Like me! Follow me! I'm a Narcissist!

Hello and welcome, Mwaah! So glad you clicked through, thank you and I love you! I say this with all the sincerity of a Facebook Like. Now stay on my blog forever and never leave. All you need is right here. All I need is love.

I have a million things to say and you are the best audience to hear it. Even if we've never met. Even if we're never going to meet. It doesn't matter, you and I are meant to be. That is, as long as you keep reading and never leave. Please don't leave.

Perhaps only half of you are still here ..that's cool, nothing stops me from being me! Incredibly, I now have 2 million things to say. They're twice as good as the original things, whatever they were, I just know it - I bet you do too!

I have a secret and I want to share this secret with those of you who haven't left yet. If only this post wasn't so darn long already!

The fad is over. Some marketing companies have a strategy that involves creating 10's of thousands of bogus "Likes" for business pages. Profiles are being hacked, horrible crime and porn pages are being published and the general use of social media is spiralling down the toilet. We are becoming the problem of our own self inflicted, narcissitic ways because the ferals have cottoned on. There are more of them than us.

If we're not trying to bring people over to us, it seems more and more are anonymously posting punishing comments about others. It's sick.

The open apologies from sports stars, celebrities, politicians et al when they tweet something they shouldn't have.. it's a mess. What started out as fun has been turned into a business model used by approximately 100,000 Australian startup companies - all experts in social media - really? experts? Their enthusiasm, passion, the dollar signs. It's fluff. I have spoken to 4 companies recently, hoping one of them could shed some light on what these two software programs are good for.

All four companies indicated that sales are likely to rise if we communicate with people on Twitter and Facebook. I am instantly very interested. "How?" I ask. The answers varied from starting competitions, posting blog feeds, asking questions, posting images, tweeting links from Twitter to FB and DM'ing a new follower the moment they follow "I'm on Facebook too" - like they care. Narcissistic? I think so.

The problem is how many competitions can you join? Who is joining them? I remember a Today Tonight segment on compulsive competition joiners. All they want is to win and get free stuff. Some were apparently making a living out of it. A valued customer? Who cares! They're a fan!

Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) once said in 1987's Wall Street, "How many yachts can you waterski behind?" Perhaps a touch out of context but how long until the point is valid for Facebook competitions?

When I asked each Director from all 4 marketing companies for an example of a facebook page in Australia generating great sales, direct from their FB page and possibly in conjunction with their Twitter strategy, not one of them could give me a single name off the top of their head.

They all said they would email me an example. Hmm.

It was never going to be easy finishing a post like this, as the first thing I'll be doing is tweeting the link to anyone that's interested in reading it.. but I won't be using Facebook.

Over to you.

Strategic Trolling

Hi, my name is David and I'm a Strategic Troll.

I have been submitting random comments on anything from property prices, the urban sprawl, political correctness, the latest shocking information about a celebrity, breaking news.. anything and everything with a "Be the first to comment" link. I'm not addicted, I'm strategic. I'm a regular.

I have earned the respect of content editors of leading internet news websites across the country by replying quickly, accurately, on topic, no spelling errors and with punctuation perfect presentation. It's hard because sometimes you want to go hard. But don't. Let me tell you why.

Firstly, even if you care, try not to care. Most of the subject matter "commented on" means nothing to me. What I am doing is accumulating 'credibility points' with editors. They have a database, they know my email address and my regular moniker. They note whether my comments have credibility and are on topic.

When the time is right and an ecommerce article is available for comment - I STRIKE.

When there is an article even remotely related to ecommerce, you will see the Fashion Addict name and our website address as the "location" associated with the article. This is when all of my strategic trolling comes to the fore. I get published in 3 minutes. I am known. I am trusted.

Who wants free advertising and who wants it now? Add a comment regularly to 'any' topical article without offence or slander, then wait for your "on topic opportunity" to comment about your business, then... - STRIKE!

I recently added a comment directly related to ecommerce and noted FashionAddict.com.au as the "location". Our traffic spiked for a very short period, I'm talking 3 hours of peak traffic. 1 month later I was able to directly correlate traffic-to-sales using Google Analytics and discovered the first points of contact came directly from a comment I made on theage.com.au and subsequently smh.com.au. The sales generated were higher than average for that period of the day.

Strategic Trolling. Could this be one of the most cost effective ways to drive traffic to your website?

Are you up for it?

Over to you.