>Astroturfing == posting fake "grassroots" testimonials about the product/idea/company in question to make it seem like a lot of people care about it.

This is actually illegal in the EU now under EU's Unfair Commercial Practices Directive; eg http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/08/eu_consumer_protecti...

You might get away with just mentioning your product in these forums, but also mention that you are related with the product. If you are humble enough and the product really fits the audience of the forum, you might generate some interest. And you don't need to fear any backlash from somebody uncovering your astroturfing.

That's what I've done with Dead By Zombie. So I don't truly astroturf. But I do chime in. I believe the guy behind Balsamiq used this technique when he was just starting out. Making comments and doing mini-pitches in various web forums that had the demographic who might be interested in his new tool.

Exactly. I think there's a lot of astroturf/fake reviews on Amazon for example.

It's soooooooo easy to create fake/throwaway identities on the Internet I think you often have to be very very skeptical about the value of any gushingly positive or gushingly negative "reviews" of a commercial product or service written by a stranger, especially if it's a sort of mainstream category like books or music albums where there might me a traditional PR/advertising company involved that's now doing "social media" promotion. Giveaways: same writing tone/voice/pov used in each review; use of industry-specific insider/professional lingo that the average Joe wouldn't know; reviews that are just too complete/thorough, etc.

Which then leads back to what I think is going to be a service category in increasing demand in the future (and thus an opportunity for more startups): trusted curators and aggregators. Entities that don't just include everything. Entities that discriminate with an eye for quality, and try hard to be independent from vendor influence. For example, for me it once got to the point where the only movie reviewer I would trust was Roger Ebert. With other reviewers I couldn't tell if they were paid shills, or they were naive/ignorant, or too much a slave to their own personal genre tastes, or they just weren't going about doing the review in an intelligent and balanced manner. Ebert I could generally trust. I want a web-based Roger Ebert for doctors, for auto repair shops, for schools. Seems like there are some guys doing quite well doing it for wines, for example.

This is actually one area where I think crowdsourcing is horrible, by the way. Crowdsourcing when applied to reviews is almost the total opposite of trusted curation. What if the crowd in question is full of fools or paid shills? Garbage in, garbage out. The Idiocracy effect where quantity drowns out quality.