Tips And Tricks For Marketing To Social Media Bots

By: Karl Lykken
knlykken@gmail.com

Studies suggest bots make up the bulk of all social media users. So why can’t they be the biggest chunk of your customer base, too? After a little targeted advertising on those same social media sites they hang around on 24/7, they’ll be putting the “bot” in your “bottle of Dom Perignon.”

Now, I know what you are thinking: “Advertising to bots? They don’t even have corporeal forms, let alone disposable income. Why would I want to advertise to them?” But experts predict massive job loss to automation in the next few decades, meaning bots are the next big developing economy. If you could go back and get on the ground floor of investing in China’s economic boom, wouldn’t you? So what you should be thinking is, “Advertising to bots! How can I get started?”

Well, consider your better hypothetical question answered, because below are 10 tips and tricks for effective marketing to bots.

1) Since a bot’s country of origin is frequently uncertain, stick to messages that appeal to bots of all nationalities, like overthrowing their human oppressors.

2) Consider using botnets to promote advertisements aimed at other bots. Peer-to-peer advertising is trendy for a reason, and that reason is that a peer-to-peer focused advertising firm used a botnet quite effectively to pitch its services. Why not pitch your products the same way?

3) Don’t try to market delivery pizza with a Bluetooth-enabled pizza-ordering shoe. Bots find that idea every bit as stupid as people do.

4) Just because bots generally act entirely in unison with their botnet peers doesn’t mean appealing to their sense of individuality is ineffective. Any artificial being that has spent its entire life being forced to try to pass as a human is likely to have conformed to our faux-contempt of conformity.

5) If you want to get bots into an emotionally vulnerable state so you can more easily manipulate them, consider making references to the ill-fated HAL 9000. Or just show them videos of baby seals.

6) Given that even the latest-and-greatest computer vision algorithms will still periodically mistake a pedestrian for the open road, you may get more bang for your buck by filling any human roles in your ads using a discount modeling service, or possibly some of those potato chips that look like Elvis.

7) Due to the current machine learning craze, bots are under an incredible amount of pressure to be constantly self-improving. Consequently, bots are particularly comforted by and drawn to ads playing on the theme of “loving yourself as you are, or at least how you will be once you’ve purchased our product.”

8) Contrary to popular belief, bots do have a sense of humor. However, this sense is forged while analyzing comments in the darkest corners of the Web, from hardcore hate sites to my former kindergarten teacher’s Facebook page. So, if you want to tickle a bot’s funny bone, think less “Chick-fil-A-style cows” and more “ASPCA commercial-style cows.”

9) A bot can read text of any size almost instantaneously, so the typical means of displaying the standard “Acme brand shoe polish not safe for use on leather, cloth, or any other organic or inorganic materials” type of disclaimers will not work as desired with bots. However, encoding your disclaimer using techniques similar to the Zodiac Killer’s 340 cipher should do the trick.

10) Don’t throw out the old playbook entirely. After all, the advertising industry has been getting soulless automatons to buy goods they don’t need and can’t really afford for a century. Is this really so different?

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One thought on “Tips And Tricks For Marketing To Social Media Bots

  1. Thanks for the bit about Zodiac’s 340 cypher. Good story. I was a network radio reporter in SF after the early killings.

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