Herbalife kills Facebook or the Other Way Around?

Grow­ing inva­sion of Mar­keters into Social Net­work Com­mu­ni­ties are con­tribut­ing fast to the end of the Social Net­work frenzy. While there are always the more mod­er­ate mar­keters, it’s namely the aggres­sive approach and the sheer game of num­bers which are hurt­ing Net­work Com­mu­ni­ties fast.

Increas­ing num­bers of inci­dents of breach of pri­vacy and their long term, some times life chang­ing con­se­quences, scare peo­ple away or trig­ger pro­tec­tion mech­a­nisms which are contra-productive for the sound evo­lu­tion of a net­work based on friend­ship, pri­vate rela­tions, naive and inno­cent exchange of views and thoughts.

Social net­works may be a great place to meet and com­mu­ni­cate with friends. How­ever, the chances for mak­ing new, well intended new friends decrease every day, with the grow­ing num­ber of push mar­keters invad­ing the space and spam­ming con­tacts with their best deal here and best price there, not to talk about the busi­ness oppor­tu­ni­ties which will make you rich quick so you can retire young and wealthy.

When recently Herbal­ife launched its face­book offen­sive, cre­at­ing its own group and stim­u­lat­ing their dis­trib­u­tors to mar­ket Herbal­ife on face­book, they were just fol­low­ing what oth­ers had started 2 years ear­lier. Look­ing at face­book and the list of com­mu­ni­ties, you will find tons of MLMs try­ing to invade social net­works under their brand label; some do it more oth­ers less discretely.

The same applies to sects and other (inter­net) guru lead com­mu­ni­ties. Face­book has become the play­ground for all those we want to keep away from our pri­vate sphere, i.e. peo­ple who under the cover of friend­ship aim our valet.

Noth­ing against Gurus and Herbal­ife. It’s just a mat­ter of expec­ta­tions; as a social net­worker you expect to meet with like minded peo­ple in a relaxed atmosphere.

You don’t hang out on face­book to dis­cover that you have been invited to become a friend of a friend because you are an ideal tar­get for mar­keters who want you to swal­low syn­thetic vit­a­mins and to boost your excite­ment with Guarana while los­ing weight with genet­i­cally mod­i­fied soy shakes before get­ting involved in the best busi­ness oppor­tu­nity on earth con­sist­ing in “shar­ing” with all your friends the same nonsense.

It’s like in pri­vate life: when you are relax­ing at the beach or enjoy­ing the 19th hole on the golf course, do you want to be both­ered with Busi­ness Opportunities?

When you are enjoy­ing the best stake in town with these great tast­ing junk fries, do you want to hear about weight management?

Or when you are in a roman­tic flirt slurp­ing a Tom Collins, do you want to be harassed with poten­tial enhancers for your repro­duc­tion mechan­ics? When you can taste fresh cold pressed nat­ural Greek Olive Oil do you want to hear of anti-oxidant pow­ders co-signed by a Nobel Price win­ner who was paid more than a mil­lion of dol­lars to stick his sig­na­ture on to the box of a food-suplement?

Hey, did you notice, the high­est healthy life expectancy on earth is where there are no food sup­ple­ments, such as in Crete (Greece) and some lost place in Japan.

In coun­try clubs, ten­nis clubs and such like, it usu­ally is not allowed to do push mar­ket­ing … or you are kicked out.

In Social Net­works there is no pro­tec­tion and this is increas­ingly annoy­ing peo­ple who meet there to enjoy a good time.

Many com­pa­nies have already expe­ri­enced the dan­ger of social net­works. While at the begin­ning they thought that social net­work mar­ket­ing was a great idea, because one could reach out for zil­lions of sheep to grab their wool, they noticed quickly the back­fir­ing effects.

Today, brands go to Social Net­works to pro­tect the brand rather than to mar­ket it aggres­sively. Indi­vid­ual Work from Home freaks spam com­mu­ni­ties and kill their per­sonal rep­u­ta­tion as well as often the image of the brand they are representing.

This is where Herbal­ife is late and there­fore wrong, very wrong and if I had to guess about the out­come I would say: the rep­u­ta­tion of Herbal­ife will ter­ri­bly suf­fer from their Face­book Project and the neg­a­tive per­cep­tion of Herbal­ife in offline com­mu­ni­ties will quickly expand world­wide through social networks.

Some may say: it’s bet­ter that way, so they will fall off the face of the earth faster than oth­er­wise; for how long can you hide to inter­net con­tacts that any­one can buy Herbal­ife prod­ucts at huge dis­count online and that you can do Herbal­ife related busi­ness as an Ama­zon affil­i­ate for free rather than spend­ing thou­sands of bucks on stock of products.

Herbal­ife is one of the last busi­nesses online where you have to pay to be allowed to pro­mote their prod­ucts; it’s a dis­a­pear­ing species, sim­ply because it’s an out­dated busi­ness model, namely online where trans­parency reigns.

The Inter­net is the killer of MLM as the Inter­net com­presses away MLM mar­gins. Just check out eBay, Ama­zon and other price com­par­i­son engines to find out that Prod­uct Prices can­not be pro­tected online.

With Social Net­works, the inter­net has also become the killer of Brands, namely Brands which are not tightly man­aged and con­trolled. The MLM Model pushes mar­ket­ing and its cost into the shoes of the Dis­trib­u­tors and you end up with a fuzzy image, at some places good at oth­ers lousy … it depends on the Dis­trib­u­tor involved and the per­cep­tion peo­ple have from his action. Lousy images travel faster.

Maybe Herbal­ife just could not do any­thing else than join­ing face­book. Maybe they noticed that many of their dis­trib­u­tors are hang­ing out on face­book any­way and that their net­work becomes the tar­get of other mar­keters. Maybe they have noticed that social net­works are a huge dan­ger for any MLM net­work in as much as any­one can talk to any­one and become friends…and delete friends as well. It’s exactly the con­trary from the strict rules in com­mer­cial MLM net­works where once you are tied to a refer­rer, you stay there for ever, irre­spec­tive of your affini­ties or preferences.

Yes, there has been talk about Herbal­ife on face­book before Herbal­ife joined, and it was not always nice. Maybe Herbal­ife moves in to pro­tect it’s brand and to put some rules and restric­tions on the behav­ior of their dis­trib­u­tors — again a move against basic free­dom of expres­sion peo­ple joined face­book for.

Maybe also Herbal­ife is aware of the dan­gers from face­book as well as about the threat it con­sti­tutes for face­book? And may be they are shrewder than any­one expected and try to kill face­book before face­book kills Herbalife?

It would be a bril­liant strat­egy to sur­vive. Join face­book with 1 to 2 mil­lion of your net­work­ers and mess up the place by harass­ing the world with pills and pow­ders. A net­work such as Herbal­ife can mess up a place in no time, and believe me they have well started already. And Herbal­ife Dis­trib­u­tors are in good com­pany with all the other hype mar­keters mak­ing face­book an una­trac­tive place to hang out at.

The dan­ger­ous game of Social Net­work Mar­ket­ing, once described as the ulti­mate sales and expan­sion strat­egy, may be prof­itable on the short term, but on the longer run there will be no win­ner, just vic­tims. Brands will suf­fer, face­book will be the place to cir­cum­vent like Google Ads on a web­site and peo­ple will find other places, other means to com­mu­ni­cate, or mar­keters will have to move to anti-marketing strategies.

I do not know who will sur­vive, but when 2 multi-billion Dol­lar com­pa­nies try to screw up each other pub­licly, it sure is a great match to attend.

Enjoy!

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3. Socal Media Mar­ket­ing — Your Busi­ness on CNN
4. Social Media Mar­ket­ing by Ycademy
5. Twit­ter scares the Moz­zarella out of Pizza Hut

Tags: Facebook, Facebook kills Herbalife, Facebook kills mlm, Herbalife, Herbalife Brand, Herbalife Distributors, Herbalife goes Facebook, Herbalife Image, Herbalife kills Facebook, Social Media

This entry was posted on July 14, 2009 at 2:27 pm and is filed under Editorial, Facebook, Herbalife kills Facebook, Marketing, Online Advertising, Social Media, Social Media Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.