Earlier this month Reddit made the news for banning some heavyweight publishers from their site. Their sin was creating lots of fake accounts in order to vote up their content and get it higher up the Reddit listings.
Which is fair enough. In the video below however Reddit founder Reid Hoffman provides some insight into how they turned Reddit from an unknown start-up into the trend setting behemoth it is today, and the answer is – lots and lots of fake accounts.
It got me thinking, can you grow a community without resorting to this tactic? It's well known that when you start a community you need to seed it with activity, as it's hard to attract people to a community with no discussions and no members.
Obviously one way to do this is to round up as many of your contacts as possible to start things off, probably in a private beta mode so that when you launch to the public there is a community for people to get stuck into.
An alternative of course is to create these people yourself using a variety of sock puppets. I won't get on an ethical high horse here but put the question out there for you.
Can you create a community without fake accounts?
Hi Adi, thanks for sharing.
I love Reddit, and I admire the intelligent community around this social network.
Upon hearing this news, I'm not surprised because Facebook has as well a lot of fake accounts.
Think for istance, about how much it has been evaluated in the stock market, according to the number of the user accounts. But they are not all real!
However Reddit remains my favorite social.
Whoah, this is one heck of question you are asking… Just checked the video, and it's very, very interesting to hear how Reddit came about. I don't agree with some aspects of their approach, but hey, it worked for them so kudos! Now, as for creating a community with fake users or fake comments…
My take? It's rarely a good idea. I can see Reddit's perspective, as they were trying to go mainstream, quickly. But is that always the case, for all types of companies? Certainly not. Growing organically through word-of-mouth is a time-proven tactic to last: just think of any village's general store. And when organic growth is not enough to meet a brand's goals, that's where classic advertisement and marketing come into play, with PR, events, etc. In 2012, this usually means a holistic approach offline and online, including a thorough social media strategy and online marketing tactics.
Just think of all these organizations that have purchased fake fans just to boost their Facebook page numbers. Well, they get penalized today with EdgeRank's algorithm since most of these fans will never interact with the brand, thus dropping the overall effectiveness of the page in terms of fan engagement. This, in turn, means a lot less messages actually reaching fans… so it actually backfires on the brand's original intent to get bigger numbers supposedly to get more activity, sales, leads, conversation and so on.
As for the ethical side of things, it's a different debate altogether, which I won't get in 😉
Cheers,
Frederic
It's an interesting one isn't it? Obviously when Reddit started the culture of the web was very much to sign up to sites using an alias or username, which made it much, much easier to create various fake accounts.
With Facebook and the other social networks however there's more of a move towards using real identities. Only Twitter really stands out as allowing people to hide behind usernames.
As for whether it's worthwhile, I think this is where having a clear ROI for your community comes in. Members don't really matter, and neither really do posts or comments. What matters for your business is the number of customer problems solved or things like that. If you use those metrics a) it's pointless to fake, and b) you focus on what matters to your business.
For a community like Reddit I guess it's going to be easier as a vote is much easier to fake than an actual conversation.
Indeed, and there is probably less interaction between members on Reddit than there are on discussion forums or social networks where people develop relationships online via their discussions.
I actually think that most companies are doing these type of things and the tiny minority that are not are either too successful to care, or are getting left behind in the race to lead. Social proof is becoming the key factor to success and with Google now even measuring it, I would say that the line between what's ethical and what's not is growing dimmer, day by day. At the end of the day, the aliases and fake accounts did not hurt anyone, nor did they cause any pain or distress, no lives were lost and nothing was stolen really. Sure, they used unethical tactics to get ahead but most businesses do worse things.
Eye opening post Adi!
What would happen if we took away all the fake accounts from the Top 10 social networks and then only counted the accounts that were being actively used, say within the past 3-4 days?
Well it was revealed recently that nearly 50% of the Twitter followers on many big brand accounts were in fact bots (that\’s not to say the brands had inflated their followers btw), so you can get an idea I think.
It really underlines the importance of using the right metrics. Members or followers or fans aren\’t really important. What\’s important are the business outcomes, so if it\’s a customer service community it\’d be the number of times a customer was helped on time and to their satisfaction. You can\’t really fake that.
Of course it's a risk, of course it's not 100% ethical, but I dare say it works by providing social proof etc. I'm not going to get on any moral high ground. You know the risks and if you're happy with those risks then I've no problem with it.