Online Conversations: If You’re Going to Be Deceptive, Don’t Be Boneheaded about It

It’s the attack of the sock puppets.

Darren Barefoot wrote a post critical of a company’s product a year ago.

Then, two week ago, three different "people" left glowing comments about the company and its products within 10 minutes of each other. And for two of them, the IP address of the computer they used showed up as belonging to the company being praised (see Darren’s clips, showing the source of a comment).

Darren offers some lessons to be learned from this:

1. Never lie.
2. Join the conversation, don’t spin it.
3. If you’re going to lie, don’t be stupid about it.

As if posting three comments in rapid succession wouldn’t raise suspicions…

Now that Darren has used the company name Constant Contact in his blog post, there will be a record of the attempt at deception, findable by search engines.

At least the firm is smart about some things. They have the top six Google searches for Constant Contact pointing at their home page. So only if a bunch of bloggers and others started linking to Darren’s post, using the company name Constant Contact in the link, would it be possible for his post to show up higher in the search rankings.

But what kind of evil bastards would do that to an honest, reputable company like Constant Contact?

More about online sock puppets:

EU Makes Fake Blogs and Comments Illegal: Are all bloggers liable?

Previous posts:

• The Internet Was Built on Bullying
• The Google Bomb Defused

Tags: constant contact, sock puppets, blogging, deception, communications, business, comments