Quote:
Originally Posted by ClarkNasty
Wouldn't be shocking if he was getting paid.
Yeah, this is actually no stretch of the imagination. PR and viral marketing firms will contract themselves out to various corporations... offering services of creating a "buzz" on online forums, blogs and other sites. This sounds like common sense, but the lengths they go to can be surprising.
A few years ago I was a mod on the VN/IGN forums which, at that time, were some of the biggest video game forums you could find online. 60 Minutes ran a news story one night about a guy who posts about video games on online forums as a job. He posts posing as a regular user, often mixing in random posting about other topics, in a very informal fashion to create buzz about the game and talk about how good it is. They blurred out the screen names, but one of the shots on 60 Minutes was very clearly a board I moderated. One of the admins on the site took the time to analyze the photo, look at the avatars and figure out who the user was. He had tons of accounts that you would NEVER suspect were paid marketing accounts that he used to post about games and prop up products. He fit in with the community seamlessly otherwise. While sort of sad, it was also pretty genius.
Seeing as this was probably 4-5 years ago, it's hard to imagine how far they've come now. Contract posters employed by PR firms to advocate certain viewpoints on heavily trafficked forums? Sounds like it should be almost standard.