Word of the Day: Sock Puppeting

Sock Puppeting: assuming a false identity online to promote a product or company online.

pets.com sock puppet

(in word-of-mouth lingo, as seen on MediaPost.com. Flickr photo by greefus groinks )

Advertisement

One thought on “Word of the Day: Sock Puppeting

  1. It’s not just in the commercial sphere. Sock-puppeting can be used by people on web forums, assuming other identities to pretend that others agree with a certain position. It’s used a lot on Wikipedia, which makes many decisions based on the consensus of users.

    It’s related to, but not identical to, Astroturfing, which is marketing-created grassroots activism, usually promoting a specific product.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s