The business of Gold Farming - where paid gamers amass gold to sell to less-experienced users to game the MMOGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Games like WOW (”World of Warcraft”) is a well known practice. In a parallel world of connections, perhaps equivalent to “gold” in terms of business leads or viral marketing armies to launch brands, one could imagine a new kind of innovative farming for profit around social media relationships. Think “Twitter sweatshops,” “Facebook factories,” “Diggsourcing” and “LinkedIn (Assembly) Lines.” After the jump, a metaphorical goldmine…

Given all of the noise around Twitter followers - Ashton Kutcher’s 1 million count plus Oprah’s 700k to-date - Facebook fan pages and profile pages with 5,000 friend caps, one could image a new kind of farming around  social media relationships. This would, of course, be the polar opposite of “What is the ‘Thread Count’ of Your Friend Count?” thinking.

Wonka with his candy farming Oompa-Loompas

Think “Gold farming meets Twitter Followers, Facebook Friends, LinkedIn Contacts, MySpace Friends, etc…”

Back in the early 2000s, like everyone else I dove into LinkedIn for business leads and new jobs opptys, and quickly had 1,500 contacts. I was in the top 5 or 10 for media professionals for LA, and regularly emailed LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman when he changed the actual # of contacts shown to “500+” contacts.

LinkedIn’s rationale, if I can recall, to showing a fixed ceiling or “500+” contacts was that they wanted users to have “real” or qualified connections, not just amass connections to compete on a quantity level. How’s that holding up as everyone tries to get up to a thousand friends and followers, then to ten thousands and hundreds of thousands?

Think Dane Cook or Tila Tequila with 1 million MySpace friends apiece, pre-Facebook and very pre-Twitter…

The big challenge, potentially: Who will have the billionth Twitter follower?

More recently, I’ve engaged with Facebook, and then Twitter. Yet, the writing on the wall is that the Facebook/Twitter influencers are racking up friends/followers and then marketing them books (Gary Vaynerchuk), Oprah visits (Ashton Kutcher) and finding ways to build marketing audiences around their social media brands or lifestream campaigns (every ad agency and their interactive neighbor).

The idea: social farming - drive up your social media audience via paying others to social harvest your identity.

Using your voice, and a set bible, you as a user ’social farm’ your identity to drive contacts in media, tech, you-name-the-industry-or-niche: console or casual gaming, Fortune 100 brands, NY ad agencies and it would pull up a list of the relevant - where you could pay variably for different levels of contact.

Just another “New Medici” creative idea on how to scale your viral marketing armies.

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“Gold Farming” from Wikipedia:

Gold farming is a general term for an MMORPG activity in which a player attempts to acquire (”farm”) items of value which are sold to create stocks of in-game currency (”gold”), usually by exploiting repetitive elements of the game’s mechanics. This is usually accomplished by carrying out in-game actions (such as killing an important creature) repeatedly to maximize gains, sometimes by using a program such as a bot or automatic clicker. More broadly, the term “gold farmer” could refer to a player of any type of game who repeats mundane actions over and over in order to collect in-game currency and items. An organization which organizes farmers is known by some as a sweatshop, though the less value-laden term is “workshop” or “gold farm”.

Once a gold farmer or workshop has created a stockpile of currency, they will try to sell it. This then becomes “gold trading”/”gold selling”; also known as secondary real money trading. In practice, the term gold farming is often used to cover both making the gold and selling it. It may also be used to cover two other separate activities: powerleveling and the creation and selling of high-level character accounts.

Chinese gold farmers typically work 10-12-hour shifts. Average earnings are around US$150 per month with (limited-quality) food and accommodation provided; more skilled farmers who can farm more in-game gold will earn more. Separate from the gold farms - which are often in low-cost, outlying locations - are the brokerages, typically based in city centres and employing well-educated customer services staff earning around US$350 per month.

The level of activity came from China, given its low payscale, but could an English-speaking, perhaps Indian call center, become the networking hub for social farming going forward?

According to estimates, at least 400,000 people worldwide were employed as gold farmers as of late 2008, with the global trade worth at least US$1bn per year. These statistics could underestimate the size of gold farming: some estimate there are more than 1 million gold farmers in China alone, with the trade worth more than US$10bn per year^.

There are reports of gold farming in developing countries including the Philippines, Indonesia, and Mexico. VietNam has also reported a growth in gold farming However, China is by far the major location, employing an estimated 80-85% of all gold farmers.