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Companies hire consultants to fight Twitter and Facebook mobs

The catch: But their effort is rife with risks of its own, rooted in the hard-to-decipher difference between legitimate grassroots campaigns and online fraudsters who create the illusion of vast protest movements.

What's happening: Several young companies are pitching themselves to twitchy CEOs and nervous marketing departments, warning that their brands are vulnerable to coordinated social media blitzes that can ruin their standing and run down their stock value.

But these companies are also confronting what Robert Matney, communications director for New Knowledge, calls an asymmetry of passion: groups that deploy sneaky online tricks to appear fundamentally bigger and more important than they really are.

But, but, but: There's no line to separate genuine collective action from the "influence campaigns" that these companies promise to protect against.

Its not clear who is right about the anti-Nike protest whether it was a manipulative influence campaign or a grassroots marshaling of conservative grievances.

Whats next: Increasingly sophisticated tools mean that more influence campaigns targeting companies are probably just around the corner, making the need to cull the genuine from the fake more pressing.

Original article
Author: Axios

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