The rise of paid trolling & how it affects the influencer marketing industry

In recent days, several start-ups have claimed to be victims of paid trolling or smear campaigns allegedly carried out by their competitors. With the ever-rising trust the youth repose in the influencers, BuzzInContent.com tries to decode how such incidents impact the influencer marketing industry

author-image
Nisha Qureshi
New Update
Post Thumb

In layman’s terms, a troll is described as “a person who posts inflammatory, insincere, digressive, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, with the intent of provoking readers into displaying emotional responses, or manipulating others' perception.” 

Troll or trolling is not an alien term or practice for us, thanks to our political system. Several top parties today have their bot army and fake accounts which help them in pushing their narrative or silencing the voice of the opposition, as the occasion demands.

However, the art of trolling has now made its way into the world of marketing. We are increasingly seeing a number of start-ups who have claimed to be victims of ‘paid trolling’. Recently, travel booking EaseMyTrip was a victim of a ‘concentrated attack’. Multiple handles commented about the company alleging they stole their money. 

A Twitter user Ravisutanjani Kumar pointed out that all these accounts seemed to be made in the month of June and were also seen promoting GoIbibo- a competitor of EaseMyTrip. Similarly, D2C platform Meesho had slammed legal notices to certain social media influencers and their agencies for defaming them. Ravisutanjani Kumar, the same Twitter user mentioned earlier in the article, had pointed out the similarity between the tweets targeting Meesho.

As is evident from both the cases, the trolls are being paid not just to smear the competition but also for building narratives. In a different case, a group of accounts were seen putting out tweets with the intent to damage control after Ola received flak from the netizens over reports of its newly launched e-scooters catching fire.  

How easy is it for a brand to troll competition? 

According to experts in the digital space, trolls are today owned by digital agencies. They also have standardised rate cards depending upon the scale of the activity. 

Speaking about how trolling actually works, Rachit Juneja, Co-founder and CEO, Sheeko, said there are ‘vendors’ looking out for brands that want to troll their rivals or for other activities. 

“Today, anyone has the access to troll anyone because there are so many vendors in the market. Even if you are not from the influencer industry if you have a few bucks, you can get anyone smeared,” Juneja said.

“We once had two brands who were direct competitors and we were asked by a top media agency to do this. However, we refused,” he added.

Juneja further stated that a smear campaign does not cost a brand a lot, especially on Twitter. 

“On Twitter, for just a couple of lakhs, you can get a good smear campaign done. For mainline influencers, it depends on how good the actual product is and whether they can get away with it. If an influencer’s cost is ‘x’ then for getting them to post something negative you have to pay anywhere between 1.5x to 3x,” he explained.  

Does it impact the outlook toward influencer marketing? 

According to experts, this trend can pose a threat to the trust that the youth have in influencer marketing. With regulatory bodies like ASCI and the government keeping a close eye on the influencer industry, experts suggest staying away from such practices. 

Pranav Panpalia, Founder, OpraahFx, said, “Influencer and content creators saw the day of the light only because of their ‘honesty, outspoken, and unapologetically real’ characters. Hence, indulging in such smear campaigns is the biggest type of cheating that a creator can do with their audiences. There is a difference between honest opinion and talking negatively about the brand in lieu of money.” 

“Indulging in such campaigns will directly affect the creator’s and the representative agency’s reputation at large. In one go they would shatter the trust of their audiences which they took zillions of years to build,” he added. 

Shivam Agarwal, Founder, Deckster.Live, stated that brands have been doing such campaigns on digital mediums like ‘Google my business’ reviews, ‘Play Store’ reviews, etc. He said people usually make their decisions based upon the average ratings, and for ages, many brands have been doing smear campaigns to bring down the average rating of their competitors. 

“Rather, this is the problem of attitude and ethics. Few brands have exploited every marketing tool to tarnish the image of their competitors, and Influencer marketing is one such medium today. It is extremely unethical of a brand to do such campaigns,” said Agarwal. 

He further stated that agencies must outrightly deny such campaigns. “It will only affect the brand value of the agency in the longer run. They would just lose business, and I believe there are only 2% of brands who do such notorious campaigns, and we all have an opportunity to work with the rest 98%.”

How can this be controlled? 

With the audiences getting smarter every day, it is not that easy to defame a brand through mainline influencers on platforms like Instagram. Hence, a majority of these campaigns are carried out on Twitter. 

According to Juneja of Sheeko, mainline influencers who target tier one and two audiences are very careful about such things. “Generally, they have become very conscious as the audience is smart so they have kind of regulating themselves. The problem is solving itself, however, Twitter is an easy platform for such activities.” 

“The bottom line is it is best to not participate in these things. Many times, you may get in trouble. For example, there was an influencer who deliberately posted negative reviews about a car because its competition paid him. So, the brand tracked down who was behind the smear and then forced the influencer to post vice versa about the brand that was behind the trolling,” he explained. 

Juneja said there is a dire need to stop the menace of bots on Twitter. He added that unless bots are not controlled, the issue won’t be resolved fully and also said that media houses that give attention to such trolling add fuel to the fire. 

“A lot of media agencies pick these (trolling) up because it is ‘masala’. You see many articles which are just quoting Twitter comments. The audience reads them and platforms like Dailyhunt and Google also aggregate it,” he said. 

influencer marketing industry The rise of paid trolling