We already know that today’s user is not ‘into’ blogging, well the user is not really blogging for a long time now, people have Video Blogs, gathering millions of views and exposure for themselves and their ideas People use Facebook Notes to write about what they have to say, create groups and fan pages to the most mundane things such as: “Feeling like a ninja when I drop something and catch it.” gaining over half a million fans (and this is not the most silly thing you may find).

Someone once said that, “one day we will look back and realize that we became fans of the most stupid things ever, like brushing our teeth or eating a banana”. And this is true, look at all the profiles you follow on Twitter, look at all the pages and groups that you are listed in, we become fans of the most trivial day to day things, and we are ALL loving it!

So when recent study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project showed that only 14% of users between the ages of 12-17 are using blogs (about a quarter less than in the years previous to 2006) and that only half of them actually bother leaving comments, a number that is 75% lower than the numbers 4 years ago. Yet the more adult audience is following in a steady stream. There is reason to believe that 1 out of every 10 adults is writing a blog, a number that has seen no changes since 2005. This means that in the US alone there are more than 30 million adults that are writing a blog, up from nearly zero a decade ago. Those numbers did see a very nice increase in the past few years showing that the percentage of users who are over the age of 30 and are writing a blog rose from 7% in 2007 to 11% in 2009.

Once spamming comments in blogs was something that was left for the gloomy Black-Hat SEO people, all the teens moved to their new homes, the Social Media Networks. Which currently house more than 75% of the young users in the internet, compared to the 55% occupation four years ago.

The social media spammers didn’t wait long to follow, they were just waiting for ways to do that.

The Zombies

Unlike blogs where you create your identity in seconds by typing in some basic information about yourself inside 3 letter boxes, the social media world is much more complex, you need to build trust, and this takes time and effort. Forcing the less complex and “thinking out of the box” spammers have little to no success in that field, while several others are doing just fine. Zombie is a term attributed to a fake profile or user on a social media website. Why Zombies? Well it’s quite simple, they look alive in terms of communication, they are doing things, yet on a very low and basic level. They are not very bright and yeah, they sort of have ‘no brains’. After all they are operated either by a very tech savvy and multi tasking social media marketing (SMM) manager or by a pre-scheduled machine, making their behavior very linear and predictable.

Zombies are great things to have, they can be used to monitor your brand on various social media arenas. They are a great tool for viral marketing by having them spread the content saying how amazing it is, just like a Zombie would spread its disease. They are even better when they are working together as a team or should I say swarm, just like in the “Dawn of the living Dead” movies, the more zombies you have, the easier it is to take over areas and dominate them with a “Brutal Zombie Force“.

Zombies can be used for evil as well as good, and by good I mean brand monitoring and things that don’t make people want to take a shotgun and go hunting for you (for the Zombie that you are). The Evil side of your dark minions comes into play when Spammers take the wheel, and then things get messy.

I have more than once received messages from seemingly sweet college girls that are offering me to go and chat with them somewhere else because she just happens to have to leave the computer, but she will defiantly continue chatting with me over at XXX (substitue a bit.ly link to an adult site instead of XXX). Then clients ask ,and not once; “Do you think they get conversions from that kind of activity?” and it took me a while to come up with an answer, and I think that it is YES, they certainly do. This is not the best way to bring traffic, and I am sure that the bounce rate will be enormous but people click!

If you were roaming the cyberplane when ’mIRC‘ was dominating it, with its revolutionary underground users and infamous BOTS, then you know why this sort of tactic converts. The same happened in various chat services with a strong emphasis on Yahoo! chat, which was extremely popular at the time. The more advanced and experienced users, or those who already clicked once and understood the drill with those links, know not to click them again. Yet there will always be those who got what they were looking for, and will click those links over and over. What about monetizing from that traffic? I would estimate and please don’t take my word for it, but I think it’s somewhere around the same as a standard untargeted display banner or even less coupled with an insanely high bounce rate.

The Worms and Trojans

“My Ex-Girlfriend Cheated on me… Here is my revenge!”, this is the title that so many people had on their walls in Facebook. Showing just how many people fell into that honey trap. The thing with the girlfriend revenge virus is its ability to virally spread itself from one user to the other, let me explain. You see that message saying that your friend’s really hot ex-girlfriend that you have never heard of or ever seen in your life was cheating on him, and to avenge his manhood he will now use all their private video sessions and images that can make you drool like a Pavlovian dog. Oh yes embracement like this is the sweetest revenge of them all. Every time one of your interested friends clicks that status, he gets it pasted on his wall as well. By using the main purpose of Social media, this Revenge worm didn’t do anyone any damage, yet people who were curious enough to click the link are advised to remove the post from their wall and to change the password due to the risk of Facebook identity theft. Nick O’Neill at AllFacebook, told Mashable that the whole worm was executed with some smart use of CSS and an iFrame, triggering the “Share event” feature every time the link was clicked.

More attacks were listed on the social media world, “Koobface” was the one that sent you messages asking things like: “Are you sure this is your first acting experience?”, “Is it u there?”, “impressive. I’m sure it’s you on this video”, “How can anyone get so busted by a spy camera?” and ”You’re the whole show! I’m admired with you.” I think that once even I clicked a message of that type (no thanks for a good antivirus and basic common sense) yet no harm was done. The thing about “Koobface” is that it would send you to a YouTube like video, and once you try to watch it, the website will ask you to install a new version of Adobe flash player. Skilled power users will go to the original Adobe website for the install, or will straight forward feel suspicious about the whole thing. Yet once you install the “New Adobe player” you get infected and the cycle begins once again but this time you are sending the messages to your friends.

Cases of profile phishing were the most common, with a massive phishing wave that struck Myspace several years ago.

Surviving this Horror Flick

Here are some basic things and rules to follow when being attacked by Zombies:

• Don’t Panic, go to your friends tab and remove that user from your friends tab
• Sharing is caring, tell your friends that you have in common with the Zombie to avoid that user and if possible erase it from their friend list
• Post on the Zombies wall the fact that you suspect it being a BOT or a fake user, you know to warn other users that are not your friends
• Call in the cavalry, there is a button with the words “Report” on it, push it.  No you are not a snitch for telling Facebook that the profile is fake and there is no real user behind it, you are actually doing a public service
• And don’t forget the shotgun