Astroturfing. So you thought grassroots is always greener on social media, huh? Think again.

By Gonzalo López Martí    – Creative director, etc.   /   LMMiami.com

• Would you accept it if, say, your advertising or PR agency offered you an astroturfing campaign?
• I’m sure you’ve heard the pitch.
• It goes somewhat along these lines: “… we have a team of influencers ready to open the floodgates and plug your product, service or brand. Just say the word, write the check and we’ll pull the trigger.”
• According to the British daily The Guardian* “astroturfing is the attempt to create an impression of widespread grassroots support for a policy, individual, or product, where little such support exists. Multiple online identities and fake pressure groups are used to mislead the public into believing that the position of the astroturfer is the commonly held view…”
• Why “astroturfing” you might ask?
• Well, lemme tell you, you are not a jock or a sports fan, are you?
• Astroturf is the commercial brand used by the Georgia-based Textile Management Associates, inc, (TMA).
• TMA is one of the largest manufacturers of artificial grass utilized at soccer & football fields, mini golf courts, etc.
• There are multiple manufacturers and brands but, as it usually is the case in many industries and categories, TMA’s Astroturf happened to become the de facto colloquial synonym of the actual generic product.
• FedEx. Kleenex.
• Hence the rather unfortunate pejorative meaning we are discussing here today.
• So you thought social media was going to democratize public opinion, consumer sentiment, taste making and cultural trendsetting, right?
• Think again.
• You’d be surprised at how little it takes to, for instance, create a trending topic on Twitter.
• Get 50 people with 5 fake Twitter accounts each to twit about a certain topic with a certain bias for a brief period of time and voilá.
• Governments in the third world do it all the time.
• Hey, in the first one too.
• It only takes a small team of professionals with the right tech tools.
• Astroturfing is, allegedly, widely used to rig those opinion polls you see on the nightly news.
• By some accounts the pharmaceutical industry is quite adept to the practice, limited as it is by tight regulation to utilize more conventional marketing and advertising mechanisms.
• The Kremlin’s been known to experiment with weird astroturfing tactics, allegedly to undermine and create confusion among the US populace.
• In fact, we don’t have to go that far: our very own US government was caught red handed (no pun intended) when the so-called “Cuban Twitter” affair emerged to the media surface a few years back.
• Never heard of it?
• It was supposed to be a bare bones, innocent looking social network called Zunzuneo.
• Sort of like a messaging board, a primitive Twitter accessible from mobile and desktop devices.
• Its aim, allegedly, was to build a large enough user base among the island’s population and set the ground for an eventual social media-fueled Cuban Spring, not unlike those in the Arab world.
• Read more about it here*:
• In any case, I go back to the initial question of this column: would you accept it if, say, your advertising or PR agency offered you an astroturfing campaign?

*I apologize for using The Guardian as a source, an insufferably pompous bleeding heart rag if there is one, but I must say that, despite their blatant liberal agenda, their writers are top notch and their reporting is thorough. Those limeys sure know how to turn a phrase. Plus, they rank very well on Google queries, which means that they know how to properly package and distribute their reporting for consumption in the crazy age we live in. Biased? LOL, they are biased as hell but, hey, who isn’t?