The Anti-Social network

IF YOU ARE AMONG THE companies gloating about the number of ‘likes’ on your Facebook page or the number of ‘followers’ on Twitter, it’s time you did a bit of snooping. Zoom in on the profiles of the fans and you just might find several who don’t exist in real life, but are creations of social media agencies eager to please their clients’ lust for numbers.

The creation of fake profiles that ‘like’ or follow brand pages is rampant in the social media advertising space in India. Shubho Sengupta, who advises brands on digital media strategy, says it is happening primarily because marketers just need to tick a box on their must-have-presence-across lists.

“In fact, it’s a global phenomenon. I’m not very surprised because it’s the easy way out,” says Sengupta. “The trouble is that companies enter the digital space because it is relatively cheaper to have a presence there and not with the intention of engaging with customers. Brands need to think about why they should be on social media in the first place.”

Ramswaroop Gopalan, the country head of advertising agency SapientNitro, which specialises in the digital space, says, “The trouble is that we are taking an existing paradigm and applying it to a new medium.” He believes that it is important to follow the example of companies such as Unilever who “ask not for likes or short-term campaign ideas but ideas that can be used to address consumers continually”.

The digital platform as an advertising medium has for long been sold as the last word in measurement. But not all forms of digital media can be measured in the same way. Users who like brand pages do not essentially engage with the brand, let alone stay loyal. While people may be on Facebook and Twitter for a whole gamut of reasons, being ‘marketed to’ isn’t top of the list.

Wasim Basir, director, integrated marketing communications at Coca-Cola India, believes that initiatives such as Coke Studio succeed both on the ground and in cyberspace because they engage. “Sometimes good quality engagement is better than spray and pray. Twitter and Facebook are just places where people are gathered. The point is not whether you know and do social media but whether you know how to talk and engage,” he says.

Of the 25 million Facebook profiles in the country, it’s difficult to find out how many are fake. But the consensus is that these malpractices are the result of the nascent stage of digital media advertising in the country. Fortune India has learnt that at least two recent account movements, a brand of packaged food and a quick service restaurant chain, were triggered by the client discovering such practices.

SO HOW DOES IT ALL HAPPNE? Fortune India had a tough time convincing people to come on record for the story. Social media agencies, sprouting up by the dozen, in their hunger to get the accounts, often make the pitch to clients, promising unrealistically high numbers for abnormally low project fees. And the easiest number to promise? The number of fans, or followers, or likes.

“Most social media pitches start and end with the agencies quoting a fee per user: say Rs 10 per like. Once you have the lowest quote, any conversation on using social media strategically to engage with people and humanising your brand becomes secondary,” says independent digital media consultant Yeshwant Miranda.

The account bagged, the agency sets up the fan page on Facebook or Twitter, and waits for ‘likes’ and ‘follows’. More often than not, they trickle in like the last drops from a water bottle in a desert, and the numbers that were promised seem impossibly high.

To avoid angry clients or the non-payment of the project fees, the agency looks for the easy way out: making up the numbers. A fake Facebook account is easy to set up. Use any face as a profile picture from a Google image search, create a believable background, fill up the details on education and work experience, and you are good to go.

The art of creating these profiles has evolved to such an extent that it requires a trained eye to figure out if a profile is real or not. That’s partly because of the presence of real people in their list of friends. It’s not that difficult, considering most fake profiles use names of girls as an effective bait for young Indian males to add them to their friends list.

Once the list of friends swell to about a 100 or more, the fake accounts send out suggestions to these new friends to join brand fan pages. When they join these pages, it’s reflected in the their feed helping the brand page go viral.

Abhimanyu S., chief operating officer at Until ROI, a small agency specialising in the digital space, blames the lack of knowledge of clients dealing with social media for the mushrooming of such practices. “They look at these pages and see people liking their page and feel that is enough,” he says.

He regrets that the credibility of social media agencies will suffer once the malpractices are exposed. “The ones doing it are spoiling it for everyone else in this space. I have even seen ghost IDs participating in and winning contests on Facebook. I don’t know where those prizes go,” he adds.

Facebook itself is aware of the menace. It has put in place checks such as tracking to ensure that one internet protocol address is not used to create more than a certain number of Facebook accounts within a certain time, restrictions on copying and pasting the same texts on multiple pages, restrictions on adding too many friends, ‘liking’ everything or forwarding too many page suggestions and so on.

The good thing is that clients seem to be learning as well. Sengupta believes such practices will be weeded out in the long run because “the medium is more powerful than the manipulator”. Like that?