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Ask Slashdot: My Company Wants Me To Astroturf, Should I?
An anonymous reader writes "Posting as AC for obvious reasons. The company I work for put an app in an app store. The marketing people think it isn't selling very well, so they sent out an email asking people to get on all their social media sites and friend or like the app to build up traffic. The thing is, most of the employees have not used the app, but we are being asked to say that we like it. We just saw stories about companies not being allowed to ask employees or interview candidates for access to social sites, but what does it mean when a company asks employees to astroturf? Will the marketing or HR people look at who has astroturfed, and who has not at raise time? How would you deal with this?"
Things are that bad at RIM and AppWorld, eh?
Look, if Thorsten wants you to astroturf, he should at least offer some examples.
Trolling is a art,
liars are liars.
there is only one answer ...
We are building a fighting force of extraordinary magnitude. We forge our tradition in the spirit of our ancestors. You have our gratitude
Putting the obvious moral issues aside, how loyal to this company are you? If the answer is "not very" then I think you already know what you should be doing (i.e, looking for another place of employment). If, however, you are a loyal employee, then suck it up & just do what they ask...finding a place to work that you actually enjoy is tough, especially in this economy.
As a fellow anonymous, representing the big E and the A, we get it in our inboxes daily to astroturf our products.
This seems to be a common practice nowadays, and I guess it shows you have some faith in your product. I have nothing against it as long as you like what you are doing. If you don't like astroturfing for your stuff, then don't.
What concerns me though is that you seem to be not very keen on this app. Care to elaborate why?
I worked at a company where we were actively told to astroturf. It was a bad sign because the product sucked and instead doing something about the criticism, they buried their head in the sand. The criticism was completely well founded. My advice is to not worry about astroturfing and start looking for a new job. Your management isn't looking to fix problems, just cover over them.
A few startups ago, the marketing teams entire plan was "lean on your personal social networks". They'd have been better off standing outside handing out flyers.
If you like the app and think it's useful then it doesn't hurt to promote it a little. If it's just some crap, then don't bother - you'll just desensitize your friends and contacts.
Just saying "I'm working on app X, it's going pretty well!" is subtle and non-annoying, curious people will check it out.
Anyway, a company asking employees to lean heavily on friends/family for promotion is a sure-fire sign of a failed marketing vision in my book, a problem in the business side of the house.
Try the app. See if it's really worth saying good things about. If so, I'd go ahead and praise it as deserved. If not, send a message to the sales/QA/service department as appropriate saying why you can't promote the app. Keep a copy of that message just in case you have to show that you were fired for raising an ethical concern.
Of course, encourage others to do the same, and mention your plan to superiors. They might just admire your behavior, and suggest it to more of the company. Few managers really want to be the guy to let a bad PR situation loose, so they might jump at the chance to prove they're more ethical than that nasty sales department - especially if the app is actually decent, and there's a good chance it'll get astroturfed anyway.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
You could always try the app yourself then give it an honest review. If you genuinely like it, it's not astroturfing.
If you don't like it, you could consider feeding that back to the developers as that may reveal more fundamentally why it's not selling well.
Whatever happened to advertising a product? Spend money to make money and all that jazz.
Costs too much. Just like in-house beta-testing. That's why the idea was born to release purposely-buggy software and let your (ahem) customers pay for the privilege of doing it for you. It's a small step from there to get people to do your shil... er, advertising for you for free.
The 21st century version is "Spend less and make more."
So are we just talking about clicking the "Like" button on Facebook? That doesn't sound terrifically evil. It's not unusual for people to "like" something they don't like, and so I wouldn't even really consider it dishonest. Like I "like" one of my friend's websites, but... you know, it's just because it's my friend's site. My work has asked me to make use my LinkedIn Profile shows that I work where I do, in case the company gets looked up.
Also, are they simply asking you to do it, or are they somehow monitoring everyone's accounts to make sure they do it, and then threatening some kind of response if you don't "like" their product? If they're just asking, and you don't want to do it, then don't do it.
This doesn't seem like a serious problem.
Get used to it. Everybody does it and much of what you think of as news (especially tech news) is networked people astro turfing for each other.
If you think some of your friends will find it interesting, why not? Just serve your friends well. Use the app and be honest about what you like about it. If you can't stand it, just mention the app without saying you like it.
It is somewhat self serving and it may feel dirty but you are helping your company and yourself and informing your friends who may be interested and so everyone benefits. This is how the world works.
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Can't say that I would do it.
The problem is the original poster, not the policy, at least so far. The original poster is an epic fail because:
The thing is, most of the employees have not used the app
You have to do that before you can decide what to do with:
we are being asked to say that we like it.
Note that you don't have to like the genre to say the product is best in class, or at least somewhat "like-able". Many years ago I was asked my opinion of an ethnic food product my former employer sold; I can't stand that kind of stuff, but I could honestly say my employers individual product was an excellent example of the genre. If I had to eat this junk in general, this is the one I'd eat. This is your out if the app is something like a female ovulation calendar app or kids educational app or whatever.
I deleted my facebook account years ago, but the social norm at the time was some dude you sat next to in 8th grade once is a "friend" and anything vaguely novel is "like", so its not as if they're asking you to get a tattoo on your forehead or become a booth babe. The standard for "like" an app is probably "it didn't make my phone catch fire, so thats good enough".
If its just too rancidly repulsive to appeal to you, or in your opinion, anyone, you need to run like hell and start emailing resumes because:
1) They're obviously grasping at straws if its so awful they have to pay people $75K/yr (or whatever) to grudgingly admit they like it.
2) After grasping at straws comes the layoffs, downsizing, bankruptcies, etc, next week. So get a jump to it.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
That would be if you were expected to fake a bunch of actual reviews. Of course you "like" it. It buys you food. Employees have always been expected to stand behind their company's work in at least a "well, it's ours" kind of way.
When marketing (or most anyone else) sends an email to the entire company, ignore it. Duh.
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Advertising like the stuff Add-block handles or commercials that are skipped over? Word of mouth is all that is left, and as another plus your employer has directed you in a memo to use social networking sites at work. Now hours of no productivity can be directly attributed to a memo instructing you to do so.
Honestly I would prepare to leave the company not because of some moral code but for much simpler reasons. If you main revenue stream is selling apps and you are not selling them then the next shoe to fall is layoffs.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
traditional advertising weakened significantly as people shifted to a 'social' model of judging if they should buy a product. Since the early inceptions of this idea were informative rather than spammy (your friend is playing this game, your brother likes bought this car). It was like a technological word of mouth, with some tools to help spread the word. Word of mouth was always valuable, it was just cost prohibitive to plant fake word of mouth people for everything. Now of course you can use your employees to count as warm bodies for your marketing department as 'likes' for their supposedly social advertising. In some ways this isn't new, how many companies offer employee discounts for example? You want your employees to be advertisers for your products, this just makes it official.
As a result advertising shifts. If people believe celebrities, hire celebrities, if people believe 'page views' or 'total number of likes' then you find ways to generate those things. If people tend to click the first result of a google search, you're the first result or you're trying to figure out how to get there.
'Advertising' is trying to get people to know about your product and want to buy it. That changes as technologies change. Right now people still (wrongly) believe that some sort of social liking of a product means it's worth owning, so you pay for that. Sometimes you pay for fake journalists, review scores, or whatever you think people will care about.
In the case of the OP his job has asked him to perform work as part of his duties. He should make a series of corporate social accounts that are for the employee Sir_Sri_CEOofSriCorp sort of thing. And use those for all company advertising. When his (or her) employment concludes transfer that professional employee persona to the employer, as it was done on their time and is their property.
One of my friends used to work at a radio station, where she had a brand that wasn't her name. When she left the radio station they claimed (correctly) ownership of the persona she had created at that station as part of her employment there. When she left she couldn't keep the name. She now does voice acting under a similar but not the same persona. (You can dodge this by creating a company that owns the persona you use, and then the contract that hires you hires your company which retains ownership). Someone like stephen colbert manages to maintain decidedly different personal and public profiles, as an employee it doesn't have to e quite as grandiose, but it's basically the same thing.