I am fed up by marketing shills.Marketing shills are the people who are paid to create viral hype for a product by posing as someone who is not benefiting from the post. This is dishonest. Penny arcade had an email from one of these guys, and a follow up about the depths they would go.

Here are some examples:

Fujifilm

• KrisFujiZ is a marketing shill. I don’t need to tell you that. It is pretty obvious that Kris M, who claims to be a 22 year old male from either Seaford New York or NYC, is a total marketing shill for Fujifilm. He’s spamming about their new Z10 camera. The camera has the creepy tagline: “Face it, Beam it, Blog it”. Except, they made a mistake on the last part, “Blog spam it.”

Blog Bribing

• A man, Steve Stedman (Google it if you must, I’m not going to give his blog links), pays people microtransactions of one-two pennies through amazon’s Mechanical Turk to post on his blog. It is a tiny amount, but because of the nature of mechanical turk, people do it, and it adds up. People will think his blog is popular, and therefore, think they should like it more. But is this how the internet should work?
  His comments are rife with an eerie sort of brown nosing, often humorous: “The internet kids should read this blog and learn something.”
  ” bloging is so confusing i wish someone would tell me how to do this stuff it seems like fun !”
  

Nvidia

• This issue was originally brought to the limelight for a while when the Consumerist ran into some rumors about nvidia spreading self-promotion. The consumerist followed up that story, and had email some discussions with one shill marketing group, Arbuthnot Entertainment Group. Yikes.

Punishing shills would have the same effect that punishing spammers did. It would only make them work harder to be less obvious. The only thing we really can do is be aware of it.

Don’t trust people’s opinions of something at face value on the internet. This is common sense, but for some reason, all too often, we allow ourselves to forget it.

In the words of someone who was probably just a marketing shill for a book, open your mind.