From PR to Eternity

Less than two months since astro-turfing became illegal, the Carphone Warehouse has been accused of doing just that by Ian Delaney, the editor of New Media Knowledge, who recently noticed some very suspicious posts on his blog. Ian spotted three comments made in seven minutes on an old post, all coming from the same IP address and waxing lyrical about Carphone Warehouse. One even went so far to say: “if cpw was that bad they would not be the market leader.”

The Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008, which were put into force on 28th May, were meant to prevent companies from misleading consumers with things like fake blogs and fake comments. But how many people are actually aware of the act and know that leaving fake comments is illegal? Companies need to train their employees and webmasters need to make their visitors aware that writing false comments is against the law.

With many review sites becoming popular online, astroturfing could be a lot more widespread than we realise. If you read a review of a TV or a restaurant (gastroturfing if you will) how do you know they weren’t made by a company to improve its image or damage that of its competitors. Then again as Stuart Bruce points out they could have been made by a nutty fan.