Sound and fury signifying what?
There's a lot of talk on the pages of Facebook and MySpace. There are people bashing a new film. There are users who write volumes of text proclaiming their devotion to products that have long since ceased to exist. And there are still others who coat their profiles in irony, such as the women who insist that they are body builders, or the teenagers who list their age as 99 (the highest age the drop-down menu will allow).
But what does any of this talk mean for marketers?
In September, emedia, a London-based consultancy firm, issued a report with some startling revelations for marketers. Although the study had too small a sample to offer a definitive conclusion, it did find that nearly a third of the people on social networks reported having some false data in their profiles.
That's not surprising to Catherine Dwyer, a professor at Pace University, who studies user behavior on social networks. Although she wasn't involved in emedia's report, Dwyer says false information on sites like MySpace is quite common.
"Marketers need to be mindful that users often put out false information," Dwyer explains. "There are two very common reasons for this: goofs and privacy concerns."
According to Dwyer, young people who make up the bulk of users on social networks are very likely to post false information on their MySpace or Facebook pages because they think it's funny.
In fact, humorous posts on social networks may be as old as social networks. According to Dwyer, the Fakester phenomenon on Friendster demonstrated how pervasive online gags really are. When the site began to grow in popularity, officials at Friendster deleted fake accounts (those created as gags by users) in order to save bandwidth. What seemed like a solid technical solution all but killed the site, Dwyer explains.
Goofs aside, Dwyer also believes there are a growing number of users who limit or falsify data on their pages because of privacy concerns. According to Dwyer, that means even basic data points like age, gender and marital status could be inaccurate.
That's certainly a concern for Barrett, who says MySpace guards against inaccuracy in its profile groups by keying off of so-called fixed data points (what users report to the site when they sign up). According to Barrett, that data, which users seldom change, provides a reference point for MySpace to test the accuracy of information that is more frequently updated, such as what appears in a user's comments or favorites sections. To further ensure accuracy, Barrett says, MySpace spot-checks profiles with human eyes.