Mind Soup

If you own or manage a Facebook page for a brand, cause or personal reason, you are bound to get spam messages from people claiming to get you more Facebook likes for cheap or free, something like the below: What is more annoying is how they try to convince you that their services are legit. Check out the below conversation that occurred on one of my client's pages. To begin with, I do not allow any of my clients to purchase fans or likes on any platforms. If you know anything about marketing, you would know that purchasing bulk followers does not get you anywhere, for the following reasons: These users approach uniformed or uneducated page owners to take advantage of them. These "companies" work by hiring a bunch of underpaid people in China, India or Egypt and stuff them in an overcrowded room to create fake Facebook accounts with randomized named and their only job is to like "client" pages. ( Side article:   83 million Facebook accounts are fake...

Twitter users and the media are amazed and impressed by the amount of followers that celebrities and some influencers have acquired since they started using twitter. To avoid any sampling bias from myself, I chose to use the " 20 Most Powerful People on Twitter in Lebanon " list by 2famous.tv . I then used a service by Status People that allows you to figure out the percentage of fake followers a user has in addition to the percentage of inactive and good followers. I obtained the following results: So what do we take from the above figures? Most celebrities (singers, actors, presenters, etc...) have a big percentage of fake and inactive followers. This is mostly due to them (or their agencies) buying followers for bulk. Notice that most celebrities have 40% or less good followers. Notice how evident this is with Zaven's follower analysis: 69% are fake (which is a whopping majority) and only 11% are real followers. If we do the math, he would easily be ...

Most of you might have noticed how the whole world is tending to become more fake: from fake noses and boobs to fake personalities to fake brands and products. Sadly, very little is being done to promote originality and uniqueness, especially those relating to human traits and physical appearance -- however, this is not our topic for today. The purpose of this post is to shed light on a very successful campaign that is currently taking place in Lebanon. BPG ( Brand protection group ) is an international organization that protects brands and consumers from fake products by creating awareness campaigns & seminars. The objective of this campaign is to create as much awareness as possible about the fact that there are fake products in the market and to promote a number that consumers can dial to report those imitated products. What I loved the most about this campaign is that its everywhere. Leo Burnett have outdone themselves this time. They have created a very interactive camp...