Ask Slashdot: My Company Wants Me To Astroturf, Should I? 391
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?"
Re:Astroturfing in social media (Score:4, Informative)
As a fellow anonymous, representing the big E and the A, we get it in our inboxes daily to astroturf our products.
He's not being asked to astroturf. He's being asked to like the product. Astroturfing is when you post comments to blogs and in other places saying how great the product is ... not unlike the occasional product plug we see here in slashdot. It's a term that comes from a "fake grassroots organization". If you pretend to be some unaffiliated user who posts things like "hey, the solution to your problem is Spiffy Car and Cat wax, it will solve two problems at the same time..." you're astroturfing. If you simply click "like" on Facebook, you're not.
Do you actually not like the product your company makes, whether you use it or not? If not, don't like it. If so, what's the problem? You're not being fake.
This isn't astroturfing. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Honesty (Score:5, Informative)
Twice, actually. Once it was actually my project being shilled (I liked the project and thought it was useful - though I did end up getting fired from there, I'll still gladly tout its benefits in the appropriate context), and once I hadn't bothered trying the product. The latter one sucked, and I told the other team exactly why, and how I thought it could be improved. I got called into a meeting with other employees who'd complained, and the project lead took notes while we ran through the demo showing what we didn't like. The project went back for another round of revisions, and eventually came out much better for it. I never talked about the project publicly, and didn't get fired, either.
Dishonest ass-kissing will get you promoted, because you make bosses like you personally. Honest critiquing with respect for politics will get you respect, because you show that you're dedicated to the company goals.
Re:Are you loyal? (Score:5, Informative)
That is my opinion of the subject. If you like the app, definitely support your company. If you don't like the app, just don't do anything. I've been places that they ask you to do that, and frankly, I can't be bothered unless I really like it. I've never had anyone call me out on it.
If they do call you out on it, it depends on how much you need the job right now, and what they will do to you if you don't. In my case, if they did insist, I'd feign ignorance of the requirement, and immediately promise to look into it, still fail to do it, and see if they notice. At that point, marketing eventually moves on to something else. If they do get deadly serious, apologize profusely for my oversight, put it up immediately and then start looking for another job. When they ask why I left, say something banal and nebulous and leave on good terms. No sense getting people like that to hate you, just remove them as carefully from your life as possible and move on.
Re:How about advertising? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:How about advertising? (Score:5, Informative)
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.