There’s a lot of research to be done on crowdsourcing—the method of turning minor human actions into large, complex activities or processes; but what about the opposite, certainly marketing could make use of the ability to generate the illusion of a crowd from a few people. Enter the power of social media and the Internet. Individuals already do this in small part on sites like YouTUBE and their favorite forums by generating multiple accounts over time and then using them to pretend to be multiple people.

The Internet jargon for this sort of behavior is “sockpuppets.”

A writer by the name of Happy Rockefeller over at The Daily KOS has stumbled upon some evidence that software has been written to assist in enabling exactly this, except on a much grander scheme than simply overrunning YouTUBE or a blog,

As I also mentioned yesterday, in some of the emails, HB Gary people are talking about creating “personas”, what we would call sockpuppets. This is not new. PR firms have been using fake “people” to promote products and other things for a while now, both online and even in bars and coffee houses.

But for a defense contractor with ties to the federal government, Hunton & Williams, DOD, NSA, and the CIA – whose enemies are labor unions, progressive organizations, journalists, and progressive bloggers, a persona apparently goes far beyond creating a mere sockpuppet.

According to an embedded MS Word document found in one of the HB Gary emails, it involves creating an army of sockpuppets, with sophisticated “persona management” software that allows a small team of only a few people to appear to be many, while keeping the personas from accidentally cross-contaminating each other. Then, to top it off, the team can actually automate some functions so one persona can appear to be an entire Brooks Brothers riot online.

It’s hard to tell if this represents a real current thing, but it could certainly represent something that we will have. A few years ago I started to discover that there have been marketing campaigns that generate “fake people,” in fact, the assertion of them appearing in coffee houses and bars is not far off the fact. Marketing companies (political and commercial) have been using plants ever since circus folk discovered how effective it is for swaying the interests of populations and crowds. In fact William Gibson wrote about one such use of plants in his book, Pattern Recognition, a fictional story about a marketer mastermind—one of the characters elucidated on her day job acting as a femme fatale bar fly chatting up male patrons in order to mention a particular product.

Real world interactions limit individuals because we’re barred by our faces, voices, and hands; but social media lifts those shackles and enables any number of people to step into our “shoes” and even appear to be us. In fact, it enables the production of virtual people.

This is what Happy Rockefeller suggests that this newly generated persona software would enable. Already a savvy individual who knows how to use social media sites can readily put together all the tools they need to generate a fake person online. It doesn’t take much, just a blog, a Twitter, account, a Facebook page, and viola—as long as you can keep it as separate from your own life as possible few people might guess that this collection of identity points isn’t a person at all.

It wouldn’t be much of a jump to generate a dozen of these and then have a small team control all of them like marionettes. A small group of people could use Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc. to greatly magnify the effects of their political or marketing savvy by generating the appearance of all of them coming to similar (but divergent) conclusions at the same time. Further, since each of them will have their own social networks and apparent personal connections they will be able to convince or bring along a number of people with them each.

Sixty personas controlled by a small team of actors (probably only six people) could have plenty of social media friends, we could assume each of them had at least ten people willing to retweet their ideas (given a few months set up) and thus six people could generate almost six-hundred social media posts. I’m not sure that’s really a high guess because I know that I can pull down almost twenty retweets of something if I press into my social networks hard enough and I’m not even trying.

On the Internet, generating the appearance of a group consensus is almost as good as actually having one. People tend to snowball into things. We’ve seen this phenomena over and over with fads, viral effects, and other emergent social behaviors. Marketers and political groups have long been trying hard to tap into this. They want the next Obama Girl to arrive for their political candidate; but it’s much harder to create a controlled viral meme than it is to make a radio baby band.

When in doubt: control the crowd.

In this case, persona software could enable marketers or political campaign managers to essentially be the crowd.

Still, this sort of astroturfing may yet be somewhat limited. People may run a bit on autopilot on social media sites like Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, etc. but the sort of memes and ideas that will be easily turfed by persona software are also the sort that will only  go in-and-out of a person’s head in a moment. Like most people, I regard my Internet friends who I’ve interacted with for years much more highly than any Johnny-come-lately whose only been talking to me for a short while, or worse, just happens to spout on their Twitter account and doesn’t interact with me.

What the persona software on the Daily KOS cannot do yet is actually interact with people. Certainly, it can produce the illusion of a divergent group of people coming up with the same thought, possibly even spread its ideas into some friend groups; but its penetration is going to be limited as long as these actors don’t also spend hundreds of man hours generating at least the second level of personal relationships. With the sort of technique listed, people will probably see sparks and flashes of crowd-think going on in the social media sphere but it will burn out as quickly as it flares up.

What personas will be best at doing is maintaining the appearance of momentum for already popular notions. It might be able to introduce new notions and make them seem like a bunch of people want to be in on them, but if the rest of the Internet doesn’t have the notion it will sputter and die for lack of fuel. This is especially true because cliques and groups of friends conserve their own ideas and resist outside ideas.

Certainly we can see brands and political ideas “soften” the population up, allowing them an easier time to reach them through ad campaigns and through the traditional media (after all three of your friends mentioned this in their Twitter feeds this week) but it’s not going to change minds even if six-hundred people suddenly talk about an upcoming rally or a new product but don’t have direct experience to go with it.

Should we be concerned about astroturfing software?

Not as much as we should be concerned about astroturfing itself. As much as people are likely to go along with things that seem to be a fad, every group does statistically have at least one person with a highly evolved BS-detector and that’s always going to throw a wrench in these sorts of affairs.

It doesn’t matter if a marketing group has a thousand employees or just ten all crowing about their product or political campaign; in the end it still has to make it past the same social filters.