Social Media Spin Wars

I caught a couple of television commercials last night about reputation management that ran back-to-back, and found it to be an interesting juxtaposition that suggests a conflict in the are of reputation management that seems entirely misguided:

The first commercial was for a firm that enabled people to run background checks on others, primarily targeting people who use online dating services and want to find out if there's anything shady about a person they are considering a real-life encounter with.

The second commercial was for a firm that offered a service to people, primarily targeting professional job-seekers, who have a shady reputation and would like to either remove any item that would give a negative impression, or attempt to bury it in a lot of positive-reputation pieces that the company would whip up for them.

And it struck me: what a paradox is all this noise about reputation management, with some people wanting to find out the dirty truth about others, and others wanting to cover up the dirty truth about themselves, and companies getting paid on both ends.

How unfortunate it is for the firms in question, and how fortunate it is for the consumer, that these two particular advertisements ran back-to-back. A person who have to be exceedingly gullible to trust either of them, given that they both claim to be effective at doing exactly the opposite of one another.

What it all points to is that the reputation of "reputation" itself is in jeopardy. If you know that a person can merely hire a firm to hide the skeletons in their closet, can you really trust another firm that claims to be able to find them? That is, can you trust "the Internet" to tell you the truth?

Perhaps that's a rhetorical question, and perhaps it's exceedingly naive to believe that it ever did. Like any other communications medium, the Internet is a distorted reflection of reality, created by people who pump out information for the sake of controlling or at least influencing the thoughts and behavior of others.

But I did have the sense that this is what people were expecting of social media: to be able to get the "real" thoughts of "real" people in a medium that has become so overrun with marketing as to have lost all credibility. I suppose it was just a matter of time before Web 2.0 became more of the same, all over again.