If You're Thinking Of Paying People To Talk Nice About Your Company Online, It Probably Won't End Well

from the ethics? dept

A company called Cash4Gold, which pays people for unwanted gold items, gained some notoriety this week on the back of its Super Bowl ad, which featured Ed McMahon with a golden toilet and MC Hammer with a gold medallion of himself wearing a gold medallion. But it's also getting some more press online after somebody doing online "marketing" for it apparently emailed a guy that had written an unflattering story about the company and offered to pay him to take it down or rewrite it (via Boing Boing). The search results for the company feature some pretty unfavorable stories about it, but evidently instead of cleaning up its act, Cash4Gold would rather just splash out some Cash4Silence. This comes a few weeks after a Belkin employee got busted trying to pay people to write positive reviews about its products on Amazon. It's hardly surprising that companies do this sort of thing, but the potential downside of getting caught (not to mention the ethical concerns) should give them pause.

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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If You're Going To Put Up Fake Grassroots Videos On YouTube, Shouldn't You At Least Pretend To Be Real People?

from the just-a-thought dept

A political reporter for the Star Telegram in Texas noticed something rather interesting after a Republican National Committee spokesperson sent over some YouTube videos, combining some news clips with snippets of comments from presidential candidates: none of the videos said who they were made by and all of them were put up under odd usernames that looked like someone had just typed randomly on a keyboard -- and all of which only had a single video uploaded. Usernames like skdjhfjhse, asdlkfjasdlk and skfhsdfsd don't exactly look like real people posting user-generated content -- and they're not. When asked about it, the RNC admitted that it had made the videos itself and posted them online. Why not post them under the RNC's official YouTube channel? Well, the RNC claims that it's because these weren't television ads, which is also the excuse it gives for not including a "the RNC is responsible for this ad" disclaimer in the videos. However, it seems pretty clear that the idea was to get these videos up for more viral purposes, suggesting something of a "grassroots" support to the production. However, if you're going to do some astroturfing, you might as well at least have the fake "grassroots" supporters look real. Merely typing in a bunch of characters from the central row of your keyboard is a pretty immediate tipoff that these aren't real people.

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