Meet Tani. I have been following her profile on Facebook, this past month, part out of curiousity and part academic interest. I stumbled on her public profile page, by accident, as I browsed Brand Pages, for which I had received request to "become a FAN".



I was intrigued by her behavior, as she acquired friends briskly, 99%+ males, consistently approximately 30 at a time (or per day, I am not sure), but mostly did nothing else - very occasionally joining a group/page. Her URL pointed to a survey/poll site among others (not a personal blog or even company site, as is usual). The profile exhibited many of the characteristics of a social media spammer, BUT she was not spamming. ( For the newbie to social spamming, it is well known that many online marketeers, employ real staff to create fake profiles which are treated as marketing assets (i.e. profiles with a lot of friends). Such assets can be leveraged later to launch brand pages and show quick acquisition of fans.



Tani broke her silence lately and shared her favorite page - a page dedicated to a website titled FriendsNet. This was her first move in a while. "Aha - so this is the new service, she was waiting to market" - I thought! Loyally, I followed and clicked on the link she peddled.



More surprise was in store, as I clicked on the url for friendsnet and it redirected to some other link (do a WHOIS to find out the common lineage) before re-directing further on a page trying to acquire new members for Fropper.



Now that is some obnoxious affiliate marketing, huh? But, why was the spammer not advertising Fropper in the first place? Why was it talking about this fictitious FriendsNet, when it did not exist?



Maybe they just wanted to sneak in Fropper after getting the skirt-chasing, testosterone driven males all worked up about the possibility of finding 10,000 new friends, on a brand new site. Anyway, just out of curiosity, I checked out how Fropper is doing on Alexa, and the results were not surprising.



Maybe their brand manager is sleeping at the wheels, or trying to take the shorter cut? Or maybe it is acquisition time and desperate measures are needed to give their sagging traffic some filip. Or, maybe it is just 3rd party marketeer, innovating new ways to make money from Fropper's affiliate marketing program.

You decide.