Nerd army for Guerilla Marketing on the web

Have you guys heard of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party ?

Basicaly It's an army of chineses that are paid to defend the Chinese Government on the web.

I guess that there are many business doing that too for:

- self-promotion through "covert persuasion"
- talk shit about their competition

What are your thoughts on this. Does someone already hired people to do that kind of stuff on social media sites and forums?

I think it's awesome - it's reputation management at it's highest form...

I know of a company that I used to work for that pays big $$$ to SEO firms to get their ripoff reports off the front page of google