that person as a friend or a fan then they will; if not, then they won’t,” Hill told Australian media.

However, uSocial’s packages are not without controversy. According to some Australian websites, Twitter tried to shut uSocial down, accusing it of spamming members, while the Los Angeles Times reported that Digg.com, a website where people vote for their top news shut down uSocial because it sells votes.