PWU (Power Workers Union) Winds Down Social Networking Campaign

 ...kills their Flogs, fires their Facebook pseuds.  Congrats to Mike De Souza from PostMedia for doing the digging on this story.  I'd visited Enviralment years ago and figured it was too clean and corporate to be a real blog, but had never figured out just who was behind it.   Good on Mike D for finding out.

I've also been informed that links to the fake enviro blogs are coming down from ProgBlogs.

Just slightly OT: If McGuinty gets in, esp. with a majority, I bet Wind Concerns Ontario disappears quietly into the night.  For reasons I've mentioned previously.

Power Workers Union Rethinking "Social Media" Campaign?

Both their fake blogs, Enviralment and Envirogy are "undergoing scheduled maintenance".  We'll see for how long, and what comes out the other side.

Background here.

h/t Scott in the comments.

Enviralment is a Flog For PWU (Power Workers Union)

That is, a fake Blog used as a sales tool, in this case  by the Ontario Power Workers Union to trash Dalton McGuinty's Green Energy Act:

A bold labour union offensive targeting the environmental policies of the Ontario government is being driven largely by a sophisticated marketing campaign that has planted comments to "create online conversations" promoting coal, nuclear and other power options.

The marketing has involved professional bloggers working for M THIRTY, a Toronto-based communications firm, who actively use social media websites such as Facebook or Twitter to simulate or kick-start online conversations with a consistent message promoting the views of their clients.

In this case, the Ontario Power Workers' Union bankrolled the campaign...

A little further down the article mentions the blog Enviralment as being part of the campaign:

She also posted a link to a blog called "Enviralment" — also produced by M THIRTY — that cast
doubts about the actions of the McGuinty government in Ontario. "What's the deal with this?" she asked, posting a link to the blog post: "McGuinty Scraps Offshore Wind Projects in Ontario."

And then a little later down:

[The messages] were spread on social media and shared on M THIRTY blogs with green-sounding names such as "Enviralment" and "Envirogy."

Enviralment can be found here.  Unfortunately, it can also be found here, on the Progressive Bloggers blogroll.  I would humbly suggest that ProgBlog owners have it removed: the folks behind it are shills for the PWU.

Secondly, I've written a couple of  times about my suspicions re John LaForet's Wind Concerns Ontario group and its possible ties to the power workers.  Well, there are numerous connections between WCO and the astroturf campaign described above: a quick look at the Enviralment page, for example,  shows how heavily it has promoted WCO over the past couple of years, for example here and here.  And Envirogy, another flog associated with the PWU effort, is on the WCO blogroll.  Also, the marketing group behind the PWU campaign, M Thirty, employs a gentleman/woman employing the pseud "Vic De Zen" who occasionally posts to the Wind Concerns Facebook page.

In any case, a real scuzzy effort by the PWU.  It would be nice to know if Andrea Horwath supports it.