Creating an “Internet Celebrity” for $ 68

Santiago Swallow (Santiago Swallow) - a visionary, consultant, author and thinker. Santiago has 85,000 followers on Twitter and an article on Wikipedia . Perhaps, as of April 17, it was the most "famous" person on the Internet, about which no one had heard. It is not surprising, because Santiago really does not exist.

Creating an image of Santiago Swallow took only two hours and 68 dollars .

Yesterday, the creator of the image of Santiago Swallow revealed his scam. He acknowledged that Santiago - a fictional image, which was born on April 14, 2013 in the text generator Scrivener (a very useful program for copywriters - generates texts, names and names). The program offered a choice of 500 names: Alonzo Arbuckle, Leon Ling, Phil Portlock, Judson Jackman, and so on, from which he chose Santiago Swallow.
')
The promotion of “Internet celebrity” began with the creation of a Gmail box - this is the only thing needed to open an account on Twitter. After that, the author found sellers of followers on fiverr.com online auctions and bought 90 thousand followers for $ 50.

Next, the author spent a few minutes drawing three photos for Santiago in the Lightroom program. He even added a “verified” account icon to the background image on Twitter for greater persuasiveness.

To maintain activity on Twitter, the author launched the TweetAdder program, which generates meaningful phrases, folovit and retweet other users to create the impression of normal activity.

In the end, the author wrote a Wikipedia article about Santiago Swallow. In order to comply with the requirements for the objectivity of Wikipedia, he criticized some of the "statements" of Santiago. For the biography, he used someone else's biography, creatively reworking it. All the work took a couple of hours. It took only $ 18 to create a site for Santiago, so the total cost was $ 68.

Yesterday, after disclosing the scam of this story, both the Wikipedia article and the twitter account were deleted. Nevertheless, the story perfectly demonstrates what are the so-called "Internet celebrities" and what are the "professionals" in social media optimization, offering "fast and high-quality promotion."

Although Santiago was removed, there are quite a few other characters left on the Internet whose popularity is nothing more than a fake.