Facebook Spam: AppBank

I hate them. I wonder if the average person pays any attention to them at all? I'm not sure, but no one gets offended when I don't collect and acknowledge that flowery, cutesy "have a great day" animation. At least, I don't think so-- I mean, c'mon, who has time for all that? If you want to tell me to have a great day, tell me; don't send me damn Facebook "gift" (which isn't a gift at all, but an annoyance).

Sending game requests are practically unavoidable if you happen to be killing time with a free, moderately entertaining facebook game. The 5 million Farmville requests I've had over the course of the year, I forgive, but I don't have time to help you harvest imaginary crops. It's not you, it's me. To date, no one has been all omg-you-didn't-help-me-harvest-last-night-you-biatch. No one has unfriended me over Facebook app requests.

I happened to have a lot of these gifts pop up on my news feed this morning because someone I know was busy accepting the app requests and personally thanking everyone who sent one to her. This is fine except this is the page that promotes her brand. Instead making me feel all good about having her on my newsfeed, I find myself annoyed with the flood of "So and So sent This Person a Name of App gift" posts. All the meat of my newsfeed is gone, turning Facebook into Spambook.

It's not branding and I'm sure many people feel the same way I do: Please quit accepting all those gifts en masse!!!! Surely there is something more productive you can do with your time? Need to accept app requests and those annoying gifts? There's an app for that. Seriously, it does it for you. Maybe you don't get to leave a personal thank you, but at least you're accepting a gift before you get unfriended. Oh, and it doesn't spam peoples' news feeds.

Of course, then you'd have to engage your "friends" with words instead. You'd actually have to market your brand in a personable way. It's not impossible and one only has to look at the other successful branding pages to see how that's done. It's about adding to experience of your product, not detracting from it.

Those gifts really detract from it. Really. I can't stop this person, so I'm going to solve the problem on my end by either hiding posts or blocking the application. If I'm not alone in this it makes me wonder how many people feel the same? I'm sure a lot because if it that weren't the case, this woman's brand would be huge. She's got talent, its just hidden behind all that gift spam.

Sorry. I don't have time to look through 100 posts of garbage to find the gems from my friends. I also refuse to support bad marketing. I'm not being shy about that refusal. Want to have a successful Facebook page? Make it a Fan Page and don't hide behind gifts. 

Dear Chevrolet

Dear Chevrolet,

I appreciate that you have manufactured a car that has essentially been worth the almost $20,000 I paid for it new. At 70,000+ miles and almost six years, I have zero complaints about its reliability and besides a hybrid, I have yet to see car that gets better gas mileage on the highway than my Willard (my car's name). The car tells me when the roads will be icy, its tells me when I need to start planning my next oil change and what that song is I like on the radio. While my neighbor cusses at her Ford, that she bought a year later than my Chevy, I pat my Willard on the dash with pride.

Now that Willard is getting on in years, his light bulbs are beginning to burn out. First the left blinker and now the right. This leads me to one complaint: I need a special certification to change the bulbs. I don't possess said certification.

I'm the kinda girl that has always been able to pop in some fluids, change some fuses, clean out an air filter and change bulbs as needed on my cars. All the sudden, I feel entirely helpless. I don't even own the appropriate tool to get at my cars bulbs. Even if I did, I would have to disassemble the whole confounded headlight casing after removing it from my car!

What the hell were you thinking. For $20,000 I should be able to buy my $3.00 bulb and insert the thing in my damn self? NO! I am not going to a dealership for them to charge me $50 for some space-age light bulb and $100 in labor for your Master Mechanics precious 5 minutes of sacred, car-god time. I'd rather pay some 18 year old peon to charge $10 for his time  and $5 for the bulb that cost his ship 50 cents. Or maybe $20 for some small town shop to laugh at me for not being able to figure this out.

Or maybe they'll laugh at how badly Chevrolet tricked its buyers into thinking that changing a light bulb couldn't possible be a huge fucking production.

I really wish I would have thought to wrap my car-payments in super, strong material, so that they would have had to call in a specialist to get to my money.

Really? You want professionals to have change a light bulb? Really? There was no easier way? Or do you over pay your designers? Did you they get drunk when conceptualizing this model? Stoned? Was it an office prank gone bad?

The next time I buy a car, I am going to make the salesman demonstrate how to change the oil, add all fluids, change a light bulb and a fuse or its no sale.