I’ve also had the weird sensation of wishing to honestly and genuinely praise something, but of being aware that I might sound like a shill for doing so. Best way to avoid that is to include in one’s comments a neutrally-phrased description that doesn’t sound like a marketing brochure. But one doesn’t always have time to do that.

I notice that I tend to buy books that I see two independent sources of recomendation on the internet. The approach that is described in the article of posting on multiple boards to get a reputations under multiple screen names, then producing multiple recommendations of a product would totally work on me. Not that it would sell enough books to make this approach worthwhile, but they are faking the the kinds of things I use to make my purchasing decisions.

The thing for me is that when a shill post approaches something that might credibly be said to be by a real human being with real experience of a product, you get to an almost Borgesian juncture. Take Emschwar’s example: the sentiment itself is pretty much what someone might actually say. Somehow it bothers us to think that someone is saying that for money rather than simply trying to share information, and it should, but the issue that concerns us there is not the content of the information and what effects it might have on our behavior. The issue is about something else, about the motivations of other humans, about the authenticity of communication.

You could not “shill post” people into making a bad film into a blockbuster, into making a serious lemon of an electronics product into a runaway success. Even something like the iPod, where I take its popularity to be at least partly about image, marketing and advertising, given its weaknesses as an actual product, has succeeded for “real” reasons as well as a marketing hook–its simplicity of design and utility, its connection to a well-developed and unique content-supply model, its aesthetics, etc. The only way I think you could shill post something genuinely bad or defective into seriously success would be to somehow completely control an information channel that readers take to be meaningful and open–say, for example, to buy off every single registered user of epinions or some such. Otherwise, what’s going to happen is that a single bad review that has substantive content is going to tip off many readers to the existence of shilling, even if the shilling is being done with great skill and effectiveness.

>I interviewed for a guerilla marketing business in San Francisco that targeted web forums.

>I was told that if I accepted the job, I was to have at LEAST 50 identities on as many forums as I could muster (they wanted 100 eventually), with a goal of 5 posts an hour. The posts had to be well thought out, and the idea was that I was to establish multiple identities with a history on the forums, so that when the timing was right a well written but subtly placed marketing post could be finessed in. And regular visitors would recognize the post as coming from a long time poster.

I think that this type of approach could be relatively effective and is something worth worrying about. I have bought things (mostly books) based on people’s recomendations on the internet. I generally trust that people are giving their real opinions on things on the internet.

>Learning to read and interpret anything, with the fullest battery of techniques and critical skills, would lend itself to discriminating engagement with all kinds of information in public circulation.

This could be true, but it is still better to arrange things so that people don’t need to use fancy critical skills. The debasing of trust in ones fellow citizens isn’t to be encouraged.

Plus, it is easy to overestimate the extent of ones critical thinking skills: “My guess is that the righteous indignation we saw on last week’s show comes from Oprah representing the less experienced readers who needed Frey’s memoir to be true in a journalistic sense.” I-am-not-suprised- when-anything-I-read-turns-out-to-be-a-lie isn’t actually critical thinking.

This approach is much less likely to get our marketer tagged as a shill, especially if he’s been posting for a month or two by then, and especially if he sticks around for a little give-and-take with jfpred34 after the initial post. I’m certainly not positing that the audience for these guys is necessarily more sophisticated than the streets of Zimbabwe (one look at my inbox would put that to the lie!), but I think the people targeting them are.

What I see is a breakdown of the broadcast model due to technology change: 57 channels and there’s nothing on. It affects media, marketing and politics in much the same way, the decline of brands as some see it.