Astroturf must die
Astroturfing attempt (by a charity, even) unmasked on MetaFilter. Merciless. This comment (by a MeFi moderator), addressed to the guilty company, gives a nice plain-English explanation of how bad things got, and why behaviour like this does not fly:
For those of us who have been interacting and working with web communities for the greater part of a decade, I’m dismayed that people who are newer to the playing field see this as just another way to game the web to hype themselves. There’s much more to it than that, on all sides.
There’s also a forensic summary of the affair on the MeFi wiki.
Marketers should not underestimate members’ protectiveness of their community. Nor how badly practices like this can backfire.