Little white lies

Abuse of the blogosphere is gaining momentum in the title race for "Survey Peddling Method I Loathe Most." When I see MR companies paying bloggers to lie, it genuinely gets under my skin. I consider this as evil as Lead Gen at its worst.

Here are some examples of companies like Ipsos, Research International, Fhios, Zoom Panel and others trying to recruit survey takers via fake, paid-for blog posts passed off as genuine recommendations. In another take on the same basic scam, a video post on Mom's Cash Blog is used as fodder for fake people to post fake comments about their fake great experiences with Survey Savvy, various lead gen sleazebags, and once again Ipsos.

This bizarro blogosphere is powered by sites like PayU2Blog, which are just another link in a long chain of scam artists on our payroll.

We tell ourselves these are little white lies. No harm done. We just need to get the word out about our sites, and is this really any different than buying ads on tv, radio, or print media? It's worlds apart, and we have to stop before it really comes back to bite us in the ass. 

These paid blogposts are lies, and savvy online users have excellent bullsh!t detectors. Paying someone to post a fictitious testimonial is almost guaranteed to backfire. Bloggers who sell ad space in their views and beliefs don't have large readerships, and it's unlikely more than a handful of people will ever read something they write. On the flip-side, when this type of post is seen by a lot of people, one of them will immediately expose it for what it is. In fact, when this type of post is seen by many people it's usually because it has been exposed as a big company trying to buy word-of-mouth.