I kicked off this year by declaring it the year of transparent retailing, and I’m finding that there are a lot of sub-themes that fit that bill. I’ll tackle them as I see them in this newsletter, and the first one that I’ll cover is on the subject of retail transparency is trolling.

What is trolling, you may ask. It is the art (some would say psychosis) of posing as a persona on a blog or in an internet group with the express purpose of inflaming the conversation or directing the discussion off topic. A good example of how this works outside of retail comes from the political sphere, where a staffer for a Republic Congressman seeking re-election posed as an “independent ” on his opponent’s site. His comments focused on concerns that the Democrats were wasting money because the incumbent was unbeatable, according to a description on Wikipedia.

While some people do this for the perverse pleasure of the kill, there are some that do it for money — posting something that gets a lot of attention (not necessarily relevant to the discussion) with a link at the bottom that drives traffic to a place that potentially makes the poster money. That’s a good enough business case that trendcentral reported on a new business model: Rent-A-Troll. Businesses can rent a Troll with a specific persona and use them to build their own business, by getting that troll to post on their own website.

In retail, the reports of trolling have been fairly limited to-date. There was a flap internationally with Amazon around confusion over the term adult. According to one report, it resulted in Amazon adding the report this link at the bottom of each review, so that the community can monitor and identify people that they think are trolls. Review companies like BazaarVoice and PowerReviews enable retailers to monitor and control review posts to make sure that consumer comments are appropriate before they get added to the site.

But in an age of transparent retailing, awareness of these issues — and how retailers respond — is going to become more and more important. It’s all about legitimacy through transparency: you can’t be taken seriously on a topic — like how you handle or manage product reviews, for example — unless you are totally transparent about how you handle such things. The existence of organizations like rentatroll.com just go to show that it truly is tempting to not only work around the existence of internet realities like trolls, but to even potentially embrace them by hiring them to troll your own site for your benefit. Word-of-mouth marketing ran into these challenges early on, to the point where they had to develop a code of ethics and a code of conduct in order not to destroy the marketing tactic completely (how seriously will people take your brand if you have to pay people to talk you up in social settings?)

When news (or think of it as bad publicity) can spread at the speed of tweets, and last as long as Google keeps the archive, then operating in a world of consumer-driven content gets complicated very fast. Retailers haven’t been in that world as long as some brands, nor nearly as long as some bloggers or savvy consumers. As you look to expand your consumer-driven content strategy — through reviews and comments, through blog postings, through social networks and communities, just be aware of the pitfalls out there. A good guideline to have: if it makes you nervous to think what might happen if consumers found out what you’re doing, then you need to do one of two things — disclose up front and completely, or just don’t do it.