Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator (32 page)

One of my first big contracts was a ten-thousand-dollar gig to handle a group of trolls who had been vandalizing a company’s Wikipedia page and filling it with lies and rumors. These “facts” were then showing up in major newspapers and on blogs that were eager for any gossip they could find about the company. How do we just make it stop?, the company pleaded. We just want to be left alone.

It’s the same predicament Google found itself in when Facebook hired a high-profile PR agency to execute an anonymous whisper campaign against them through manufactured warnings about privacy. Bloggers of all stripes had been pitched, with the idea of building enough buzz for the grand finale: editorials in the
Washington Post
,
Politico
,
USA Today,
and the
Huffington Post
. Like my client, Google was stunned senseless by the plot. Imagine a $200 billion company saying, Make it stop. We just want to be left alone. But they were effectively reduced to that. “We’re not going to comment further,” Google told reporters during the firestorm of controversy. “Our focus is delighting people with great products.”

Sure, go ahead and focus on that Google, but it doesn’t matter. Once this arms race has begun, things can’t just go back to normal. It escalates: A company sees how easy it is to plant stories online and hires a firm to attack its competitor. Blindsided by the bad publicity, the rival hires a firm to protect itself—and then to strike back. Thus begins an endless loop of online manipulation that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. And that’s the easiest of the PR battles a company may have to face.

Consider what happened to the French yogurt giant Danone, which was approached by Fernando Motolese, a video producer in Brazil, with two hypothetical videos.

One, he said, was a fun spoof of their yogurt, which was designed to improve digestive health and, um, other bodily functions. The other, he said, was a disgusting version of the first video, with all the indelible scatological images implied by such a spoof. He might be more inclined to release the first version, he said, if Danone was willing to pay him a fee each time it was seen.

“It felt sort of like blackmail,” said Renato Fischer, the Danone representative who fielded the inquiry, to MIT’s
Technology Review.
¹
Well, that’s because it
was
blackmail. It was extortion via viral video.

THE IMPLICIT SHAKEDOWN

Molotese’s hustle is one of many styles of a shakedown that happen across the web countless times a day. Its only distinguishing feature was its brazenness. It’s usually couched in slightly more opaque terms.

Take Michael Arrington’s
TechCrunch
post entitled “Why We Often Blindside Companies.” What begins as an apparent discussion of the site’s news policy I see as a veiled threat to the Silicon Valley tech scene. After a start-up founder had, for the “second time,” publicly announced news about her own life before Arrington’s site had a chance to write about it (
TechCrunch
told her they were writing a story about her, so she broke the news herself), Arrington decided to make an example out of her. First he told his readers that he had nasty personal information on the founder that he had been reluctant to publish. This was a not so subtle reminder that he had dirt on everyone and that his personal whim decided whether it got out or not. Then Arrington took his stand, saying the founder would no longer be “getting any calls from [him] in the future to give her a heads up that [
TechCrunch
is] breaking news about her start up.” As though the journalist’s job to speak to sources they are writing about was a courtesy. He concluded on a friendlier note: “Treat us with respect and you’ll get it back. That’s all we ask.”
*
He may have ended his post nicely, but his message sounds no less extortionary to me than Molotese’s.
²

Many other blogs do the same thing through a combination of a sense of entitlement and laziness. A group of hotel chains is currently litigating a lawsuit against TripAdvisor and other travel sites over defamatory reviews that the sites won’t remove. A mostly positive 2010
Financial Times
article about the rising influence of blogs covering the luxury watch market featured a small complaint from a watch manufacturer about a blogger who often got important details and product specifications wrong, in addition to having typos and bad grammar. In response, the editor of another watch-industry blog,
TheWatchLounge
, leaped to the site’s defense: “What is the luxury watch industry doing to help him become a better writer?” he demanded to know. “And for that matter what is the industry doing to help any of these bloggers become better writers?”
³

I would ask the same question of him that I once posed to a blogger who kept getting a story about American Apparel wrong. “When you find a mistake,” he’d said, “e-mail me and point it out.” I had to ask: Hey man, why is
my
job to do
your
job?

A while back, a plane of a major airline experienced potentially catastrophic trouble in the air. Despite a flaming engine and poor odds, the pilot managed to land it safely, saving the lives of four-hundred-plus passengers. Yet, as events transpired, Twitter users went berserk and reported that the plane had tragically crashed. In reality, the plane had not only landed safely, but the pilot acted like a gentleman from another generation, offering the passengers his personal telephone number if they had more questions or wanted someone to talk to. He exuded humble and quiet heroism that should have been recognized.

Only nobody knew about it, because the story online was so different. The
Harvard Business
Review
criticized the airline for not responding quickly enough with marketing spin and for not magically stopping the rampant online speculation. They wrote: “What a pity that social media users, in their well-known enthusiasm for being first to share breaking news to their followers, would unwittingly
conspir
e to obscure the big story of a pilot’s life-saving landing” [emphasis mine].

Yes,
a pity
. A word a neighborhood thug might use in the hypothetical, “It’d be
a pity
if something ever happened to this nice little shop of yours,” and then try to collect monthly protection. These
are
the economics of extortion. The threat is less overt than “pay us or else,” but it’s a demand nonetheless. You must provide more fuel to the story and get out in front of it (even when there are more important things going on, like, you know, not letting the jet crash), or your reputation will be ruined. To not do this is to risk a vivid misperception that is impossible to correct with the truth, or anything else.

A CULTURE OF FEAR

Most social media experts have accepted this paradigm and teach it to their clients without questioning it: Give blogs special treatment or they’ll attack you. At any time, a hole could be dug by blogs, Twitter, or YouTube that the company must pay to fill in. And depending on the intentions of the person who dug it, they may also ask to be paid to not dig them anymore.

Being right is more important to the person being written about than the person writing. So who do you think blinks first? Who has to spend thousands of dollars advertising online to counteract undeserved bad press? Who ultimately hires a spinmaster like me to start filling the discussions with good things just to drown out the bullshit?

Today there are dozens of firms that offer reputation-management services to companies and individuals. Though they dress up their offerings with jargon about performance metrics and customer feedback, their real service is to handle the disturbing, nasty, and corrupt dealings I’ve talked about in this book, so you don’t have to. In a way, that’s what I do too. I figure out how to stretch Arrington’s definition of what the rules are as much as possible.

Navigating this terrain has become a critical part of brand management. The constant threat of being blindsided by a false controversy, or crucified unfairly for some misconstrued remark, hovers over everyone in the public sphere. Employees, good, bad, or disgruntled and desperate for money, know that they have the means to massively embarrass their employers with well-placed accusations of mistreatment or harassment. People know that going to a blog like
Consumerist
is the fastest way to get revenge for any perceived customer-service slight.

That there are a million eyes watching, each incentivized to demagogue their way to a traffic payday, dominates discussions in corporate boardrooms, design departments, and political strategy sessions. What effect does it have? Aside from making them rightly cynical, it forces them to act in two ways—deliberately provocative or conservatively fake. In a word: unreal.

Blogs criticize companies, politicians, and personalities for being artificial but mock them ruthlessly for engaging in media stunts, and blame them for even the slightest mistake. Nuance is a weakness. As a result, politicians must stick even more closely to their prepared remarks. Companies bury their essence in even more convoluted marketing-speak. Public figures cannot answer a question with anything but: “No comment.” Everyone limits their exposure to risk by being fake.

It’s now common for indie bands to avoid or turn down as much online press as possible, with some even going as far as obscuring their likenesses or withholding their names. Why? They are petrified of the backlash that has sunk so many promising “blog-buzz” bands that came before them. With the hype comes the threat of hate, and I don’t think this is limited to music blogs.

Overstock.com was compelled to address this unpredictable and aggressive web culture in a recent 10-K filing with the SEC. It is a precautionary measure many companies will have to take in the future—to let investors know how blogs could impact their financials with little warning and little recourse. Designating it as one of three major risk factors to the company, Overstock.com wrote, “Use of social media may adversely impact our reputation.”

There has been a marked increase in use of social media platforms and similar devices, including weblogs (blogs), social media websites, and other forms of Internet-based communications which allow individuals access to a broad audience of consumers and other interested persons. Consumers value readily available information concerning retailers, manufacturers, and their goods and services and often act on such information without further investigation, authentication and without regard to its accuracy. The availability of information on social media platforms and devices is virtually immediate as is its impact. Social media platforms and devices immediately publish the content their subscribers and participants post, often without filters or checks on accuracy of the content posted. The opportunity for [the] dissemination of information, including inaccurate information, is seemingly limitless and readily available. Information concerning the Company may be posted on such platforms and devices at any time. Information posted may be adverse to our interests, it may be inaccurate, and may harm our performance, prospects or business. The harm may be immediate, without affording us an opportunity for redress or correction. Such platforms also could be used for dissemination of trade secret information, compromise of valuable company assets all of which could harm our business, prospects, financial condition and [the] results of operations.

Alarmist? Maybe. But I have seen hundreds of millions of dollars of market cap evaporate on the news of some bogus blog post. When the blog
Engadget
posted a fake e-mail announcing a supposed delay in the release of a new iPhone and Apple operating system, it knocked more than
$4 billion
off
Apple’s stock price. The 2008 election was nearly derailed when the same “citizen reporter,” on separate occasions, tricked both Obama and a campaigning Bill Clinton into saying something vulnerable and honest by misrepresenting herself. The sixty-one-year-old woman later admitted that the two figures had “had no idea [she] was a journalist,” nor that she was recording them with a hidden device. Then, angered by the lack of compensation from the
Huffington Post
for her “scoops,” she resigned by publishing private e-mails between herself and Arianna Huffington—just to get one last blast of attention at someone else’s expense.