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The Web 2.0 revolution’s most controversial impact has been the freedom it has given to people to show creativity with their online identities. In Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom, we call this identity disaggregation. The construction, and maintenance, of multiple identities on social networking sites is rapidly becoming the expected norm. In the online world, the unitary self has morphed into the multiple self. Identities in cyberspace are multifaceted, splintered, concocted, fluid, negotiated, unexpected, and sometimes deceptive. 

Since the explosion of social networking websites, million of people have been constructing multiple identities as they socially interact, build networks, and collect “friends”. Virtual reality has given a new meaning to the term “facelift”. In online worlds like Second Life, we can hide behind virtual avatars. Online self-representation is disembodied and exempt from the immediate moral consequences of direct eye-to-eye contact. Millions of online social networkers thus have become masters of self-fabrication, distortion, misrepresentation, and outright imposture. 

The dark flipside of this phenomenon is that identity manipulation can also lead to online identity theft, fraud, cyberbulling and other forms of criminal and anti-social behavior. 

Fraud is a massive problem on the Web. Many of us worry about having our identities stolen by Internet hackers seeking to drain our bank accounts. These anxieties are well-founded. Cyber-fraud is now a billion-dollar criminal racket. For fraud to be perpetrated successfully, however, nobody can know about it. A fraudster furtively borrows your identity in order to steal your money in a criminal act that initially goes unnoticed. 

In Britain, a 23-year-old woman called Kerry Harvey discovered to her horror that scam artists had stolen her online details – including her date of birth and mobile phone number – and reconstructed her online identity on Facebook as a prostitute soliciting clients online. Kerry, an advertising executive from Gloucestershire, was at first baffled when she started getting calls from “punters” looking for sex. Then she learned that she had a parallel life on Facebook, where malicious fraudsters had stolen her photo from another website and, combining it with accurate details like her phone number, transformed her into a Facebook hooker. 

The phenomenon of identity blurring has produced alarming consequences when exploited, often in an ill-advised manner, for corporate PR purposes. An example is the advent of so-called or “flogs” – or fakes blogs – created by marketing and PR flaks to promote products under the phony guise of authentic consumers who appears to be enthusiastically plugging a product. 

Major PR firms like Edelman have been taken on in the blogosphere for flogging on behalf of corporate clients. In 2006, Edelman managed a flog for retail giant Wal-Mart, called Wal-Marting Across America. The blog created the impression that it was written by an average American couple, “Jim” and “Laura”, who were chronicling their travels across America in a recreation vehicle and making stops in Wal-Mart parking lots. It turned out, however, that the blog was being written by “fake people” – Laura was a freelance writer and Jim was a Washington Post staff photographer -- paid by a pro-Wal-Mart public relations front, Working Families for Wal-Mart, which had already been at the centre of another phony-blog controversy. Working Families for Wal-Mart had been set up, it turned out, by none other than Edelman. 

When media reports, including an exposé in Business Week, uncovered the Wal-Mart flog, both Wal-Mart and Edelman hastily beat an embarrassed retreat. But it was too late. The blogosphere had already piled on, blasting Edelman for appropriating the blog form and blurring the line between authentic opinion and PR. The Wal-Mart flogging mess raised serious ethical issues about the general question of corporate-sponsored “PayPerPost” blogs. Edelman, in damage-control mode, was forced to come clean and, in a blog posting on his own corporate site, clarify his firm’s policy regarding corporate clients. As blogger Richard Scoble noted: “The nice thing is that when the corrosive effect of money comes into the blogosphere and isn’t disclosed, it’ll earn a direct blowback.” 

Wal-Mart, meanwhile, decided to seek redemption by launching an authentic blog written by employees called Checkout. The company describes the blog this way: “This is a blog, simply, about a team of experts at Wal-Mart who have really cool jobs working with gadgets, wine, sustainability, fashion and more.”

Another controversial corporate flog was Sony’s marketing campaign using MySpace profiles and YouTube videos to hype its PSP game console. Sony’s flogging was quickly exposed by alert bloggers, such as the Consumerist, who posted the phony MySpace profiles and denounced the “marketing douchebags who appear on the PSP flog pretending that they are kids who want their parents to buy them a PSP for Christmas.” Sony immediately yanked the embarrassing flog – proof, once again, that the libertarian democracy of social media has a built-in self-correcting mechanism. 

Even CEOs have committed astonishing blunders on their blogs, including attempts to hide behind false blogging identities to promote their brands – and, even more controversially, knock their competition. Whole Foods president John Mackey got busted doing this after he blogged using an identity called “Rahodeb” (a scramble of his wife Deborah’s name). 

Mackey’s flogging was hardly motivated by his enthusiasm for initiating online conservations. His flog posts betrayed a clear conflict of interest. While flogging away, Mackey was trashing another food retailer, Wild Oats, on Yahoo! stock forums. Slagging off competitors is one thing, but it turned out that Whole Foods was making a takeover attempt on Wild Oats while Mackey was flogging about how overvalued the competing retailer was. One of Mackey’s flog postings was unequivocally self-interested: “Would Whole Foods buy Wild Oats? Almost surely not at current prices.” Then Mackey added that Wild Oats had “no value and no future.” When Mackey’s flogging was uncovered, the U .S. Securities Exchange Commission launched an investigation to determine whether he had violated any laws about disclosure of insider information. 

Steven Grover, a vice-president for Burger King, is another top corporate executive who got “punked” by the blogosphere for questionable flogging. He had been using his teenage daughter’s email identity to smear a labor group, Coalition of Immokalee Workers, which was petitioning on behalf of Florida tomato-pickers against the company’s alleged low wages. One of Grover’s flog postings said: “The CIW is an attack organization lining the leaders’ pockets by attacking restaurant companies. They make up issues and collect money from dupes that believe their story....” Unfortunately for Grover, both his daughter and wife were more honest and forthcoming than him. They admitted to the press that he’d used his daughter’s email to attack the labor organization. 

The bad optics for Burger King were aggravated by the fact that its competitors, McDonald’s and Taco Bell, had agreed to the tomato-pickers’ wage demands. Grover’s predicament became even more embarrassing when his postings showed up on YouTube and on blogs like The Consumerist, whose slogan is “Shoppers Bite Back”. The Consumerist remarked: “The next time Burger King VP Stephen Grover goes online to spread FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) about labor advocates, he should probably leave his daughter out of it.” 

These examples demonstrate that the phenomenon of identity masking has penetrated the corporate world, and early signs point to a troubling trend towards questionable conduct. As the above examples show, the consequences for personal and corporate reputations can be extremely negative when digital doppelgangers get found out. And in the Web 2.0 era of the blogosphere, getting caught is virtually certain every time.

We need to learn more about this trend with concrete examples about identity manipulation, especially inside organizations – an especially the impact (negative or positive) on reputation, branding, and trust. Are there any “best practices” that can be established based on a knowledge of positive and negative examples?
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