Front groups.

I was roaming around finding fake blogs or flogs ( thanks Wil !), when I came across someone talking about people getting fired for breaking rules about talking to the public. (McDonald's Lincoln Fry Fake Blog--Look at me! I'm Fake!)Here was my response on the issue:Of course they have guidelines. It sounds like he broke them. Maybe he was not educated enough on what they were. Or he was confused on the topic, we don't know the whole story.According a friend in investor relations most public corporations have guidelines about what you can say about the company on message boards and chat rooms (the place to go pre-blogging). What is interesting is that when I went to two conferences about blogging most people there said that their company didn’t have any blogging guidelines. Now they might not have been familiar with the message board guidelines (lack of education) or they considered blogging so different that they didn’t consider it covered under these guidelines.Does the employee bear responsibility for not following the stated guidelines? If I've signed an employment contract that says I can't talk about the next quarter financials or a new product under development and then I go out and talk about them to someone at the local paper, is that grounds for dismissal?Once that is determined then you have to deal with the larger issue of what if someone blogs on a topic that is outside the norm on their personal time. Does the employer have the right to fire someone who is blogging on socially distasteful, racist, or sexist topics?Say that I work for Clear Channel and in my off time I post to my blog talking about how I think that all the prisoners in Abu Ghraib should have a stick of dynamite put in their behind and dropped from 30,000 feet from an airplane. Now is that okay?What if you do it during your radio program? http://s88172659.onlinehome.us/2004/12/fcc-hate-speech-okay-pixilated-breasts.html Is that okay?I spoke to a friend to works in IR the other day and he assures me that all the high level execs know what they can and can not say. What he was not so sure about was if the employees knew what they could and could not say.PR and marketing people are jumping on to blogging as a way to create buzz and promote products. They will do whatever they can to push their product up the list on search engines and create “buzz”.Say I have a $5,000 budget to create “buzz”. I could use that to pay a bunch of people to create posts on popular blogs. If have a $30,000 budget I can create a bunch of fake blogs with links to a bunch of other fake blogs or "real" blogs that I have established and set up for this purpose. These techniques have been used by PR types for years.Beware of front group blogs. Check out PRWatch.org and SourceWatch at http://www.sourcewatch.org/ to see the long history of front groups buying ‘respectability’ in the form of fake grass roots (Astroturf) and paid off experts.The barriers to entry are low. Their no oversight. It is ripe for exploitation. Some companies will be subtle about doing this others will be ham handed and then people will be shocked that McDonald's tried to manipulate the blogosphere. It is not the ham handed work that we have to worry about it is the subtle things that remain invisible to most people.Interestingly coming up in April is a conference on how to exploit blogs for PR. I'm going to crash it and blog about it. It should be interesting.