Sock Puppets and Astroturfing

One of the small debates in my house has to do with Wikipedia. Our three children have been warned at school about using Wikipedia as a basis for their research because its entries are unverified.

As a good free-market capitalist (and someone desperately trying not to be too obvious a digital immigrant), I happen to believe that errors in fact and interpretation on Wikipedia get fixed pretty quickly, given the unfettered access offered to all contributors. In a perfect market (my theory goes), Wikipedia should be a perfect source of information.

In any event, it should be at least as good as an Encyclopedia Britannica entry written by a single “expert” and vetted by a handful of experts and editors. I took courses from some of those experts in college, and while they were extraordinarily bright and articulate, they weren’t without their own biases.

(The Wall Street Journal addressed this issue last September in its article “Will Wikipedia Mean the End Of Traditional Encyclopedias?” Like all things WSJ, it is a terrific piece, featuring a debate between the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, and Dale Hoiberg, senior vice president and editor in chief of Encyclopaedia Britannica. See here.)

And, to give my children’s teachers credit, the flow of information on Wikipedia is not perfect, data entries can be vandalized, and there are certainly times when facts are in dispute and skewed interpretations have yet to be countered. Indeed, the entries in Wikipedia are never “complete.”

Now we come to the business world, where the issue of what to believe on the web is compounded by the fact that information is plentiful and almost overwhelming in its quantity, aliases are common, and anonymity one of the features that encourages participation. The web is also a place where inaccurate and false information can damage companies’ reputations and finances.

With this in mind, along come “sock puppets.”

Frankly, until this weekend, the most famous sock puppets I knew where Lamb Chops and Lefty (from The Ed Sullivan Show; yes, proof again of being 50).

However, I learned about another kind of sock puppet, one of two new terms highlighted in the October 2 edition of PC Magazine. “Sock Puppets,” it turns out, are folks who participate in discussion forums under false identities. Wikipedia (Ed. Note: Isn’t this an ironic development?) notes the following examples:

• John Lott, author of More Guns, Less Crime, who, between 2000 and 2003, posted under the "sock puppet" name of "Mary Rosh," praising Lott's teaching, and arguing with Lott's critics on Usenet. The name was also used to post outstanding reviews of his books, and panning books of rivals on online book sites.

• Lee Siegel, writer for The New Republic magazine, was suspended for defending his articles and blog comments using the user name "Sprezzatura". One such comment, defending Siegel's bad reviews of Jon Stewart: “Siegel is brave, brilliant and wittier than Stewart will ever be.”

• In 2006 a top staffer for then-Congressman Charlie Bass (R-NH) was caught posing as a "concerned" supporter of Bass's opponent Democrat Paul Hodes on several liberal NH blogs, using the pseudonyms "IndieNH" or "IndyNH."

• In 2007, The CEO of Whole Foods, John Mackey, was discovered to have posted on the Yahoo Finance Message Board, extolling his own company and predicting a dire future for their rival Wild Oats Markets while concealing his own relationship to both companies under the screen name "Rahodeb."

The PC Magazine article also describes the practice of savvy marketers who are “sock puppeting” in unison to create phony grassroots support for products, called “astroturfing.”

(Remember when we used to have to “decline verbs” in school? Try this: I shill, you sock puppet, we astrotuf. Something like that. By the way, there are also “strawman sock puppets” and “meatpuppets,” but I’ll let you research those on your own. Try Wikipedia.)

Suppose there’s an online forum about a particular product or service. If the company offering the product encourages others to jump on and pump the product, or indeed, does it themselves under a bunch of aliases, they’re astroturfing. (If you saw the movie Wag the Dog, you’ll remember that government astroturfing.)

Peter Nicholson, chief creative officer of ad agency Deutsch Inc. says,

“People don’t like to talk about it; they pretty much keep it to themselves. But there’s plenty of it going on. . .Users must understand that people they’re talking to may not be the experts they say they are and opinions may not be based on anything.”

One of the things good historians are taught is skepticism. Data, “facts,” and interpretation all need to be tested. So too in school, and in business. Smart parents teach their kids skepticism when they do research on Wikipedia. (They also teach them to double-source everything they can.)

Smart business people exercise skepticism when they read message and chat boards, web sites, and all things Internet.

And blogs, for that matter.

Something new to worry about.

Sock puppets, astroturf and blogs.

Oh my.

Posted by Entrepreneur Generations