A media marketing agency has come up a cunning trick to exploit the surge of companies scrambling to jump on the social media bandwagon by selling them Twitter followers.
The Australian firm uSocial claims it can track Twitter to identify users that are likely to be interested in following a brand by matching their profiles to their clients.
The company sends these users a message suggesting that they might want to follow their client's brand. It's then down to each potential follower whether they want to subscribe to them.
The firm reckons every follower is worth about 6p to a brand and is selling packages of followers starting at £42 for 1,000 new connections.
The chief executive of uSocial, Leon Hill, said personal users and businesses were queuing up to pay for the service.
But many PROs are up in arms about the service and see it as an unethical practice that could potentially tarnish the legitimate and ethical discipline of public relations.
And they are clearly not alone, illustrated by a recent case in which Digg took legal action to prevent the company from offering a similar package for its social bookmarking site.
Digg accused the company of devaluing its service by allowing clients to artificially push positive stories about their brands up the site's ranking system.
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