INTRODUCTION
This report is a book review of Trust Me; I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator, written by Ryan Holiday. Portfolio Hardcover published it in the United States on July 19, 2012. The book is classified as a non-fiction book and comprises 288 pages.
The book gives the readers an insider's experience of the media industry and a manual on how to manipulate the media. Ryan Holiday has penned down guidelines for succeeding in the media world. He shows that blogs are targeted to provoke fear and anger among readers, increasing the blog's online coverage. He also goes on to expose the reality of the media system, which does not care about facts and truth but gossip and controversy.
SUMMARY
Ryan has divided the book into two sections. Part one is about how advertisers can manufacture controversies and bluff the media using blogs, while part two stresses the consequences of doing so.
The book's first half teaches the readers how to exploit the media and manipulate it to get to the end public. Interestingly, Ryan Holiday does not term these tactics as lies but as media manipulations. He has shared his incidents wherein he has stirred up controversies for his clients. Holiday shared how he vandalized billboards for his client's movie. I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell in the middle of the night. He then sent the snapshots of these vandalized billboards to a local blogger using a fake email address. Prominent bloggers and editorials later published this story to be run on television finally. This resulted in massive marketing for the movie. This book gives its readers the idea that any publicity is good publicity.
The holiday started a lot of fake news and controversies by creating numerous counterfeit profiles, feeding fake scoops to blogs, and posting fake comments. He did so to garner fake traffic, which led to the articles being published all over, with people believing these scoops.
He shares one more instance of his friend's non-profit. He suggested his friend make a YouTube video showcasing his charity's work and later write an article for a local Brooklyn-based blog and embed the video. Huffington Post picked up this article and featured it in their New York and Los Angeles news. These links were sent to a CBS reporter using a fake email address, who then did a television story using his friend's video clips. His friend was also active on Reddit, where users voted for stories they liked and posted the CBS links on it. All this bolstered his campaign, and blogging giants picked up his story. Voila! He raised a lot of money as well as recognition.
He explains this whole process as a media chain. For your news to become breaking news, one needs to follow this chain where local bloggers fall at the bottom layer and the media giants sit at the top. He has succeeded in creating much buzz for his clients using this chain.
He continues to tell the readers that all bloggers care about is page traffic to earn revenue. T...
