It’s funny how many times I find myself using fake names when signing up for this site or that service.

Usually, I am simply testing something out and don’t want to be added to the marketing list, so I just make up a name.

A while back a woman named Lori Drew (her actual name) did the same thing, but then decided to play a trick on a girl that was going to her child’s school. She logged onto MySpace and created a fake profile, claiming to be a boy in the girl’s school.

Well, the chatting commenced and when it ended the 13 year old girl was dead - she had hung herself after a particularly discouraging chat from this other ‘boy’.

All kinds of debate has obviously be started over this case - mainly is MySpace liable…but I think it illustrates an important point; nobody is who they say they are on the Internet.

I guess, just because the web is voyeuristic in nature - you can be someone else. You can express yourself or make stuff up, and nobody knows who you really are.

As marketers, this happens to create a large challenge. We have so violated the trust we once had (did we ever have it?) with consumers that we’ve lost all credibility completely.

When we first started Yovia, we set out to change this. We wanted to do what everyone else wasn’t doing - tell the truth.

We believed that if you had something that was naturally interesting, funny or just plain good, people would talk about it, and it would spread.

I was thinking through all of the stuff we do to market today (almost a year later), and how we are always trying to grow Facebook Groups and MySpace friends and how proud I was that we ‘weren’t’ like all of the others out there…

And then I remembered Becky Thatcher.

Becky was one of the first employees of Yovia. She worked hard, never complained and most of all is a really cheap employee.

Oh, one thing - Becky Thatcher is not real.

We made her up, I guess, thinking that we could conduct campaigns on Facebook without anyone actually knowing who we were.

Nothing really ever happened with Becky. She was eventually forgotten. Now, we only use our actual profiles.

My philosophy is that if my real friends would be offended by something I was posting on Facebook, I shouldn’t be posting it.

In a sea of misinformation, fraud and even little girls taking their lives, let’s stand up and just be who we are.

I have nothing to hide, do you?

Jalali Hartman