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.
