Knowledgeistics

Depending on your point of view, astro-turfing is a great marketing tool, or a pernicious and nefarious tool for deception. “Astro-turfing” is the practice of ‘building artificial grassroots’, and is commonly used in a political context, but also applies to similar commercial activity. For this post, I’m going to focus on astro turfing done for marketing or sales purposes, not political or reputational. Astro-turf is different from plain old spam in that it is advertising deliberately misrepresented as genuine user-generated content.

Astro-turf poses a uniquely sticky problem for both consumers and market researchers. Consumers can find themselves stymied when considering a purchase if they believe that user reviews within a given category are untrustworthy. Researchers will be uncertain about the validity of their conclusions if their data is compromised by covert marketing.

The appeal of astro-turfing to marketers is obvious. Because of the semi-anonymous nature of online commentary, marketers are able to pass off what amounts to advertising as the genuinely expressed, unbiased opinions of users. While it may be effective, the practice of fudging reviews and commentary is clearly unethical. Unfortunately, it is also seriously widespread – it has been suggested that trusted sources of user reviews like Amazon and Yelp, [2] not only fail to prevent astro-turfing, but may condone or even encourage it.

When you consider the kind of content that gets slyly slipped into wikipedia, the covert ad campaigns launched on Youtube, and the company flacks surreptitiously patrolling various user forums, it starts to seem like astro-turf and its variations are unavoidable, and maybe insurmountable. But how big of a problem is it really? Looking at it from the consumer and researcher’s point of view simultaneously, here are some factors to consider:

The Good News:

The marketer’s reach may exceed their grasp.

A diligent researcher or consumer should be able to get a reasonable idea about a product or service by examining a broad swath of sources. Will marketers astro-turf Amazon? Sure – high traffic and visibility mean good return on astro-turf investment. The costs outpace the benefits when you try to infiltrate every small-time forum or message board that features a discussion of the product. Not every consumer will put in the time to research those small, low-potential sources, but the dedicated should be able to spot discrepancies.

Users in niche markets actively defend their information sources.

In message boards and forums, expert users often have a nose for the plastic scent of astro-turf, and are eager to sound the alarm if they catch a whiff. Marketers would face high time costs in building a reputation and relationships with forum users, only to risk it when they need to advance a suspect opinion. Instead of taking that approach, in some niche communities companies will go above-the-table and assign support staff as a liaison to the community to openly share information with users.

It’s easy to spot a rat.

Unsophisticated astro-turfers will often devote nearly 100% of their reviews or comments to building up their product or brand, and sometimes to tearing down competitors’. A quick review of their posting history should reveal this phenomenon pretty quickly.

If it’s too good to be true, it probably is.

In some cases, an astro-turfed review may have the ring of ad copy rather than extemporaneous opinion. When a “review” seems eerily reminiscent of a brand’s key positioning statement, or lavishly praise every aspect of a company – including unrelated products or services – it might be a plant.

Technological traps catch the lazy.

If marketers aren’t careful to make every aspect of their astro-turf seem natural, a tech-savvy investigator can catch them. For example, if a post or review has been partially re-used even once, Google should quickly turn up the offense. Multiple hits for a sentence or part of a paragraph in topically co-relevant, but disparate sites will reveal astro-turfing, even if perpetrated under different user names. Similarly, if user IP information is available, it’s possible to reveal whether multiple posts or reviews have come from one source. By examining the numbers in their IP addresses, commonalities can be spotted and astro-turfers outed.

To Be continued later this week, with … The Bad News.

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