Ashamed you only have 200 Facebook friends? Worried the MySpace community won’t pay attention to your aging synth pop band? Can’t get @iamdiddy to reply to your tweets? While bots may be able to boost your friend count with other bots, Australia-based viral marketing company uSocial knows you’re looking for something a little more, you know, “real.”
That’s why they’re selling friends, followers and Diggs, all the things you need to be relevant on the inter-webs circa, um, now. While both Twitter and Digg have tried to shut down the company, noting that uSocial followers are merely spambots, the company continues to market its services to wannabe web-celebs for a hefty price tag.
Despite a slumping economy, wide-scale layoffs and tent city’s popping up all over the country, uSocial is certain social media whores will shell out $654.30 for $5,000 new, unknown, virtual friends or a cool $1,154.30 (uSocial desperately needs the extra $0.30) for a walloping 10,000 Facebook “fans.”
As if the gimmick wasn’t ridiculous in and of itself, uSocial CEO Leon Hill counts both the US Marine Corp and The Mormon Church as prior customers, claiming that uSocial helped gain front page placement on Digg for both of the organizations.
While additional Facebook friends are nice, uSocial really hopes to makes dime slinging Twitter followers, which it sells for roughly 11 cents each, a hefty markup considering Facebook friends are worth a mere 7 cents. As if you haven’t been deleting the likes of Pam546, who “just wants to party all night, DM me,” from your followers list, uSocial claims the reason for the high price of Twitter followers is they are much harder to monetize. The company estimates that Twitter followers are worth an estimated 10 cents a month, which, by our calculations, is roughly how much money the micro-blogging service has earned in 2009.