Mashable Playing it Dirty with Google Buzz Count

We all know that Google Buzz is really making a Buzz in the industry. Whether this service is good, or not we can leave that for another article because in this article I will be showing you the dirty little trick that Mashable is using to get more users to Buzz their story.

If you don’t know, Mashable is one of the leading Social Media Magazines that cover everything related to Social Media and then a little bit more to earn some extra cash from their advertisers. Recently when Google Buzz came out, like always Mashable jump on the bandwagon to get a lot of followers. Which is not really hard to do when you already have a massive readership. They added a mini little Google Buzz button which actually is not really a Buzz button. It posts your articles to Google Reader, so if you are new don’t hit the Buzz it button on any website because they are all doing the same thing. Now this is understandable, everyone is working around technology.

But Mashable loves to take it one step further. They came out with this one article called Google Buzz Buttons learn to count which basically tells you how they are trying to help the industry by collecting data.

“We’ll be gathering the stats about how much people share on Google Buzz (Google Buzz) versus Facebook and Twitter, and we’ll be sure to report back with our findings!”

That is the quote exactly from their website. The truth really is that the data that they are collecting is SKEWED. It is not really how many people buzz their story, it is how many people click on that link. Which they too mention in the article that they are using bit.ly stat API.

Now my attention was brought to this when a lot of my clients wanted to incorporate this technique on their site, and I had to explain to them that this is a dirty trick. I am a firm believer that it is better to be not informed at all rather than be misinformed. Which is exactly what Mashable is trying to do right now. Web users, they are going to come up with a new data that shows that more readers Buzz stories then they share it on facebook, and half of the web will jump on this bandwagon where the truth is that these stats are manipulated.

The Number Game, Psychology trick – People tend to feel a social pressure when they see a high number of people doing something. Now if I can simply click on the Buzz link and refresh the page 50 times, or create a mini script to do that. It will show that all of my articles have been buzzed 50 times, or even 500 times. Then other people will want to Buzz it as well. (DIRTY)

Let me show you how easily it can be manipulated.

This post is the one about google buzz count button. It had 778 Buzz and I took 30 seconds and manipulated the count to 794…. Now imagine the validity of this count button.

I always thought these cheap tactics are employed by one of the lesser quality sites, but Mashable doing something of this level is just despicable. I think this post deserve to be heard, so Retweet, Facebook Share or just plain simple let others know about this, so they don’t think that this is something really cool.