some time ago someone offered me $ for creating a “virtual person” which would be used to make some buzz on few major polish community websites… it sounded challenging but it had one serious issue… it was supposed to be 100% fake profile without any clues or stuff that would make people aware that this is not a real person.

and I mean, that’s not cool. So I said - no.

I do understand that creating virtual people for marketing purposes is very efficient but we should always be honest with people we are aiming at with our campaign. The truth about existence of specific person should come from its creators, otherwise people will feel like they were cheated. I guess I don’t have to explain what you could do with your campaign after that….

For example, some time ago I found out that on LinkedIn you can find profile of Barack Obama, my first question was “is it real?” And of course, that was pretty obvious that it’s not him managing his profile but his staff. And when that’s obvious no-one can feel cheated.

But what if someone who’s not a public person, someone who looks just like your neighbor… how would you feel if you would find out after few months that it wasn’t a real person but a whole group of people? Do you want your users to feel that way?

So what can you do to prevent such situations?

• Make simple and clear rules. For example on GoldenLine.pl we have a point in our statute that “§ 20. Zabrania się udostępniania swojego Konta innym podmiotom.” This means that it’s forbidden to give access to your account to someone else. Of course in this case we don’t want profiles other than from a real person managed by herself. If you want to allow people to make a profile of some company’s virtual person you can say something like “If your profile will be managed by more than one person it should be said in it’s description so it will be clear for everyone who contact your profile“.
• Be sure people obey your rules. I know this is a hard one but at least try. You can add some features like “report” button in users profile so you get noticed when there will be something you should check.
• React when there are doubts about someone’s profile.
• Make sure people know what’s your statement about profiles managed by someone else than the one they present. We all know that people use to forget about reading the statute so there is a big chance that information’s included in it will just miss them. Find other ways like company blog for example.
• If you want to have “featured”/”sponsored”/”group” profiles make it possible for people to create them without cheating.
• Make it easy to notice who’s standing behind specific profiles. For example, while making a buzz using some celebrity signed profile, when you write something to users sign it “The staff” or something near that so people will know that it’s not the celebrity itself but her staff… of course, it makes that profile less cool than the one which would be actually managed by the celebrity but it would make it even less cool if you lie and someone find out…
• Double verification? Let’s be honest, people do lie about who they really are. They have their reasons (they’re afraid of identity theft etc.). But there are some websites where they need to post their very detailed personal info (like eBay, Amazon etc.). What you need to do now is just to allow them to synchronize their profiles (technically it can be solved in a lot of very different ways, but what’s important, we don’t need to copy or see any data, we just need to know that this user have an active profile on Amazon, eBay which won’t work if they post there their fake info like address or surname). It’s probably the easiest way to make your community members more reliable…

Treat your users the way you would like to be treated,
be honest….