Real person or Ghost

Ok, I know there are a lot of fakes out there on twitter, Facebook and on other Social media websites. But this one has got to take the cake.

"I ghost a couple of CEOs in New Zealand right now," social marketing consultant Courtney Lambert told a recent conference in Auckland. "I’m not going to tell you who they are, but I pretend to be them online. This is a stop-gap method that we’re doing for them at the moment because it’s impossible to get them online otherwise."

Via: Ghost-Twitterers abound – Technology – NZ Herald News

I would consider this blatant fraud on both the person pretending to be someone else, and the someone else who hired them to do so.

Now this is just my own thoughts, but It’s almost as bad as Telecom putting someone in a shipping container then dropping them off the coast. Yeah, right.

Fine, if you want to have someone tweet stuff for you, but at least have the decency to let your followers know it’s not the person directly. Heck, we all know that John Key doesn’t tweet his own stuff, but that it’s his staff. That’s great, at least we know and someone isn’t pretending to be him.

I can see lots of business loosing the trust of their clients when it eventually comes out that the person doing the tweeting or posting on Facebook or where ever to be someone with no real connection to the business other than a contact payment each month.

How hard is it to learn how to use a client to send tweets ??? Surely with a little education and an initial setup the “real” person could be tweeting or posting their own stuff.

I for one am going to pay more attention to the “businesses” I follow on social media websites, such as Twitter and Facebook.

If a business can’t be honest with their followers that they are hiring someone to post to social media sites how do you know they are being honest with you in your business dealings with them.