The media/ad/pr/marketing issue of the day in Montreal: astroturfing! This morning in La Presse, Patrick Lagacé revealed that the agency (Morrow Communications) for Stationnement Montréal – the prime movers behind the (awesome) Bixi Public Bicycle system launching this month – created and has managed a fake blog (plus facebook profiles for the “authors”) for several months.

Astroturfing is the practice of creating fake blogs, media and/or personas to promote a message in such a way that it seems spontaneous and unscripted; to have come from the grassroots. The blog, http://www.avelocitoyens.com/ is reasonably well executed – and it looks like they have quickly adjusted to the fact that they were outed… Regardless, astroturf is astroturf, and it’s never appropriate in the blogosphere. It’s unethical, and anyhow it serves the client very poorly, because such fakery WILL come out in the end – leaving the brand with a public relations problem it never should have had.

Ironically, a quote from a Michel Philibert of Stationnement de Montréal points to the real challenge for organizations in a Web 2.0 world: “If we had built a blog hosted by Stationnement de Montréal, nobody would have been interested.”

The challenge for organizations isn’t to try and get around this fact by trying to fake out the very public they’re trying to reach. That’s the easy (and dangerous) way out. The true opportunity is to take on the harder but much more profitable challenge of making traditionally-boring organizations interesting enough to gain our attention. It’s a huge opportunity – and organizations that don’t try to accomplish it are serving themselves, and their clients, very poorly.