Trust Me I'm Lying: Manifesto of Online Media [un]Truths

Getting through to people is no easy task. Especially when you have an entire microcosm of instantaneous online information to contend with. Ask any budding PR professional about how hard it is to get publicity on an issue/campaign and they will tel you: It's really hard.

For Ryan Holiday, all it takes is a well placed [manufactured] tidbit of info wiggled in front of a starving blogger. Once the “mark” is hooked the entire media monster will often rear its starving maw.

Pull at own risk.

Who is Ryan? Ryan Holiday is a Director of Marketing for a well know apparel company. As part of his actual job he often machinates media to promote and hack brand names and products. How? By turning a something small -- often ridiculous and fabricated -- into a hot topic the entire online economy cannot resist.

Amazon.com

Ryan illustrates how getting a small blog to cover your story can often float that story upward to bigger outlets. Mind you, that the story in question is completely prefabricated and specifically designed to go viral. He calls this “trading up the chain,” and details how it can have immense benefits for a product or brand.

Gossip blogs, technology blogs, fashion blogs, political blogs, are now prominent news outlets -- or are often owned by bigger media corps. All need the scoops. All have new and daily postings. All of them craft useful content to inform their readers, right? Wrong. In the era of the paid by click economy the only thing that matters to bloggers is getting their site the hits.

How is this done? By crafting pseudo-exclusive news. Entire articles written for the sake of driving traffic and selling goods. But what happens when this shady tactic is used to shift and/or manipulate public opinion? Hold on to your keyboard, because the entire Internet is full of this sort of manipulation.

“And sure, sometimes people get mad when they realize they've been tricked. Readers don't like to learn that the story they read was baseless. Bloggers don't like to learn that I played them. But this is the risk bloggers and I take, mostly because the consequences are so low.”

In Trust Me I'm Lying, not only does Ryan share his knowledge of media vulnerabilities, he also exposes its chronic addiction to always craft/steal scoops at all cost. To stay relevant, and to make profits, blogs need to be updated all the time. This creates the need for content. Unfortunately, relevant news does not happen all that often. To fix that, bloggers need to create newsworthy events out of nothing to keep their sites updated daily (sometimes hourly).

Saga by Image Comics

In this vacuum of forced publishing the very idea of well-thought, researched, and accurate stories is best left with the scribes of the past. Content that does not spread is dead. And what spreads are loaded stories to inspire anger, cutesy pictures, short paragraphs, gossip, and many, many, lists. Usefulness and correctness of the content is always second to maximizing the spread.

Check this leaked guideline to pseudo-posting: Crap advice for novices.

The book goes in-depth on how to corrupt and inject stories to bloggers. It also shows in detail the affect that something entirely fabricated can have on individuals and companies. Welcome to [un]reality. PR folks beware.

I enjoyed Ryan's insight on the unseen side of the communication biz: death of the RSS Feed, coverage about coverage, myth of corrections, and keeping things broken on purpose. He backs his points with his own case studies, and compendium of links to examples that often prove how little credible fact checking and sourcing there is online. It's indeed a place ripe with exploitation.

Lazy journalism and media manipulation may not be the newest of topics. But as far as I know there has not been a story angle written from the point of the manipulator. You may not like Ryan (or the fact he has used his shady tactics to promote his book), but keep in mind that he is not the only deception artist that keeps the digital pen corroded.