An interesting little tidbit on both CrunchGear and BoingBoing today: a shill for Motorola has been cruising gadget message boards, blatantly talking up Motorola’s touch-screen Krave, making the company look like total tools to everyone involved.

There are good ways to utilize social media, and bad ways. Getting online and identifying yourself as an employee of a company whose product you’re shilling for (even going so far as to post a link) screams out amateur hour and will provide ten times more bad press on tech blogs than any positive result you get from doing it.

The practice is called astroturfing, and the definition is pretty self-explanatory: it is the production of a PR campaign with the intention of appearing grass-roots when in fact it is all smoke and mirrors. Works great if you don’t get caught.

But it’s not hard to get caught when you admit to working at Motorola. Here’s an example of his brilliance:

Oh man this looks awesome! I hope they release a version for the Krave by Motorola. Ever since I started working with Motorola I have became a huge fan of the phone (motorola.com/krave). With a full list of features, like a full touch screen, I can’t stop obsessing over it.

The poster goes by the moniker MGOODE08 and has been doing it to it all over the Internets. On many forums, he has not been identifying himself as a Motorola employee. Which is even worse. A commenter on BoingBoing estimates M Goode made approximately 2,100 bogus comments across the web.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 26th, 2008 at 5:07 pmand is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.