Corporate executives bent on an Internet smear campaign might first consider the ignominious unmasking of surfxaholic36.
Surfxaholic36 was the online pseudonym a Burger King vice president reportedly pilfered from his young daughter to post all manner of scurrilous stuff about his company's perceived enemies.
Unfortunately for Steven Grover, those enemies included the Student-Farmworker Alliance. Middle-age inhabitants of fancy corporate suites should refrain, always, from picking Internet fights with any organization with ''student'' in its title. Wrong turf, Burger Boy.
Grover, as surfxaholic36, reportedly posted nasty comments laden with misinformation under Internet articles about the Immokalee-based SFA.
Surfxaholic36 charged, among other sins, that the alliance and their partners at the Coalition of Immokalee Workers were pilfering pay increases they had negotiated for Florida's beleaguered tomato-pickers and were ``reaping millions in cash from unknowing or duped supporters.''
CORPORATE GIANTS
The Immokalee activists had convinced corporate giants like McDonald's and Yum! Brands to ante up the penny-a-pound raise. Burger King just got sneaky.
The SFA's Marc Rodrigues said someone who identified herself as Cara Schaffer, a Broward Community College student, wanted to join up and take part in strategy sessions. Except he noticed she was working off the same script as another mysterious student, Kevin, from the University of Virginia. Kevin's e-mail address, stopcorporategreed@live.com, happened to match the origins of a ''leaked'' Steven Grover memo that suggested Burger King might stop buying Florida tomatoes altogether rather than deal with trouble-making activists.
''It didn't take us long to figure it out what was going on,'' Rodrigues told me Wednesday. All it took was a Google check to figure out that Cara Schaffer was actually the (unlicensed) operator of a Pembroke Pines security outfit called Diplomatic Tactical Services, which (according to its website) specializes in infiltrating ''the ranks'' in labor disputes.
The stopcorporategreed@ live.com e-mails were traced by The Associated Press back to BK headquarters in Miami. And, in a nifty piece of reporting, Amy Bennett Williams of the Fort Myers News-Press figured out that surfxaholic36 belonged to a Miramar school girl. The kid fingered her daddy, Burger King Veep Steven Grover.
The smear job was as sophisticated as an online squabble among school children. ''It was so sophomoric,'' said Rodrigues.
INTERNET MISHAPS
But a sophomoric smear campaign aimed at impoverished farm workers run by a $2.23 billion a year company captured the attention of several U.S. congressmen. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, among others, wants to hear Burger King execs explain BK's Internet mishaps.
Suddenly, for a company in dire need of an image fix, a penny-a-pound looks cheap. There were indications Wednesday that BK was ready to reopen negotiations with their old enemies in Immokalee.
In further damage control, BK announced Tuesday that it had fired two employees ``who participated in the unauthorized activity on public websites which did not reflect the company's views and which were in violation of company policy.''
The company declined to identify the fired employees. I'm guessing it wasn't a good day for a would-be surfxaholic.
