Recently, The East Village Idiot smelled a rat on Facebook.
“When I saw that 156,000 people had become ‘fans’ of Ticketmaster on Facebook, I got suspicious. Their fan page is now the 5th most popular on Facebook – they have more fans than Hillary Clinton. ‘Come on! There are not 156,000 people who would willingly display that they were fans of an evil corporation that bilks its customers for massive, inexplicable fees,’ I thought.”
He was right. After some investigative bloggerism, The East Village Idiot realized there were thousands of fake profiles set up on Facebook, seemingly for the single purpose of becoming a “fan” of Ticketmaster.
The comments on the blog post fill out an interesting story”
“For a while, when you became a fan of Ticketmaster they would give you a code for 5 free iTunes downloads. I’m assuming people just made fake profiles to take advantage of the situation.”
By Cheesegod on April 14 2008
“Correct. Many people I know made fake Facebook profiles (it takes less than 2 minutes to make an email and Facebook profile), then joined the group. You received 5 free songs, so the amount of songs you could get were pretty much limitless. I’m guessing they caught on and stopped the offer.”
By Mike on Apr 14 2008
“That’s hilarious. I think Comcast should do the same thing- I’m sure they only have fake friends too.”
By K-Dog on Apr 15 2008
Regardless of whether you create the fake profile pages yourself or crowdsource people by paying them to do it for you, astroturfing makes baby flying spaghetti monster weep meatballs.
Hey Ticketmaster, intentional or not, you have some ‘splaining to do.
(Thanks for the lead ShinyDotBulletin)
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5 Responses to “Ticketmaster Crowdsources their Astroturf”
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April 17th, 2008 at 1:25 pm
Interesting issue at the root of all this – are FB fans and friends the same thing? Short answer no, but there’s more to discuss about that.
Alarm bells should have gone off earlier what with all the odd names, no profile pictures & users with no friends…and in that, I’ll agree the TM needed to be more attentive to the fan page activity. They were either naïve or negligent (with some ‘see no evil’ possibly thrown in).
But I’m sure TM was just thrilled to see that many fans – legit or not – at least until they started to realize the costs they were incurring.
It was certainly clumsy but this is what brands do – they offer incentives to win customers..bigger, better, faster, cooler, cheaper, exclusivity, etc, etc…these are all incentives..some are tangible, some are functional, some are aspirational but they all offer the consumer something in exchange for buying/using the service, product.
It may not gel with the spirit of social media, but there’s at least equal blame to be assigned to the users who created the fake profiles. In fact, that may even be a more grievous abuse of the ideas of transparency, honesty, etc….
April 17th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
I’m with you JD. I wonder however, why hasn’t Facebook pulled all of those fake profiles?
April 23rd, 2008 at 2:50 pm
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December 18th, 2008 at 5:20 pm
[...] and although has grown, has since dropped to position 21. Seemingly, the questionable tactics of Ticketmaster United States resulted in their drop from number six straight out of the top 100 with nearly 90,000 people [...]
January 28th, 2009 at 5:46 pm
[...] Motrin, Wal-mart, Target, Hasbro, Ticketmaster or any other brand make a mistake in social media, credibility is lost. Consumers lose trust and [...]