Shill City: The Dark World of Privacy Tech Marketing

Privacytests.org - a performance table site which ranks Brave as its best-performing browser - is maintained by the Senior Research and Privacy Engineer at Brave Software. But sure, let's all take this quagmire of shilling and sockvertising seriously.

There should never be any trust where brands are concerned - especially in the tech genre. But after it was revealed that the self-styled privacy brand Startpage had bribed its way back into the recommendation resource privacytools.io’s listings after being legitimately booted out, the focus of suspicion split in two. Not only were the “privacy brands” untrustworthy - at least some sources of recommendation were a sham too.

As the seriousness of the privacy debate escalates to uncharted levels, perhaps this is a good time to ask how many of the voices in the privacy arena are being incentivised by brands. Perhaps, indeed, it may be better to ask how many of them are not being incentivised...

Maximum Community Management: Celebritising The Brand

“Any brand can be celebritised. But how do you celebritise a brand?...”

Photo by Nik Shuliahin on Unsplash (image modified).

If you thought community management was little more than diverting a brand's negative social media feedback into the dark depths of the private messaging system, we really need to talk. In fairness, most mid to large sized businesses do have a broader vision of community management than that, but even at the upper end, not always by much.

They might, for example, equate community management with hopping onto forums and review sites with an “I'm sorry you feel you didn't get good service”, and a polite but subliminally sulky defence of the company's reputation. And maybe they also equate community management with trying to sliver-tongue or basically bribe bloggers whose less-than-glowing assessments of their offerings are rapidly creeping towards Google's front page… They're covering the defensive bases. But if you know your old sayings, you'll be aware that defence, is not the best form of defence…