Commune Media | Measurably Effective Digital Marketing™

Don’t monetize your friends

Posted on Wednesday, October 10th, 2007 at 11:59 PM by Simon Smith  |  Comments (0)

For evidence, just check your fridge or belt strap. Think of your favorite brands—Coca Cola, BlackBerry—and you might notice a common theme: alliteration.

To some, the connection between a strong brand and the repetition of sounds might seem farfetched. But researchers have studied the impact of alliteration and found that it may indeed aid memorability. In fact, studies have shown that alliteration is such a powerful mnemonic that providing students with alliterative sentences can help them more easily learn a new language.

Then there are the real-world examples, which include such well-known brand names as Gold’s Gym, Dunkin’ Donuts, Weight Watchers, Volvo, Palm Pilot and Krispy Kreme.

Clearly, something is going on here.   

Stick it in your ear

Of course, alliteration’s just one approach to branding. (And product naming’s not the focus of this post. For a good recent book on that subject, check out Wordcraft: The Art of Turning Little Words Into Big Business.)

The point is to demonstrate the power of alliteration in creating copy that infects readers’ minds, slips past their conscious filters and recurs later like a catchy tune they can’t forget.

To demonstrate, consider these fictitious marketing slogans that express the same core concept:

1. Your path to personal power
2. Your road to personal strength

Or how about these:

1. Find your freedom 
2. Discover your  freedom

Which one sticks in your ear? While word length and rhythm play a role in memorability, alliteration can often m

Imagine getting paid to socialize. At first, sounds great. Sort of like politics. You earn money meeting people, having drinks with friends, calling to wish happy birthday. But slowly, your behavior changes. You start socializing in the most financially rewarding ways. You call people excessively and leave long-winded voice messages when they ignore you. Suddenly, you can’t have real relationships. You commodify your friendships. And when your friends get offended, you blow them off and look for more financially rewarding relationships.

Then your boss sweetens the pot. Rather than just pay for your social activity, she starts paying for the social activity of people you refer to the company. So you’re even less interested in real relationships. You focus on referring people—friends or not, who cares—then kick back while they monetize their friendships. Suddenly, it’s not about friendship at all. Your social life becomes a line item in a spreadsheet.

It might sound far-fetched. But if a new social networking site called Yuwie succeeds, that’s exactly how the future of online friendship might look. Started in May 2007, Yuwie is similar to MySpace and Facebook, with one big difference: it pays users for generated activity—views of their profile and photos, for example—and that of people they refer. Sort of like a pyramid scheme. And it threatens the foundation of social networking: the whole "social" part.

A recipe for spam

Getting accurate information about Yuwie from users is a challenge. Most reviewers have a vested interest in its survival—and in referring you to sign up. So even a site called Yuwie Scam includes a banner with a link containing the site owner’s referral code.

What most report, however, is needing to refer lots of "friends" to make money. Yuwie pays users a portion of advertising revenue, and as anyone with a web magazine or blog knows, online advertising revenue isn’t the ticket to financial freedom. In fact, Yuwie notes that if you refer 19,683 friends, who in turn generate about 19.7 million impressions, you’ll still make just about $984 a month.

Seems like lots of virtual birthday cards for little money.

Or maybe just lots of spam. Because that’s the other, obvious impact of paying for impressions. First, people will embed their referral links in spam around the web, trying to entice others to register and bring them ever closer to the 20,000 friends they need to pay the rent. Second, people will post spam to Yuwie itself, trying to increase their impression count to jack their earnings.

Don’t add me

Now, I’m not against affiliate marketing or paying for user-generated content. The former rewards people for promoting products with less risk to marketers and, in best-case scenarios, helps users by aligning ads with relevant content. The latter encourages online efforts; people who place Google AdSense ads on their blogs, for example, can benefit from visits, encouraging them to post better content and increase their readership.

Yuwie, however, doesn’t appear to be a viable long-term model. First, it turns something people don’t want to monetize—their friendships and social life—into a commodity. Second, it rewards people for referrals regardless of their relationship. Third, it threatens to create more useless impressions for advertisers, at a time when many advertisers already doubt the value of advertising on social networking sites and sites with user-generated content.

Of course, none of this has stopped Yuwie from growing faster than an online hoax. The promise of free money has that effect. And so Alexa reports that the reach for Yuwie has grown 92,900% in the past three months, making it the 5,547th most visited website on the internet.

But are users of social networking websites, advertisers, those seeking financial independence, or your friends any better off? Unlikely. And if you think I’m wrong, please create a Yuwie account and refer 20,000 friends to prove it.

This article was first published in One Degree.

ke a meaningful difference.

So next time you’re preparing to name a product or tackle a new tagline, spend some time carefully considering your consonants.

Tags: social media, social networking, yuwie