For some journalists, success is now measured not just by circulation, ratings or online visitors but by the number of people who click social media 'Like' buttons on their pages.
It's been only a year since Facebook let other websites put the button on their pages but it already feels like forever. Facebook reportedly says that 10,000 websites are adding the 'Like' button (above) every day.
Modern journalists are embracing social media networks for the numbers and interactivity they provide. But they should beware: some of their 'likes' may not come from real people.
Twenty-eight-year-old Cristina Apostol works in Bucharest and has accounts on Facebook, Yahoo Messenger (YM), MySpace and Hi5.com. In fact, she has three or four YMs, two Hi5s and two MySpaces. When I spoke to her recently, she said she might soon open another Facebook account "because you never know when you might need it".
For Apostol, the multiple account habit started a few years ago when she helped a male friend who believed that a girl was using charms (yes, as in witchcraft) on him.
She didn't think the girl would admit the practice so decided to spoof her. She created an account on Yahoo Messenger that gave the impression that it belonged to a well-known drum 'n' bass DJ. Armed with this fake identity, (s)he contacted the suspected 'witch', told her (s)he had found her address through Hi5.com (a popular social network in Romania) and that (s)he had fallen for her. Within three days, the girl had told Apostol the story of her life and confirmed that she had indeed tried to bewitch her friend.
"When it comes to the internet and online identity, people are very naïve," says Apostol. "If you say you are someone, it's practically as if you really are that person."
But it's not just people wanting to play private-eye who are creating fake identities.
There are others playing online games such as Farmville or Mafia Wars. By creating fake profiles, they can add more friends to their network - and more friends means extra points.
Many organisations open personal accounts on Facebook instead of company pages. As a result, they appear as people. I have received friend requests from such 'people' as Car Body Parts.
US federal agents reportedly use Facebook undercover to spy on suspects. Policemen in India have created hundreds of fake identities on the social network in order to monitor young separatists in the Kashmir region.
According to Computer Weeklylast year, cybercriminals sell fraudulently obtained bulk login information to access hundreds of thousands of Facebook accounts. They also use special programmes to create fake profiles that can be traded on the black market.
The Romanian blogger Andrei Crivat wrote in February that some people have hundreds of fake accounts on Facebook which they use in contests that count 'likes' as votes. Sometimes, there is a prize for the picture that collects the most 'likes', so a user with multiple accounts can collect enough 'likes' to win. Such users also trade or sell 'likes'. Crivat's post about the 'Like' mafia has itself been 'liked' 227 times and generated almost 60 comments.
Fake 'likes' can be troublesome for media organisations, especially those which invest real effort in engaging real people on their social media pages. The editors of Decat o Revista(DoR), a new Romanian magazine with an impressive following of real users on Facebook, were dumbfounded last March by an invasion of new fans that started flocking to its page by the thousands.
DoR's fanbase on Facebook shot up from 20,000 to 31,000 within two weeks. Strangely, editor Cristian Lupsa said that most of the new fans appeared to come from Indonesia, Turkey and Latin America. And, more strangely, these profiles had no friends and used obviously fake profile pictures.
"We were bothered by this," said Lupsa, "even though, from the outside, all one could see is that it's just a lot of people."
The editors started to manually eliminate thousands of 'fake Indonesians'. At some point, though, they were overwhelmed. By 25 April, DoR's Facebook page had gathered more than 39,000 'likes' and, according to Lupsa, 10,000 to 12,000 of those came from 'fake Indonesians'.
"I don't know what to do; I don't know where they come from," he says. He wrote to Facebook about the issue but is still awaiting an answer.
Website administrators generally use pieces of code called widgets to easily install buttons such as 'Like' on their sites. Somebody told the DoR staff that the fake 'likes' might come from bots: pieces of software designed to roam the internet and perform various repetitive tasks. In this case, the bots might be engineered to use the widgets to generate multiple 'likes'. The DoR editors deactivated the widget on their website, but the fake 'likes' keep coming.
Unofficial estimates of the ratio of fake profiles range from 1% to 2% to a third of all Facebook profiles. Sture Nyberg, an online marketing coach, claims that 27% of all Facebook accounts are fake (but fails to mention a source for the figure).
Facebook encourages people to report fake accounts and employs a "User Operations team that reviews these reports and takes action as necessary," according to a statement published last July on BusinessInsider.com. "We also have technical systems in place to flag and block potential fakes based on name and anomalous site activity," the statement reads.
For example, users who send lots of messages to people who are not their friends, or whose friend requests are rejected at a high rate, are marked as suspect. And the company has built 'grey lists' of names usually associated with fake accounts and makes it hard for people with unusual names to open an account.
Most social media experts I spoke to agree that fake accounts are still just a minor issue. And DoR has become a local phenomenon on Facebook by engaging real people; not 'fake Indonesians'.
Online contests using the 'Like' functionality as a voting system show a lack of creativity on the part of marketers and encourage people to create fake accounts, says Nicolae-Augustin Rogoz, business developer with Holosfind Performance, a Romanian digital marketing firm.
Such contests attract "bounty hunters" who create fake accounts in order to generate more 'likes', he explains. But they fail to effectively engage users, who tend to lose interest when the contest is over. Real user engagement should be driven by shared values, experiences and vision, Rogoz believes.
Many journalists are used to receiving comments from anonymous users on their websites. In contrast, Facebook and other social media services encourage people to use their real identity. But, as the question of fake accounts reveals, the number of 'likes' a page attracts is not necessarily as important as the quality of the interaction it generates.
In journalism, engaging with the public translates into creating a real conversation around topics that really matter to people. Real people.
A version of this article appeared first on the European Journalism Centre blog. Its writer, Alexandru-BrÄduÅ£ Ulmanu, is a journalist currently working on a book in Romanian about Facebook and social media. He is also a print and online journalism trainer, and blogs about journalism, media and technology at jurnalismonline.ro.
