the timboucher experience

I’ve been thinking lately about the public relations industry and people who influence public opinion and stuff. And I was thinking, that I bet some of these companies involved in that business must be involved in blogging as well. I’m not talking about writing corporate blogs for different companies and stuff, so they can seem like they are jumping on the bandwagon. I’m talking about these companies creating blogs which seem like they are written by average everyday people from all walks of life.

It makes perfect sense really. They could use these fictional bloggers to inject ideas into the collective consciousness, and make it seem like these concepts and trends are coming from the ground up, rather than being enforced on people from some kind of outside source. It’s also good, because there’s really no way to trace the true identity of bloggers, since a great many of them don’t use domain names (which can usually be tracked down - to some degree). And it would be so easy for them to target certain audiences based on subject matter, and other affiliations. Even things like blogexplosion, traffic exchanges and blog directories and stuff.

I can really imagine having a team of like 5 people working for a PR company who spend like 40+ hours a week writing blog posts. Perhaps each person would distribute their entries over like 10 different fictional blogger identities. They could write on things like news stories, political agendas, different products, all kinds of crap. Each of their fictional blogger identities could talk about roughly the same set of topics, but from a slightly different perspective - but each retaining whatever essential core elements they are trying to describe. I imagine it would bre pretty effective too, that 50 reasonably well-written and frequently-updated blogs would have a fairly wide audience and impact on an audience, which would expand outward in a ripple effect, especially if they were aggressively cross-commenting on real people’s blogs as well.

And let’s not forget the enormous amount of content which they would generate for search engines also. I mean, my site alone, after about a year and a half of frequent blogging will now shoot certain keywords that I write about into the top five search results in a matter of like 3 days in some cases. If companies trying to influence public opinion, subtly or overtly are NOT using these sorts of tactics, I would be really goddamned surprised. Shit, maybe I should put together a company like this of my own.

[Also, as John pointed out, blogs are not constrained by facts, so the potential to unleash distorted information into the bloodstream of the America people is enormous. And I also forgot to mention that you could also rake in web-ad revenues while you're doing all this.]

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