Five Reasons Social Media gets Gamed

By Ian, on July 22nd, 2010

It’s not too hard to connect this, which arrived in my inbox today:

with this, which arrived in my spam box today:

I wonder if it’s always true that a new area attracts charlatans? I suspect so. There have been plenty of medical charlatans in recent years. You look back at the history of science and there’s all sort of whackos.

In the case of social media, though, I think we’re all aware that there are an especially large number of hucksters out there. Why?

It’s easily faked. Put some ‘read-write’, ‘paradigm change’ and ‘transparency’ into your presentation and everyone’s game.
Multiple Personality Cash Order. Create a load of fake accounts and your client will be delighted that so many people are commenting on their blog post about goat collars, or something.
Preying on the fearful. There’s still an idea, among some execs, that the web is very new and very scary. Show someone a negative review on a blog and they shit their pants.
The basics are *so* easy. Whacking up a twi/fac/mysp/4sq/etc account is a piece of piss. So is blogging. I am living proof.
People fall for these crappy formats = easy again: You wouldn’t stand for a ‘top five reasons why’ post in your favourite newspaper, so why are these silly lists continually at the top of social media tracking charts? I think it’s because we all want easy rather than hard, even though hard might be better for us.

Doing these things well is an entirely different matter, of course. Despite reading about social media and practising it in some ways every day for five years, and as a social web user for 20 years, I’m learning new things every day. And I’m still rubbish.