Beware of faceless online salesmen

Whether it's Microsoft paying a journalist to edit the company's entry on Wikipedia or the CEO of Whole Foods giving an anonymous online thrashing to competitor Wild Oats or Sony Corporation funding an "independent" fan blog, deceptive marketing practices on the internet are a growing problem, new-media analysts say.

This type of consumer manipulation is known as "astroturfing", and efforts to stomp it out are growing. The Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) has been honing a set of voluntary ethical guidelines for its members, and the European Union recently banned the practice altogether.

"The internet functions on trust," says Joel Postman, a corporate communications specialist and founder of Socialised PR, in Boulder Creek, California. "As more and more people do business in the digital world, more consumers than ever need to know who they can rely on to tell the truth."

Astroturfing, a word widely attributed to former US Senator Lloyd Bentsen, is an umbrella term for any sort of fraudulent message masquerading as grass-roots word of mouth.

It comes alongside a continued explosion in the world of viral marketing - self-replicating techniques that use text messages, video clips, images, and other means to encourage people to pass along a marketing message voluntarily and spontaneously.

According to WOMMA, viral marketing has grown 39 per cent in the past year alone, generating nearly $1 billion.

Some 65 million American consumers shared their personal views on products with others online, according to a 2006 study by EMarketer, an internet research firm.

Peer-to-peer marketing

Such peer-to-peer marketing is more important than ever because consumers are much savvier than they used to be, says Paull Young, a new-media strategist with Converseon, a media marketing firm in New York.

Businesses have to be much more sophisticated to speak to a generation that has learned to tune out traditional advertising messages. It's harder than ever to get past the "sniff test" of today's consumers, says Young. That, he says, can put companies in a danger zone.

The WOMMA guidelines address the core concerns for the Digital Age - transparency and trust, says strategist Young.

And the three key words for any online marketer these days are relationship, opinion, and identity. Companies must disclose the relationship they have to the message, whose opinion they're actually voicing, and their real identity.

What's at stake is far more important than a single transaction. One disillusioned consumer can reach a vast universe of fellow shoppers in a single message, Young says.

"A company's reputation is so much more important than a single sale, it doesn't make sense not to be transparent in the digital world."

This observation is echoed again and again by online business strategists.

"It's so easy to bust people online these days ... they just can't hide," says Doc Searls, a fellow with Harvard's Berkman Centre for the Internet and Society.

"It's beyond me why anyone would even try to hide who they really are." Among countless examples of so-called "online identity reveals" is last year's outing of Dan Lyons, a Forbes magazine staff writer, as the author of a fantasy diary known as 'Fake Steve Jobs blog'.

New environment

"Why not figure out better ways to be ethical in business instead?" asks Searls.

Unethical and deceptive practices have existed for a long time in the analog world, of course. But they are "migrating and adapting to the new digital environment [while] the tools for combating it in cyberspace are still being created," says New Knight Centre's Gillmor.

He is leery of governmental intrusion into the internet environment.

"If it means stepping on the First Amendment, I'd be completely against any kind of government oversight," he adds.

An educated and empowered consumer is a far better countermeasure against astroturfing, he and others say.

"We all need to develop a healthy scepticism and the ability to question messages we receive on the internet," he says.