So, during my lunch today I popped on to Facebook to see what my friends were up to.
In my news feed, I spot this:
This has got to be one of the worst attempts at brand promotion via social media that I’ve discovered first hand. Silverberg Opticians’ comment is totally irrelevant to Mike’s status. This is tantamount to spam.
In a way, I think it’s worse than the Habitat Twitter hashtag spam debacle, because in order to for them to post this Mike had to become a friend of Silverberg Opticians (their profile is not a fan page) to grant them the permission to comment on his status. They are abusing the fact that he’s let them into his profile.
They might as well track him down in the pub and start trying to sell him glasses while he’s mid estate-agent-bashing with his mates.
On a practical note, even if Silverberg Opticians’ comment was relevant, they still haven’t maximised the effort they’ve gone to to make a comment. They’ve put a link to their website, but apparently don’t know that if they want people to be able to click directly through from their comment (which would undoubtedly boost the number of visits as a result of their ‘marketing’) then they need to include the ‘http://’ Without that Facebook (and Twitter for that matter) will just treat it as any other text.
And don’t even get me started on the multiple exclamation marks!!!
I can’t think on anything positive about what they’ve done, apart from the fact that they’re trying. But is a half-hearted or misguided attempt better than none when you’re invading online personal space?
