While chatting with Connie Bensen of Techrigy a few weeks back, we discussed the phenomenon of meeting people online as "social network friends."

Then we shared some stories of how fantastic it is to meet people face to face after a long period of time and feeling like "you already know them."

I've had enough good experiences along these lines (see the Venkatesh story-when I first 'met' him and then in person) that I'll accept friend/link requests from pretty much anyone.

Then, my discussion with Connie took a turn to the, shall we say, less than positive experiences or, as she put it so well:

"I liked you better virtually."

She'd had a set of expectations built up and they weren't met because, in her mind, the person didn't really represent him/herself in an authentic way...and that led to disappointment.

Not the best way to build relationships.

Call it the Age of True Accountability (as I did--I love blogging, since you can quote yourself :-) ] or "Are You Too Good Looking Online?" as Rohit did, the fact is that if you (or your company or your product or your organization) misrepresents itself, you will be outed.

For restaurants it's Yelp, for books Amazon, or any type of reputation management system (a la Rapleaf)

And that's going to hurt a lot more than the initial pain of just saying "this is who I am" or "what we are about" and accepting the fact that some people won't like it.

If someone becomes a Raving Fan and then find out that she did so under what she considers to be false pretenses, you've got a Raving Critic.

Not worth it.