Know Thy (Social Networking) Self

May 3, 2011 |

Author ken

They say imitation is the greatest form of flattery. They say that impersonation is a form of imitation. Ergo, shouldn’t impersonation thus be considered flattery? Well, no – not really. Especially not if, whilst impersonating you, they’re actively making you look bad. And unfortunately, this is becoming an increasingly ‘popular’ practice amongst social networking sites.#

We did a piece last year in which we covered an example of Eric Schmidt (former CEO of Google) having his identity “borrowed” by techcrunch.com (done simply for the express purpose of illustrating a point). This was an excellent example of CEO’s needing to manage their personal presence online, in order to preserve their online reputation. Now however with an increasing number of companies opting to have Facebook ‘business’ pages and the likes, it’s more important than ever to maintain your presence over social networking media to save your business from suffering.

When ‘business’ pages were first introduced, as with any new system they took a while to catch on. Only a handful of businesses had pages on Facebook or Twitter, so unless people were specifically advised to; they wouldn’t think to search for companies on the ‘off-chance’ that they’d find content at the end of their websearch. Now however, given the large number of people who’ve put their company names to Facebook pages, people are taking it upon themselves in increasing numbers to search for companies speculatively.

What are these people finding? Are they finding pages that you’ve set up to manage and represent your company in the best possible way, or are they finding a page set up by a third party for malicious purposes because you either didn’t think you should, or hadn’t gotten around to doing one yet? Let’s say you haven’t, and somebody else does it for you. A disgruntled ex-employee, perhaps, or a dissatisfied customer – or maybe even a competitor. All they need to do is a quick image search for your company logo, stick it on this fake Facebook page and all of a sudden people are listening to this person on matters concerning your company as if they were coming from you.

If you’re lucky, this person will be a harmless prankster, looking to make a bit of fun and impress his mates. People aren’t generally complete idiots and wont take a Mike Myers-esque “this man blows goats” comment seriously, but anything written even semi-seriously might pull the wool over a few eyes. The more ‘legitimate’ the page is made to look, the more damage it could do to you if left unchecked. For the same reasons you wouldn’t allow your receptionist to conduct themselves improperly when answering the phone, you don’t want anyone with ill intentions being left to speak to either current or prospective customers or business partners. And if you’re company is traded on publicly, one embarrassing ”announcement” could cause almost immediate financial backlash. Perhaps worst of all, the person might be looking to impersonate your company in order to perpetrate fraud.

That’s not to say that imitation pages couldn’t be setup even in addition to your existing presence, but these pages are easier to deal with. And, if you’re in the habit of pro-actively managing an existing online presence (or outsourcing the work to save the time constraint), negative comments and harmful fake pages will be identified and addressed faster as to minimize the possible damage caused.

We strongly advise that even if you don’t feel you have the time or resources to have a continually updated Facebook or Twitter page, you should still at least have a profile set up to hinder impersonators causing you a headache. 20 minutes work now can save a lot of work later on. For more information on managing your reputation online, and how to handle the intricacies of social media and search engine optimization, give us a call.