Faking Hell
Posted by Mitch on 10th March 2015
Social media is brilliant.
Anything that democratises the way information is shared and engaged with has to be a positive step in our evolutionary journey.
But like everything, it has a dark side.
One of those dark sides is that it feeds into the narcissism that all of us have to some extent. And one of the ways this narcissism manifests itself is in number-envy.
Number-envy used to be something that took a hierarchical form back in the days before social media took-off and the Internet’s early adopters would use specialist discussion forum websites.
In many of these forums, your post-count would appear next to your name/avatar, which in turn would indicate how long you’d been a member of that forum and how much you’d contributed to it.
All but the most provocative and/or skilled new members of these forums would be ignored until such time that they’d accumulated enough postings to be deemed as integrated and worthy of a response.
These days, number-envy has evolved to being expressed by how many followers someone has – the rationale being that the more followers they have, the more influential they’re likely to be, which in turn will drive more followers.
But as in all areas of business, there are people who are prepared to game the system.
They do this by buying fake followers. Twitter is a great example of where this happens a lot.
How it works is that there are people out there who create thousands of free email accounts, then an associated Twitter account with each. Then they’ll add a profile, sometimes steal a headshot of someone and then start tweeting random stuff. They create a second account and start to follow each other, then a third and so on.
They look like ‘real’ users and then start to follow real people for money. It’s probably quite likely that there are Internet ‘bots’ that do this kind of thing even more efficiently.
So it’s dead easy to do and is cheap. You can buy a 1,000 fake followers for as little as £5.
Here are a couple of examples of people who have purchased fake followers.
This is a one man band recruitment agency that has only posted around 420 tweets, yet has 12,600 followers.
You’d be forgiven for thinking “Wow, those must be some really awesome tweets”, but they’re not. They never are. In this case, they’re nearly all job postings and sales messages.
When you click on the ‘Followers’ link and start to scroll down for around 10 seconds, you start to see a trend in nearly all of the follower profiles. Most have no bio, many don’t have a picture and a remarkable number have Spanish sounding names. In other words, fake.
Next we have a chap called Andrew Leong who has a book to sell. A book that will, if his Twitter handle ‘The Rich Recruiter’ is anything to go by, make recruiters who read it… yep you’ve guessed it, rich.
The Rich Recruiter has posted only 168 times, yet has a staggering 22,000 followers.
Scroll down his ‘Follower’ page for around 20 seconds and you start to see nearly all of them have Arabic names.
But unlike Wolf Recruitment, Andrew had the decency to follow-back all of his fakes – probably in an attempt to make his follower number appear more genuine.
Unfortunately, I can’t see any actual recruitment experience on Andrew’s LinkedIn profile, so am struggling to guess where he might have got the material for his book.
Maybe he bought it from someone else? Either way, I’m sure it will provide some “tips and tricks” to the weaker members of the global recruiting community.
There are many examples of this.
The other day I found a London based “executive search” recruitment business on LinkedIn with around 30 members of staff, nearly all of whom had only ever worked for that one agency and who were all moonlighting as stock-photo models.
Given that all of these examples are small businesses, could we be forgiven for suggesting that there’s actually very little harm in artificially massaging your social media numbers? Could it be described as a legitimate marketing tactic?
But what happens if you buy into this fakery?
What if you attempt to do business with someone who corruptly inflates their social media presence?
Are they going to be trustworthy?
Is social media marketing the only area where they’re prepared to lie? Or are they only guilty of just being a bit stupid?
I’ll leave that for you to decide. For me, it sends a clear signal that these people are relatively comfortable lying if they think it will deliver a positive outcome.
I struggle to cope with people like that.
How often do you check a social media profile before you decide to engage with it?
I check everyone’s profile, photo, numbers and websites before engaging with them and advise you to do the same.
Especially if the maths don’t add-up or the picture looks a little too perfect.
Comments
By Paul McMahon on Friday, 13 March 2015An enjoyable read Mitch.
Admittedly I chuckled at some of your very valid points and I think the reason being whilst reading the one thought I had was surely (in our industry) clients/candidates would not be suckered in or swayed by social media.
It’s so easy these days to see significant amounts of public information at companies house whilst also being able to view a demonstrable track record. Maybe I am naive here but I just assume that the people on the other side of their table have done their homework hence why they’ve chosen to speak to me or our firm… more I think about it the more I realise I am very financial services specific and there must be so many other sectors where exactly what you’re proposing not only happens but achieves successful results. That just baffles me!!
By Mitch on Wednesday, 17 June 2015
As an update, I recently found out that the “one man band recruitment agency” mentioned in this blog has been jailed for 2 years and 8 months.
For business fraud no less.
By Steve Ward on Wednesday, 17 June 2015
It isn’t just the dodgy-end of the one-man band fraternity.
The tactics of ‘supposedly reputable’ agencies such as Sumo Creative and Aspire, to do auto-follow/auto-unfollow activity, with automated and un-engaging content is rife too. Can spot them a mile off.
By David Stone on Wednesday, 17 June 2015
But, Mitch - MY profile picture is stock-photo perfect, and yet you connected with me….... ;o)
By John W on Friday, 22 July 2016
Don’t you need to caveat that the title isn’t a typo?
Commenting is not available in this section entry.