behind netvocates (and it's link to customscoop)

I was looking at inbound links this evening and came across one originating behind the firewall of a company called NetVocates which is a "blog intelligence and advocacy service". The website blurb says, reasonably enough:

"...blogs frequently impact an organization and its products and image in uncontrolled and often unexpected ways. In addition, the sheer volume of blogs, message boards, and other discussion forums makes it difficult for organizations to effectively monitor the activity relevant to them."

Organisations want to know what people are saying about them online - that makes perfect sense. However, I spent a bit more time on the NetVocates site and found this:

"NetVocates then recruits activists and consumers who share the client’s views in order to reinforce those key messages on targeted blogs – and rebut misinformation when appropriate."

So they hire sockpuppets to go out and pretend to be "ordinary users" when they post stuff on blogs? ANYONE THINKING OF HIRING A COMPANY TO DO THIS needs to think very seriously about the backlash that's likely to happen if people find out. Don't believe me? Then see this post about a company that tried it and got caught.

Other bloggers who have found themselves visited by NetVocates include:

PSoTD
Make Chai, Not War
CracksInTheFacade
pandora's jar of mixed nuts

What do each of these have in common? Well, based on a very brief visit to each, I'd say they all discuss political issues at least some of the time. On my visits, Pandora's was discussing nuclear power plants in Australia, Cracks most recent post was about American troops in Iraq but the following post had a link to an article about energy, MakeChai describes himself as a "Pakistani American Muslim... human rights and responsibilities advocate..." and PSoTD has a "leftie blog" badge on his site and reckons the netvocate people visited this page about the Al Gore movie. I also just found this guy who posted about Net Neutrality on the day he was visited.

I'm starting to worry...

So who are they? Well, a search of the whois database on network solutions, where they registered their domain name late last year, found that the owners are Griffin Strategy Group, LLC who list an email address at eoutreach.com as their contact and a non-sense contact phone number of 999 999 9999. Searching based on the listed zipcode + "Griffin" I found this page which seamingly ties netvocate to a profile on iKarma for Chip Griffin, Chief Innovation Officer at CustomScoop, a trademark of "eOutreach Solutions, LLC". Which leads me to a biography of Chip who also has his own blog here. Customschoop has actually been featured in TechCrunch and in this post on Micro Persuasion who, I reckon, don't have a clue that Chip is also involved in a company like NetVocates.

So returning to the whole who is Chip Griffin question, a quick google search throws up lots of stuff. He seems to write a lot of stuff of interest to Republican candidates, congressman, etc and his own blog says: "Griffin worked for a variety of politicians, think tanks, and public relations firms in the Washington, D.C. area. In addition, he headed townhall.com, a conservative internet portal." I won't embarrass the guy by telling you he used to be into knifemaking and castle wolfenstien...

So do people out there know that the guy behind NetVocates, a service that watches blogs and message boards then hires "activists and consumers who share the client’s views in order to reinforce those key messages on targeted blogs" is also the guy behind CustomScoop, a service that's getting some kudos in the blogosphere? Somehow I think people haven't noticed - what blogger would talk up a service that has a sister service that, basically, pays people to post comment spam?!

There's still some room for a bit of sleuthing around this... have you been visited by NetVocates? What was your content about? Maybe you've been approached to "blog" or "comment" by them? Let's find out more.

---

Update 22:52 BST: It looks like cracksinthefacade and PSoTD both posted about the Al Gore movie, as did the Pandora's jar guy - so someone has paid to find out what people are saying about the Al Gore movie, An Inconvenient Truth. Did you post about the film? Did you get inbound links from NetVocates? More interestingly, did any user comments appear and what did they say? Let's see if any feedback posted looks similar...

Update 18.22 BST 06/01/06: Chip has posted a bit of info on his blog in response to this and posts made by other bloggers. One paragraph of it, if true and I have no reason to doubt that it is, makes me feel quite a lot better about the idea of NetVocate asking people to post comments (see my other post - I've since changed my mind about that). Chip says: We have a few basic principles we ask all of our staff and the activists we work with to operate under. First, we ask our activists to only engage on issues they actually believe in. Second, we ask everyone not to lie about anything. Third, we ask our activists not to create multiple online personalities to engage in blogosphere conversations.

[see my other posts about netvocates]

bookmark this post: del.icio.us l Digg l Furl l ma.gnolia l Newsvine l reddit l Yahoo MyWeb l Track with co.mments

Comments

[Liz Strauss]

I get about 6 or 7 visit an hour from two group of them during the daytime hours arrca.netovates.com and arrcabeta.netvocates.com both use the scoopscraper on the phrase net neutrality. I post everyday on both sides of the issue. I rarely comment or get comments on the issue.

I've tried to track behind them and once ended up in a communist webring. creepy.

[Chip Griffin]

I've addressed these questions on my own blog: http://www.interadvocacy.com/2006/06/about_netvocate.html

Hopefully it will help clear things up.

Chip

[Baraka]

Thanks for all this information!

I noticed a spike in visits after I posted a couple of entries on Israel/Palsetine relations.

Oh, & I'm a girl ;)

Cheers,
Baraka

[mckreck]

I got a visit June 9 to a post from June 8 about Michael Berg, father of the Nick Berg that was beheaded by Zarqawi.

At the bottom of the post a technorati tag was highlighted. The tag said "media bias"

I post on political issues a lot but it's mostly pretty conservative. I can't say I like what this guy is doing. It seems to me to be more than just research, showing a client a bunch of links. It's a bit creepy.

FYI, the url of the page loaded was not at my site (on Blogger)

The load page was:
www.netvocates.com/tools/cleanpage.pl?postid=86083&postcheck=1908917402&dataset=21

The referring page was:
arrca.netvocates.com/Default/index.cfm

Hope this helps.

[calistan]

I received a hit from that arrca.netvocates.com on my website. I couldn't figure out why until I found this post. I recently posted a piece that is critical of a representative in Wisconsin who voted in against of "net neutrality." That must be why. Interesting.

[Big Gav]

I've had a few visits from them - the first one I noticed was in mid May - at the time they were trawling for blogs that mentioned "climate change", "earth" and "al gore".

[DBK]

Thanks for running this down. I also post on political topics and have had a slew of hit-and-run comments lately that challenge the positions of the posters, but don't actually offer anything substantive in response to genuinely substantive postings. Now I am going to post on my visitors from arrca and link your posting.

Nice work, my friend.

[A_B]

They hit my page today. They were looking for "Coca-Cola" and "fat tax." Apparently the big purveyors of corn syrup are nervous about the AMA.

Here's my blog post with a screen cap: http://anonymousblogger.blogspot.com/2006/06/are-you-paranoid-if-theyre-watching.html

[Agen Schmitz]

Hey - thanks for doing some research into this. I am the lead blogger at Cracks in the Facade and have been curious about all the hits I've been getting this spring from Netvocates. I don't get that many comments, so I was able to do a quick review. On May 30, I did a post leading up to Al Gore's movie and subsequently got a comment from "ChinaLawBlog," noting that Gore was wrong to assert that China could be held as a good example of working toward reduced CO2 emissions. There was no link to the ChinaLawBlog blog, but a link to the profile--which is empty, save for the title. I checked my logs and it seems I got a visit from Netvocates right around the time that I received this comment.

[nika]

I was hit too by these monkeys.. its easy to see what they were looking for by hitting the referring URL.. Why dont you all set up a clearinghouse of sorts where we hit-ees can report their scoop or scrape search terms.. that way you can track what they are looking for and it might give a heads up re: Rove's tactics.

Might be valuable to campaigns as well as it moves into that level of granularity.