Fake Internet Personas Don’t Work and are Just Plain Garbage
Yesterday at Social Media Camp NYC there was an interesting session on ‘Persona Blogging.’ In fairness to the speaker, I didn’t sit in on the whole thing but the portion I was there for was quite interesting.
- A 28-year old female from NYC, will NEVER understand the life (i.e. persona) of a 40-year old woman with a full-time job and two kids. No matter how much they hang out on iVillage, watch Lifetime movies, or read blogs written by moms; it’s just not going to happen because they aren’t living it.
- Social media no longer relies on demographics alone. Social media focuses on behavior (wants, needs, etc.) too. So back to my example above, how would a 28-year old female from NYC understand or emulate the behavior of a 40-year old with a full-time job and two kids? They can’t…they can only pretend. And pretending doesn’t last because eventually the fake persona will slip up and say something that is uncharacteristic of the real persona.
- People are generally smart. They might buy into a fake persona for a bit, especially if that fake persona is entertaining. But it won’t last and eventually the fake persona will be found out. Then the company that hired the fake persona will need to do damage control and the person/agency that set up the fake persona will lack credibility—for a long time. The Internet is a small and permanent place.
I don’t see any ethical angles to justify the fake persona. If you are a B2C or B2B company, why not just hire real people who are completely loyal to your brand? Why not try WOM? There are a lot of other ways to genuinely promote your brand. And, you know what they say… “garbage in, garbage out.”
What do you think? Will persona blogging work as a promotion tactic? Or should we take a stand to wipe this tactic off the promotions list?[image: iStock]
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Tags: Blogging, blogs, fake blog personas, fake bloggers, fake personas, Marketing, Social Media
20 Responses to “Fake Internet Personas Don’t Work and are Just Plain Garbage”
The Harte of Marketing by Beth Harte is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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I don’t see many of these businesses springing up. It was funny to walk from the Saul Colt talk about the work he’s doing for FreshBooks and go into the Persona Blogging talk. It was completely diffreent ends of the equation and the persona blogging one felt so… wrong.
Your post is just another piece of the pie for removing anonymity from the web altogether.
You can’t fake a persona in business. It’s dangerous in personal situations (a la , “To Catch a Preditor), and it’s the screen most Internet crime hides behind.
Beth, Interesting Post
It seems a little hard to fathom that such a course or workshop actually existed, as the approach is so counterintuitive to what Social Media is. However, I suspect that there are plenty of potential customers who are ready to try out the Social Media craze, but only if they can control the message, which is an illusion, they have never been able to control the message.
It’s interesting that you found someone who is willing to perform this service. Recently when consulting clients, they seem to want someone like this because it’s an easy answer/compromise to “Get us involved.”
Usually I’ll explain that entering social networks — even as a company — is a mistake. People don’t talk to companies, they talk to people. As self-evident as that seems, no one wants to take the time, or assign the task.
Having said that, I think that entering social networking as a job is a type of persona: the work persona.
So there is a degree of narrative building that becomes its own fictionalized person, representing a larger concern.
You know, the art imitating life thing. It may feel like reality to the writer, but will ultimately always rest somewhere between real and the perceptions of reality held by the reader.
Finding this balance will be interesting going forward: being authentic, engaging with an audience, and developing relationships in the context of business via these dynamic platforms.
What’s your take on fictional blogging? As it, a writer creates a blog for a character (example: Sherilyn Kenyon’s Dark Hunter Ash, who has a LiveJournal).
Would that be considered a fake persona: Ash is a figment of her imagination; or just an entertaining way of branding the particular series of books the character is a part of?
@RobBlatt, I don’t see companies springing up either. That said, I have had agencies pitch me on ghost writing, which I don’t see as much different. My hope with writing this post is that if anyone is thinking about engaging in these types of services will Google it first and perhaps find my post. Maybe they will think twice about it…just maybe.
@ScottClark, I agree with you from a business perspective, but from the ‘average Joe/Jane’ perspective, there still aren’t enough safeguards/security in place to protect people. Predators/thieves/etc., that’s a topic beyond my expertise…so I’ll leave it to the experts.
@EricBrown, at UnConferences, like Social Media Camp and PodCamp, the topics are open to the people who attend. Anyone can speak on any topic. So, it wasn’t a workshop or course per se, more of a person speaking on a topic they felt they were an expert in or had expertise with.
The issue is a lot of companies are looking into social media and are being pitched by agencies that they should have a blog. When they realize the work and time committment they might consider hiring a ghost writer or someone to fake a persona. Personally, I don’t think they’d benefit from either. If they don’t have the time, people, real voices/knowledge, then it’s okay to not have a blog.
@Scath, thanks for bringing up a great point. To me, that’s akin to writing a blog for Mickey Mouse, Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Elmo.
Most people will know they are characters and that humans are writing their blog.
But pretending to be someone you are not (for a brand or company) to engage people who you really can’t understand or represent is wrong and will just cause more damage to brands/companies than it’s worth.
Wow. I think this is going to continue to be hot topic since the temptation to outsource social media in general will be huge.
I have ghost written articles and editorials in the past for clients, but I believe ghost blogging — and especially persona blogging is very different and a very bad idea.
Only lately has it occurred to me just how important it is to explain how different blogs are from other more static forms of information. Insisting that blogs are conversations does not work. That phrase, and a lot of the other language that is used inside the social media bubble, doesn’t mean anything to people who have not engaged in those conversations — or even observed how they work.
Companies that aren’t paying attention will continue to be prey for bad social media strategies – like internet personas and fake blogger chicanery. That’s why posts like this are so important.
Companies that walk away from bad strategies will most likely blame whatever social media tools they used in their outreach. The tools are great, but they’re only as good as the strategy and intention behind them.
You rock, Beth! Love this.
@mleis, excellent point, “People don’t talk to companies, they talk to people.”
I am engaged in social media as me, not as Beth Harte that works at OnPATH. But that’s just me. If a company wanted me to engage in social networks as a representative of that company, I know I wouldn’t select the same socnets as I would for myself.
Paul Chaney has a great blog post on this very thing: http://tinyurl.com/5d3f3v
Agreed. It will be interesting moving forward as we sort through it all.
@shannonpaul, you raise a really important point. Companies aren’t paying attention. And their PR/Marketing folks aren’t getting involved from a personal or professional perspective either.
It’s very important to be involved in social media from a personal perspective. How else can we learn, grow professionally and— most importantly—advise the companies/clients we work for on implementing a social media strategy if we don’t get it?
Thanks to all the smart folks I have met, I can now I can smell a bad social media pitch a 50 miles away. And I can soundly advise my executive team to walk away, not from social media, but from the agencies that don’t get it.
Part of me is thinking that personal blogging (if that’s an actual term) and flogging will become more commonplace. We’ve seen some very poor attempts so far. So what will end up happening is that, in time, these attempts will be better executed. And some may very successful…and we’ll never know.
I’m against that, but that’s my prediction.
@JonathanTrenn, thanks for stopping by! I sure hope you are wrong…but for some reason I think you are probably right. Some agency will package it with a fancy bow and unsuspecting & uneducated companies will buy into it [Edelman/Walmart example]. That's why we need to keep discussing it…so that it doesn't happen [again].
How is persona blogging any different from anonymous blogging? What’s the point, especially when blogging for a company?
@GregHollingsworth, through this conversation there have been several types of blogging personas mentioned: fake, ghost and anonymous.
Here’s my take/opinion on the three:
1. Fake persona bloggers. It’s just wrong. This particular person was pretending to be personas such as a housewife, a gay male, etc. Companies need to be made aware that this type of blogging, as part of their marketing strategy can only harm their brands. Liz at Spiral Scratch has a great recap of the session here: http://tinyurl.com/5ef4sk
2. Ghost bloggers are typically consultants hired by companies to blog for them. The consultants receive direction from the company and act as the voice of the company. They blog under the names of people within the company. Personally, I think this treads on the thin ice of transparency and authenticity. Lewis Green has a post about this at MarketingProf’s Daily Fix: http://tinyurl.com/59b9c8
3. Anonymous bloggers are typically individuals who want to blog under a nom de plume. I have done it and most people who knew me knew it was my blog. Others people do it for privacy reasons. Some anonymous bloggers can be harmful and some are just average people sticking their toes into the blogosphere and are trying to maintain their identity for security reasons.
Beth,
I certainly understand what you’re saying, but if a company is going to venture in to blogging, anonymity (at least to me) rings false.
I spent two years blogging on my personal blog with a nom de plume, and yes, my friends certainly knew it was my blog. There is nothing wrong with a nom de plume when we’re talking about analysis or commentary, but when your goal is to engage your customers, using a pen name seems in my opinion to be half hearted.
@GregHollingsworth, thanks for continuing the conversation! We are in complete agreement on this one. Personally, I think if a company can’t dedicate the internal resources, be the sole voice and the executive team isn’t behind it, they should consider engaging in another way. There is no rule that says companies must have a blog.
I know some social media folks think outsourcing blog writing is okay, but I don’t agree with it.
For example, if a customer reads GM’s FastLane blog for years…they come to know and trust that person(s) based on their blogging. Then what happens if that customer meets the GM blogger in person and they are nothing like what/how they wrote and what they said. The customer will immediately know something is not genuine and it will affect their preception of that person and the GM brand. That’s what you don’t want to happen.
I agree completely. If a company makes a commitment to engage it’s customers it needs to be honest engagement, not a ghost campaign run by a PR firm.
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