No Shills

Image by The Rocketeer via Flickr

Shill: A shill is an associate of a person selling goods or services or a political group, who pretends no association to the seller/group and assumes the air of an enthusiastic customer. The intention of the shill is, using crowd psychology, to encourage others unaware of the set-up to purchase said goods or services or support the political group's ideological claims. Shills are often employed by confidence artists. The term plant is also used. 1

Recently I heard a piece on NPR about "mom bloggers" and "blog-ola" or "pay-ola." It appear NPR picked this up from a similar piece at Business Week. Since I'm a mom and a blogger I felt the need to write something.

I spent some time reading mom blog reactions to this. There are many. I also spent some time looking a mom blog hubs that include articles on product recommendations.

I've faced this in the homeschool world where many curriculum companies offer parents who use their product the ability to be a sales representative for them using the materials they already own. Anyone who is interested is given a special code that will give the parent/rep credit for a sale if one takes place. This can be done face to face, but it can also be included in links from posts, emails, and blogs to the website of the curriculum company. No one who is not familiar with such practices would know that clicking such a link might represent money in the pocket of the person who recommended the product or provided the link.

In a large email group I run, we have a rule that such affiliations must be disclosed and I've lobbied at forums I've been a member of to have such ethics standards in place as well.

One of the astounding things to me in reading through many blogs in the past week is how comfortable many people are with this idea. How little they feel it needs to be made clear what is going on. What ambiguous turns of phrase might be used to describe a product they received free from a company. Certainly caveat emptor must be the watch word of many places.

I'm sure many of the people who only post positive reviews would be quite upset to spend money on a product only to find out that it has many faults that weren't given in a review because the reviewer felt obliged to only publish a positive review. No doubt the reviewer feels they liked some aspects, but didn't feel it was right to give the negatives and they really weren't that important anyway.

The other interesting thing I noted was many bloggers pointed out that some magazines and newspaper also do this in their pages (in newspaper this occurs mostly in the pages aimed at women). They are correct, but does that mean that this new media of blogging is just going to follow the example of the old media without thought?

In case anyone is wondering: first, I'm not even sure anyone is reading my blog, I'm pretty sure that not enough readers exist for anyone to ever offer me blog-ola, but if offered I'm going to turn it down. If I ever get to be a book reviewer (the only product I can see anyone offering to give me to review), I'll let you know very clearly that I've been given a book. But for now I have my doubts about anyone offering me anything.