Astroturf is the crappy fake grass we use to see in so many sports stadiums in the 80s but in this post it is something slightly different. In the online/marketing world astroturf is when a company or marketer tries to generate hype for one of its products by posting fake positive messages on blogs or in other social media.
This usually ends up generating negative feedback to the company mainly because it is pretty obvious that the positive comments are fake. The most recent example was with Motorola, when they posted comments to gadget blogs like CrunchGear (first comment) or Gizmodo. It was discovered pretty easily because the same comment by the same person was left on several high profile blogs. Once discovered the negative publicity was pretty rampant; if you google "Motorola Astroturf" you will see hundreds of other posts also social sharing sites like twitter, fiendfeed, etc spreading the story like wildfire.
The funny thing is, all the people seeing the negative feeback are the people (gadget influencers) Moto is trying to get on their side meanwhile they have also generated horrible reviews about the product that was mentioned. The obvious lesson here is when dealing with social media be authentic and don't try to pull a fast one. This should be true of all media all the time but in the online social media world it is so much easier to get caught doing stupid things like this than in the offline world.
4 comments:
Actually, the photo you are showing is not a photo of AstroTurf at all, neither the old nor the new versions of that famed product line.
It is actually a photo of indoor-outdoor carpeting, sometimes called Patio Grass. You will usually see this product glued to a porch, or stapled to a retail sales display for lawn furniture or lawn mowers.
It was never used as a play surface on sports fields, but ironically, it has become the unfortunate mental image the public associates with the famed sportsfield surface that started the artificial turf industry.
Probably 99.99% or more of the people who use the term AstroTurf have never seen the actual original AstroTurf surfaces, which looked nothing like the product pictured, were made of completely different materials, and at the time of their inception, were actually very much state-of-the-art.
In this fast-paced world of "what's new and exciting today", as manufacturing progresses, we quickly tire of what was once considered new technolocy.
Today, AstroTurf is the state-of-the-art again in artificial sports surfaces. It looks and feels like real grass and eliminates some of the undesirable aspects of the artficial turf technology that replaced the original AstroTurf line begining in the mid to late 1990's.
SYNLawn is the sister brand of state-of-the-art products for residential,commercial, playground and pet related landscape use.
Both are incredible products worthy of respect- they do a tremendous amount both to save the environment & natural resources and to improve the quality of life for people as they enjoy sports, recreation and their personal lifetstyles.
wow Abbott thanks for your comment. Obviously my post was not about real AstroTurf but the online practice but it is alway good to learn something new. I am curious what your 2 deleted comments were? it would have been much more fun if you cursed me out for my AstroTurf ignorance.
Post a Comment