The Astroturfing Debate Continues…
Yesterday’s post generated a lot of interesting debate points in the Comments section re: astroturfing. For your reference, Wikipedia defines “astroturfing” thus:
Astroturfing is a neologism for formal public relations campaigns in politics and advertising that seek to create the impression of being spontaneous, grassroots behavior … The goal of such a campaign is to disguise the efforts of a political or commercial entity as an independent public reaction …”
Here are some excerpts from the Comments that are worth highlighting…
From Michael Monello – one of the producers of the original Blair Witch Project (and one of the students who hatched the whole program):
While we were building out the (Blair Witch) website and the community, we always knew we were walking a line, but we decided we were not going to try and hoax people outright. The regular members of the Blair Witch community … knew it was a work of fiction … We were not trying to fool anyone …
“(Regarding) the difference between Blair Witch and LonelyGirl15 … The fans of LonelyGirl felt they had a relationship with the character, they communicated to her and she responded back to them. They were all part of a community, so when it was revealed that she was a fiction, people felt betrayed because they were emotionally invested in her.
“If you are going to walk that line, you have to be respectful of your audience and their emotions. People love a good prank, but they don’t like to have their emotions manipulated falsely.”
Michael’s comment was much longer and more nuanced than I can suggest via an excerpt, but he makes a fascinating point:
Community investment is the key to understanding community reaction.
Blair Witch fans were invested in solving a mystery; LG15 fans were invested in a fellow community member (or so they thought). Likewise, Facebook users are passionate about the service; thus, when FB disrespects the amount of “ownership” that FB users feel for their interactions with the service (as with the original flavor of Beacon), the backlash is intense.
Which leads me to this note from the Comment by Joel Richman:
(Is there) a huge difference between what The Commotion Group is doing with videos, and what every SEO/SEM firm operating on the web is doing with text or links? Gaming organic results, right?
“What about parallels in other mediums? Having ‘fake’ comments and multiple people ‘in’ on getting a controversy started around a video is a little like having a laugh track on a sitcom, don’t you think? It’s there to infect the audience and get them invested in what they’re seeing.”
Ethical SEO is not about gaming the system, it’s about optimizing a website’s design & content such that Google effectively recognizes what the site is truly about. And those lame-o laugh tracks are more akin to spam. In both cases, the so-called manipulation is at the surface-level: these are half-assed ways to influence the masses, not abuses against a community.
Other great points were also raised yesterday; I hope that if you have something to contribute to the conversation, you’ll comment either here or on yesterday’s post.
Either way, if you’re getting value from these chitchats, make sure you’re subscribed, ‘kay? Have a nice weekend!
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Let’s take a quick reflection when trust is misinterpreted or mishandled by the author/producer.
http://members.aol.com/jeff1070/wotw.html
This is classic.
I’ve always had a problem with SEO as a discipline. No disrespect to SEO practitioners, but I believe that if people spent half the time on clearly describing their products/services and offering solid information about the benefits –i.e. if they tried to actually honestly sell their product on their site — as they spend on design and SEO techniques, websites would be a whole lot better.
Instead we generally have over-designed websites that read like a keyword index.
I’m just sayin’
Great follow up points. Lame as the laugh tracks are, they’re still used to get a reaction from viewers and give a feeling of kinship with the audience around the content–laughter is infectious.
And, as long as the content is good, no laugh track (and our parallel, initial fake comments) will get the audience to engage. It’s just the nudge needed to get the content discovered in the crowd of 10k – 50k new videos uploaded daily. So if the video takes off and gets north of 100k views after the “nudge,” is that the fault of the guys who gave it a nudge? No, it’s because the content is good. They just found a way to make enough noise for the video to be found in the flood of crap video hosting sites have to index, or store and serve.
And this was a great line: “In both cases, the so-called manipulation is at the surface-level: these are half-assed ways to influence the masses, not abuses against a community.” Amen. The way some have reacted you’d think this was a crime against humanity.