The Next Web

Look out for the (fake) SHEO at Linkedin

Written on June 17, 2008 – 1:34 am
Simone Brummelhuis, writing about women on the web

This week a new media campaign around the negative representation of female CEO’s in The Netherlands will be introduced. And you know what? It will use the social web to its fullest. Female Internet Hero Shula Rijxman, Chief Commercial Officer at IDTV, is the brain behind the idea. In short: the CEO will become a SHEO and will be brought to life and as a consequence the negative representation will become positive representation!

First, a guerilla marketing action is planned, which is - by the way - not so guerrilla when you announce it first. During this wild action, parking spots of companies’ VIPS’s will be ‘reserved for SHEO’s’. After that, some traditional advertising will take place presenting the SHEO to the public. Also, at airports SHEO business lounges will be opened. Lastly, drama series will be produced about the worklife to the top of 3 SHEO’s.

Internet will come into play in combination with these drama series. At social networks like Hyves, Linkedin, Facebook, Xing and the one you have, these three SHEO’s will submit their profiles. And so they will be brought to life. If you want to contact them, an editorial board will impersonate the SHEO’s and answer your questions.

A similar campaign of Campari in which a fake social network profiles attracted about 3,000 friends was described recently at ReadWriteWeb.

Question - red flag - comes to mind how many people on the social networks are actually ‘fake’ and only there for purposes of advertising campaigns, tests or just for fun. How many of your friends and business partners at your social networks only exist on paper and were just an invention by an advertising executive?

Is this a development that is desirable? Please lend me your thoughts.

Note: Instead of creating a non-existing SHEO, why don’t we call upon all the women CEO’s to add to their profile SHEO?

I hope you like that post!

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ceo, fake, linkedin, SHEO