Welcome to Above The Fold! Your weekly dose of business development for SMEs.
Since the beginning of time, ‘reputation’ means everything. This has never been truer than in today's vastly interconnected world, with an ever-growing, global-level competition.
Hard to build and easily destroyed.
If you go over some of the stories of business magnates in the world, old or new, you'll understand that previous statement much better.
But, in a digitally dominated world, where deepfakes and propaganda exists on an open source level, can you actually ‘buy’ reputation, instead of building it?
The short answer, unfortunately, is YES. With (oftentimes, shady) service providers who specializes in Twitter followers and retweets, to ‘organic’ website visits, YouTube views and likes, Facebook likes and comments, article placements on some high profile publications, and even fake Google, Yelp, and Trustpilot reviews, it's just a matter of having a big enough budget - and finding a reliable provider, since oftentimes social media platforms ban and close their bot accounts in high numbers, almost daily.
In many instances, it's been proven that a lot of celebrities ‘buy’ these social media bot services, and a considerable amount of their followers are in fact, bots.
If one wants to generate buzz and ‘chatter’ about their upcoming product release, all they have to do is get some bots to do the ‘talking’ for them on any social media platform. Once they've done enough of that, they can turn towards unsuspecting customers and dupe them.
Or worse, get investors to buy into the company.
Recently an internal investigation by IRL’s (an allegedly ‘upcoming’ messaging app) board of directors found that 95% of the app’s reported 20 million users were “automated or from bots,” The Information first reported. So, after raising more than $200 million in venture capital, IRL is shutting down.
Stories like this show that it's not hard to pull off a scam like this. But it also shows that it's not sustainable to keep the scam going, and it will be discovered by someone, eventually.
In a world where companies like Theranos, FTX, Wirecard, and others were able to successfully dupe the general public into believing that they were the real deal, more and more people are becoming suspicious of overnight successes and high-profile brands.
Now, on to some (relatively) positive side of this.
It's very hard to sustain (aka ‘maintain’) a ‘store-bought’ reputation, for a couple of reasons.
Like I said before, social media platforms are aware of this situation. And they're always taking down these bot accounts en masse.
One of the most obvious giveaway is a high percentage of inactive, and banned user accounts as followers. And most tech-savvy people know this.
Plus, there are some good algorithms that'll find out whether any given social media account's followers are real or fake.
Also, once a social media platform's algorithms flags an account for bot activity (i.e., having bot engagements, using bots to run the account, etc.) the account's organic discoverability dies off, and it gets shadowbanned. It means that it'll be invisible for users to be organically discovered, and sometimes won't even show up in search results.
Not to mention that due to being shadowbanned, the accounts’ content have a very low organic engagements, thus they either have little to no likes or comments, or they have bot likes and comments, which can be identified by most users due to the comments being very generic and spam-like.
Overall, it serves no purpose - other than greed - to fake a reputation. But, being delusional in the face of ‘clout’, and a gamble of getting a bigger check, some people tend to do these fraudulent activities.
In the end, even if they didn’t face legal consequences, the revelation alone will tank whatever reputation they built.
Till next week.
-Jay.
You can always reach out via abov@post.com if you have any questions or you want to share some ideas with me.