The Dark Side Of Influencer Marketing

Akshit Pushkarna

“Competitors defaming another Startup…. All fake accounts, girls’ names, new accounts, Defam-ing EMT, Promoting Goibibo. High time when Influencer and Paid Marketing needs to be regulated?,” Ravisutanjani Kumar, VP-Partnerships, Testbook.com, tweeted on June 23. Kumar, who has about 40,000 followers on the social media platform, earlier blew the whistle when a similar case defaming e-retailing platform Meesho arose. What drew the attention of media to Kumar’s tweets was the hard facts he presented with them in the form of screenshots of various “twitter influencers” posting tweets in a similar language targeting both companies in what appeared to be a targeted attack to smear the reputation of the brands online. “I identified certain patterns of comments or posts about companies by influencers where it was clearly visible that the posts were made with a common use of language and were aggressive. To simplify, they looked like similar copy paste comments. At that point, I was following some of these influencers and they weren’t accounts who would talk about startups. Hence, the language they were using didn’t look polished enough or coming from someone who would had business knowledge. This pattern became clearer and I made the post highlighting the issue,” Kumar tells Entrepreneur India.