Darth Vader has 16,313 followers on Twitter.  With updates like, “To all troopers: When searching for droids with stolen Death Star Battle plans, check behind ALL doors, even the ones that are locked,” and his revelation that he was dressing as Vice President Dick Cheney for Halloween this year, it’s a safe bet that Vader’s microblog is not an official Lucasfilm marketing effort.  Other notable fake Tweeple include Jane Austen, J. Jonah Jameson, Sarah Palin, Tony Stark, John McCain, and Doctor Doom, who has been amusing Twitter with his fake Presidential race against his fake archenemy, Reed Richards.

Since I harp on Twitter a lot (and Biz Stone can start sending me checks whenever he likes), I should also point out successful fake character pages on MySpace (Mandy Lane, from the slasher flick All The Boys Love Mandy Lane, has her own MySpace page), Facebook (Red 5 Comics’ Atomic Robo has his own profile and has 196 friends), and there have been reasonably popular blogs written in the voice of The Incredible Hulk and comic book detective Ralph Dibny.  Yes, I know.  Me with the comics again.  Whatever.  There are plenty of other examples out there on MySpace, YouTube, and any other place you can imagine.

One of the cornerstones of successful social media engagement is authenticity – the appearance that you are a real person providing real value to the community you’re involved in.  Aren’t these fake characters an example of poor authenticity?

Well, kind of.  But here’s the thing, and it’s based around one terrible, horrible facet of social media that its evangelists don’t crow so loudly about: it’s way more important to be entertaining than it is to be authentic.  In fact, what authenticity really means from a social media perspective is that you are providing value to the community, not simply leaching value from it.  From that POV, there’s no way to really be entertaining without being authentic.  So, whether you’re branding yourself in social media-space as yourself, your dog, your mascot or as zombie Abraham Lincoln, the best way to connect to your customers is give them something to pay attention to.