In Argentina, Danone countered online slurs against their brand, Actimel (which is known as DanActive in the United States), in an interesting way. Instead of simply and only refuting those slurs, which they did, in addition Danone decided to demonstrate how elusive truth can be in the virtual environment, showing that what you read online isn’t always true.

A recent Ad Age article, titled “Danone Fights Damaging Viral Slurs in Argentina,” detailed various email rumors which denigrated the Actimel brand. According to the article, the company responded with some of the traditional tactics such as responding to each slur found on various Web sites. The company even went a step further by making a TV commercial which addressed the online attack. But the company went very much further when it decided to demonstrate how everything online shouldn’t be believed. To do so, it set up a site called Creador de Rumores (Creator of Rumors). (The site, assembled by digital shop Sinus, appears to be no longer active. Venturing to the site redirects one to the site of the digital shop.)

Per the Ad Age article, visitors to the site could create and start rumors about themselves. Visitors chose from a pre-selected list of rumors such as winning the lottery or going on tour with a British rock band. The Ad Age article doesn’t provide any information on how well Danone made its point about the ease of virtual rumor mongering and if that point was absorbed by the general public, but the article did report that in the first month of the campaign (which per the article I believe was February 2010) over 40,000 people visited the site and initiated about 100,000 rumors.

Certainly this is a novel way to tackle the problem of online activism based in falsehood and it’s a tactic that can be added to the irregular competition playbook. But like any tactic, it’s one that should not be applied in isolation.