internet - Haier accused of manipulating the web

A highly detailed document from white-good producer Haier in Qingdao has appeared today on BBS's disclosing its policy to manipulate the internet in a positive way. The interal document (available here in Chinese) orders local branches of Haier to post highly positive articles. Based on 12 keywords on Baidu, the most authorative BBS's will be identified and branches of Haier have to localize five articles they get every week from the headquarters and post them.
The headquarter will check the results and give incentives to branches with good results, if they fail to do their job, they will get a 100 Rmb fine.
Manipulating the internet in such a way is considered to be a nono in the US, where recently Wal-Mart and PR-firm Edelman had to apologize for their mistake when employees had set up a fake weblog. According to Sam Flemming of CIC Date, speaking earlier this week on Mobile Monday in Shanghai, he sees sometimes such efforts to manipulate the internet in China too. "What you would see is 60, 70 highly negative of highly positive comments on a company or brand name," he said. "But considering that every days millions of comments appear on the internet, I consider this not to be a very effective strategy."
Flemming then did not know about the highly sophisticated strategy by Haier.
Haier is an official sponsor of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. The company was highly succesful in the 1990s and subject of many articles in international magazines and even a Harvard case study.