consideration in social and digital marketing today, as well as a possibly efficient tool in the future.

Currently, the true value of social robotics in social media comes from recognizing their existence and their implications. Socialbots are shaping the way in which consumers interact and perceive intrusion online, as with the case of spambots. As users’ online behavior is shaped by intrusions on networks from automated presences, the way they perceive all proactive messaging changes, affecting the difficulty in creating conversation between users and brands. In addition, brands are vulnerable to swarms of socialbots forming socialbot networks, fostering conversation about brand issues that could create artificial controversy throughout a community. Finally, socialbots call into question the ability we have to rank user influence within networks. As marketing focuses on targeting influential online users for brand engagement or advocacy, the way we identify these users must take into account artificial presences. Services such as Klout measure a user’s activity on a network and its subsequent effects to determine influence; as socialbots become more indistinguishable from human network users, they could hijack or artificially inflate scores.

The future may bring heavier
use of social robots for marketing.
Gartner Group and other forecast-
ers have predicted that by 2015 an
estimated 10 percent of an individ-
ual’s social network will be robots.
While this doesn’t inherently
signal the age of socialbots for
marketers, it does indicate a possi-
bility for users to grow more used
to their presence. In this future,
brands and small or medium-size
companies could use socialbots to
handle initial responses to con-
sumer requests. While a response
of “your tweet is important to us”
wouldn’t be ideal, as companies
move more activity into social
media, mechanisms to quickly
acknowledge, sort, and reply to
consumer messages in a timely
fashion will become increasingly
important. Additionally, brands
can consider using socialbots to
bring company mascots and assets
to life with little effort. While
both of these possibilities require
balancing engagement and brand
control with autonomy, they show
that socialbots have the potential
to move from a mere present-day
consideration to a great future
opportunity.

Socialbots Are
Robots, Too
Greg Marra

March + April 2012

interactions

Social robots have a lot to learn
from their older siblings: physical
robots. Socialbots learn the shape
of the social graph and observe
what people are talking about,
perform analyses to decide whom
to interact with and what to say,
and execute their plan by follow-
ing and posting. Physical robots
observe their surroundings with
cameras and GPS, use pathfinding
algorithms and motion simulation
to decide where to go and what to
do, and then execute their plan by
moving around and manipulating
objects. These three domains of
actions—figure out what’s around
you, figure out how to get closer to
your goal, do that thing—make up
the sense-think-act paradigm that
guides much of modern robotics.