At the end of 2016, a PR company called Hack PR had a problem.
They had launched a promo campaign for a rich but unknown political aspirant — but the campaign was going nowhere.
The CEO of the Hack PR was stressing out because his reputation was on the line. And so he decided to astroturf on Reddit.
In other words, he went on Reddit and posted a link to an article talking about the languishing promo campaign. He then went on Fiverr and bought all the Reddit upvote packages — for a total of $35.
Two hours later, his post was at the top of r/politics and had 500 comments. Media requests started pouring in.
And each time a new media outlet covered the campaign, Hack PR would repeat the process — post on Reddit, buy upvotes on Fiverr. They also started anonymously spamming a list of journalists with links to the trending articles.
All in all, over the course of 3 days and for a grand total of $255, Hack PR managed to get 6 million website visitors. They also got 4,000 very engaged email subscribers.
So what’s the point?
I’m not sure. I’m just impressed. And I plan to do more research about astroturfing, Reddit, and PR.
For now, if you want to see how you can communicate with a very engaged list of email subscribers and get them to further your cause (whatever that might be), you might like my upcoming book on email marketing: