Tongue boss: Enthusiasm and passion may have been behind astroturfing
The ECD of relaunched “ideas shop” Tongue has suggested that a junior member of staff was behind an attempt to talk up the agency’s new website on a Mumbrella comment thread.
An article about the agency drew a suspicious number of positive comments about the Tongue website – examples included “Loving nice simple, slick websites. Good stuff”, “looks great”, and “Damn it. It is good”. When Mumbrella checked, all came from an IP address used by the agency, which rebranded from New Dialogue last week.
The practice of posting artificial comments to talk up a brand on social media sites is known as astroturfing.
Last night, Tongue’s executive creative director Lyndon Hale posted on the discussion: “I can promise you that no-one from the senior team at Tongue had the slightest thing to do with any of the comments that supposedly came from Tongue IP addresses. Just to be clear that means we neither posted nor asked anyone else to post any of the comments on this thread up to now.
They’re not the first and won’t be the last. Talking about great sites: you should see mine.
Always a so-called junior member of staff.
What a crock and what a weak response – take some responsibility for your team.
One of your team did it, so that means Tongue did it.
Admit, own it and get some balls.
You know who else is passionate and enthusiastic about his work? Dennis Ferguson.
Real social media experts would have known that you use an Unwired account to Astroturf and/or create a compelling engagement with blogosphere inhabitants through the use of commercially crafted narrative, delivered by skilled avatar-performers.
For a digital agency this all shows that Tongue have very little understanding of digital and social media.
They better get some new PR out there quickly as they will not want this to be the first thing clients see when they Google them.
“For a digital agency this all shows that Tongue have very little understanding of digital and social media. ”
…or that Tongue doesn’t feel the need to HIRE people who understand digital and social media.
Either way, epic fail.
Whoever did that deserves a real tonguelashing…
Ahh those junior employees. I always love their work.
Imagine talking up a company in a discussion board. http://www.thesack.tumblr.com
I think it’s a FANTASTIC site. So fantastic, I think they should add my video to the front page.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRYm4p5cbAk
Thanks, Damian,
I’ve embedded your piece at the end of the article.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
Must hire me some junior staff members. Would make a nice change from blaming the subeditors, I suppose …
Hey Tim, whilst not wanting to split hairs, I’d suggest this does not really fit the definition of ‘astroturfing’. This is the practice of developing a false or fake ‘grass roots’ campaign, which in the PR world has often been associated with community organisations, or lobbying. Surely the social media tsars are not claiming astroturfing as their own now as well!?
I’d say referring to some one-off comments by one individual as astroturfing is using a fairly broad brush, and quite complimentary to the turf layer in this case! If only it were quite so strategic… not that I condone turfing of course.
Cheers,
Scott
Jonathan Pease did the Witchery ‘Girl in the jacket’ and seems to have taken the same approach with Tongue.
For fuck’s sake, whether it was deliberate or not, don’t hang your junior staff members out to dry.
Reading “…no-one from the senior team at Tongue had the slightest thing to do with any of the comments that supposedly came from Tongue IP addresses” made me cringe.
The only consolation is that your juniors are going to spend the better part of the staff Xmas party shagging on your desk. That’s what I’d call a real “case of enthusiasm”.
What I want to know is why all those poor bloody ‘juniors’ were in the office on the weekend. Because if they’d been doing it from home it wouldn’t have come up as the the same IP address. Tongue – give the poor kids of bugger all pay some time off would you!