Marketers rely on social media heavily. We all know that. But what happens when our message gets distorted or just misrepresented? Fake social media accounts are a real thing and can damage our clients business and our reputations. Let’s imagine a situation with two competing coffee shops: one is already well established and another one has recently been opened. Prior visiting coffee shops, customers will go online and read the reviews and decide on which one to go to. As there are many people, so there will be many opinions, both negative and positive. However, there is always a possibility that some of the reviews are fake. And among those reviews the chances to encounter fake ones are high nowadays. We live in the world of competition. The strongest will survive, meaning the one who has more positive reviews. So the odds of seeing fake reviews whether positive or negative are high. There could be bots — fake accounts behind those false reviews trying to destroy the reputation of a good coffee shop, or trying to promote a bad one. Those misleading reviews can destroy the business and customers will never want to visit the coffee shop. Looking at this article from the Consumer Federation of America by Tracy D.Rezvani “Review Bots: False Advertising and Opinion Spam?”, bots are a problem for consumers and marketers but there are actions being taken to fix the problem. (https://consumerfed.org/review-bots-false-advertising-or-opinion-spam/)
Imagine a situation, Estee Lauder company has launched a new campaign on one of the social media platforms such as Facebook, where they are introducing a new lipstick and asking customers, who used the product, to review it, in case they need to make some changes. So the company sent out a poll, reaching out to customers. With a possibility of existence of fake accounts on social media, it creates a high risk of the results of the poll to be misleading. This makes our job as marketers a lot harder. We have to find ways to identify and delete the fake reviews, the fake bots and get our message across truthfully and genuinely.
According to Tricia Wang, a well-known global tech ethnographer, in her TED video “The Human Insights Missing from Big Data”, she says marketers can not only rely on Big Data, they have to follow their human knowledge and intuition, in order not to be manipulated and be able to represent a true picture of what is really happening.
