Regular users of social networks generally collect friends and followers on a one-by-one basis, then use those connections to share their opinions and links to the latest "Double Rainbow" remix or whatever is making the rounds that day.

These systems are based on trust and loyalty, and as such, they present a massive opportunity to marketers who want to encourage those traits in their customers. People are more likely to trust people or companies that have lots of friends or YouTube views, so the incentive clearly exists to artificially inflate those counts – and a cottage industry is emerging to help them do just that.

In addition, because real friends trust each other, marketers try to insert themselves into those conversations by offering product discounts or cash when people mention brands in messages to their friends. Suddenly, friendship is as ripe an area for product placement as music videos (and in some cases, music itself).

If clout is the new currency, in other words, it already has its share of counterfeiters.

To be clear, Twitter and Facebook are hardly overrun with this sort of thing, and I personally don't believe I have ever encountered a single paid-for message. And it's hard to say how many popular Twitizens may have paid for some percentage of their followers. Nonetheless, as the cat-and-mouse game between social networks and social networking marketers escalates, that could change.

Here are a few ways that self-promoters and marketers are already trying to game the social networking system.

Friends and followers for sale ——————————

Anyone who wants to look important, loved, influential or trusted might be tempted to purchase Twitter followers or Facebook friends by the thousand, and they have plenty of options when it comes to buying them.

Twitter spokesman Matt Graves pointed out that Twitter's rules forbid selling followers unless the seller has been "specifically permitted to do so in a separate agreement with Twitter."

"It's fairly simple for us to identify and suspend mass-created accounts with '10,000 followers,' so it's also a terrible purchase in general," he told Wired.com. "They're never 'real' followers."

Some clients of these services tell a different story. Affiliate marketer Jonathan Volk posted charts showing how his purchase of 1,000 Twitter followers from Followers for Sale using its recommended setting that adds followers "very slowly" so as to escape detection, resulted in real followers being added to his account on a steady basis.

Before ordering this service, I had a negative trend in followers. After ordering, I gained the followers that I paid for pretty quickly. Now the main (and obvious) question [is], who are these followers? Are they real or just some bot accounts? After talking with some people, apparently the followers are indeed real people [with] real Twitter accounts, etc. The way I understand the service to work is that these real people are paid a small fee to follow [clients of the service]. It seems like a great way to increase your Twitter following and as a result increase your sponsored tweets price, etc.

So, what are these sponsored tweets to which he refers? That brings us to …

Selling tweets and status updates ———————————

Some marketers have concluded that "word of mouth" marketing cannot be bought. Michael Zessler, senior vice president at Liberty Media, for instance, writes, "word of mouth generated by social networks is a form of marketing that must be earned – unlike traditional advertising, which can be purchased."

That's not necessarily the case. Sponsored Tweets notoriously paid the celebrity Kim Kardashian $10,000 per tweet for mentioning certain products to her millions of listed followers, but the company also allows anyone – including Volk, apparently – to monetize their Twitter followers by sending them brand messages. Thousands of Twitter users are listed on the service.

A spokeswoman for the company tells Wired.com that Sponsored Tweets and its sister site, Pay-Per-Post, which pays bloggers to write about certain products, have about $10 million in funding, over a million sponsored messages, 400,000 participating bloggers and tweeters, and over 40,000 advertisers.

And it's by no means alone. SocialTwist rewards social network users for promoting products to their friends, offering advertisers "highly viral, word-of-mouth marketing campaigns online by combining consistent marketing messages, the power of referrals and the social platforms customers use most – from e-mail, IM, to popular social networks and bookmarking sites across the web." So far, the company says it has produced campaigns for Intel, P&G, Kraft Foods, Jamba Juice, KLM and Barnes and Noble, and claims its ability to increase revenue and drive page views is "proven and measurable."

A study by media research firm PQ Media (available for purchase only) describes these "sponsored conversations" as one of the fastest growing segments in advertising, having increased 14 percent last year, and set to grow 26 percent this year to about $57 million-worth of paid tweets and blogs.

Fast Company is seeking "the most influential person online" as part of its experiment with Mekanism.

Ponzi friendships —————–

San Francisco marketing firm Mekanism has drawn lots of criticism for encouraging people to promote unique links touting how much influence they have amongst their friends while trying to convince their friends to sign up, so that they can gain even more influence.

Fast Company magazine wanted to find out how effective it was, so it asked Mekanism to produce a viral marketing campaign on behalf of the magazine as part of The Influence Experiment, in which the most influential influencer will get their picture on the front cover of the magazine.

SFWeekly offers a nice round-up of influencers' overwhelmingly negative responses to the initiative. We especially liked Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan criticism: "It's fair to say that some of the most influential people on the web aren't going to take the time register in a project, to begin with. I mean, they're influential! As part of being influential, they're probably busy doing the things that made them influential in the first place, not worrying about proving their influence."

Guaranteed YouTube views ————————

Just about everyone who uploads videos to YouTube wishes more people would watch their videos (with the possible exception of Double Rainbow guy, who must be losing what's left of his mind, given the massive response to his original upload). If your company is unsatisfied by the number of views their would-be viral advertisement is garnering on YouTube, Sharethrough can help.

Compared to some of the other models on this list, Sharethrough is relatively unobjectionable, because it doesn't pay users directly or manipulate play counts, the way some bands did on MySpace. Instead, it pays to put companies' videos in places where users will find them and share them organically, driving up views.

"Similar to how traditional media companies sell impressions and measure performance based on clicks (i.e. clickthrough rates), Sharethrough sells video views and optimizes for sharing and user endorsement (i.e. sharethrough rates)," Sharethrough CEO Dan Greenberg told Wired.com. "Sharethrough manages … paid advertising placements across a set of premium web partners that place our videos in key entertainment destinations. Viewers will see them and proactively choose to share them across social networks, social games, applications and other portals because they enjoy the content for its entertainment value or its relevance to their interests."

A spokeswoman for the company says it has already increased views for Orbit Gum, Muscle Milk, Nestle, Butterfinger, Activision, Cisco, Microsoft and others.

Marketing has always been a crucial, necessary part of the media. On one hand, why shouldn't it be part of social media? On the other, the social fabric of social networks – precisely the element that makes them valuable to marketers – will deteriorate if we can't trust the people and numbers we see there.

See Also:

It's fair to say that some of the most influential people on the web aren't going to take the time register in a project, to begin with. I mean, they're influential! As part of being influential, they're probably busy doing the things that made them influential in the first place, not worrying about proving their influence.