If you can’t make it, fake it
Paull and Trevor point us to: NewPR Wiki – AntiAstroturfing.HomePage.
Astroturfing is the practice of creating fake grassroots (get it?). Hiring supermodels to walk into bars and order a particular type of vodka, or get hundreds or thousands of people to write letters on a given issue–without mentioning the coordinating body.
The issue for me is transparency. There’s close to zero trust of marketers these days (which is why my book title was so misunderstood). Astroturfing makes it worse. It feels wrong at a very deep level.
I have no illusion that their site all by itself will be sufficient to slow down the practice, just as being anti-spam didn’t help with that. But I’m pretty certain that if you do it, you’ll get caught, and when you get caught, you won’t have much hope of earning back the trust you lost.