Dee Ann Divis: Stealth bloggers pose risk to lobbying campaigns

WASHINGTON (Map, News) - Lobbyists, many still new to the blogosphere, are secretly paying bloggers to support their issues in the increasingly influential forum of online opinion. Experts say number of those being hired are stealth bloggers, who risk the wrath of the millions of blog readers by not being upfront about who is footing the bill.

Paid bloggers are not a new phenomenon. Many organizations have staff-written blogs and hire PR firms to respond on their behalf to negative comments online. At the end of 2005, Marqui, a Vancouver, B.C. public relations firm, paid 20 bloggers $800 a month to write whatever they wanted about the firm’s public relations software as a marketing ploy.

But, while Marqui’s paid-blogger program was not a secret, the move challenged the influence-free approach valued in the hyper-independent blogosphere. It touched off a firestorm and, the firm said, a quarter million e-mails in barely a week.

Since the paid-blogger project, the firm has worked with clients on issue-focused campaigns, helping them “indirectly” find “those type of services,” said Rick Patri, Marqui’s vice president of sales. Though he declined to name any firms or individuals, Patri said he was aware of lobbyist-paid bloggers who were upfront about who they were working for — and others who were not.

“I think that a lot of people probably do [pay bloggers]. It is not a sin by far,” said Michael Krempasky, founder of the conservative blog Redstate.com, who is now with Edelman communications. “What I think is considered almost universally a sin is getting paid to blog and not telling anybody.”

Though no estimate was available on how many stealth bloggers lurk on the blogosphere’s millions of sites, experts were unanimous in saying that the consequences of being discovered were severe.

Tad Furtado, the policy director for Rep. Charles Bass, R-N.H., was forced to resign Tuesday after he was identified as the source of postings intended to convince readers the re-election race between his boss and his opponent was not competitive. When a blogger paid by Mazda — posing as a consumer entranced with the company’s ads — was found out, it undermined the company’s expensive advertising campaign.

“It wildly backfired for Mazda,” Krempasky said. “They just got caught not being open and not being honest. For all the money and resources they tried to bring to bear, they created a considerable reputation problem for themselves in the blogosphere”

“You should disclose if you are being funded by someone,” said Robert Arena, the vice president for interactive media at Carton Donofrio Partners. He cited “Astroturf lobbying” as being particularly troublesome. “It looks like [a grassroots campaign] but it’s not really. It was sort of laid down quickly and expensively by a nice PR shop.”