When the Real Steve Jobs Doesn't Stand Up, Consumers Do It For Him
It turns out that Steve Jobs' latest "email exchange" was a fake -- the one in which he told an irate iPhone 4 owner with connection problems: "Retire, relax, enjoy your family. It is just a phone. Not worth it." So is the Twitter account @ceoSteveJobs (its logo at right), which led to an erroneous report earlier this week in The Daily Mail that the iPhone 4 might be recalled because the fake account -- which has over 100,000 followers -- said so.
Yes, in one of the weirdest outgrowths of the social media movement, there's a cottage industry in impersonating the Apple CEO, a phenomenon that started in 2006, with Dan Lyons' Fake Steve Jobs blog. Which leads to a question: what's at work here with all these counterfeit Steves?
Of course, part of it is that Steve Jobs is mythic -- a cult figure who lends himself to all manner of tribute. Just ask Jesus what that's like. But there's something else going on too: because Apple has no discernible social media strategy, consumers have filled the void -- and that's a bigger issue that companies in the spotlight all need to address. If you're not saying much, consumers will say it for you -- and they don't exactly adhere to the party line.
If Jobs and his company were actively operating in the rapid-response social media sphere, posting about what the company was doing to resolve the iPhone 4's apparent issues, or swatting down the latest rumor that Verizon is going to start selling the iPhone, there might not be as healthy an appetite for these Jobs impostors. It also doesn't help, in the matter of the fake email exchange, that it took Apple at least seven hours to say it was a lie.
As an aside, Jobs' occasionally leaked email exchanges with consumers don't help all that much. It's laudable that he's doing so, but it's hardly strategic to have your emails leaked by whomever you're conversing with. That only leads to to rumors like the ones that have broken out this week.
But the problem of these counterfeit social media accounts isn't exclusive to Apple -- it just happens to be a particularly good example of how consumers can try to stage a coup over a company's -- or a CEO's -- voice. Another great, recent, example is @BPGlobalPR -- which just keeps gushing out tweets, at this point to more than 180,000 followers, while the real BP Twitter account has 16,500. There are older examples as well -- such as Comcast and Dell -- both of whom eventually realized what Apple and BP need to: that the best way to have some influence in the conversation about you is to make sure you're an ongoing part of it.
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