My favorite summation of the blogosphere's backlash potential comes from Steve Hayden. “If you fudge or lie on a blog, you are biting the karmic weenie,” says the ad guru. “The negative reaction will be so great that, whatever your intention was, it will be overwhelmed and crushed like a bug.”

It’s no secret that to hoax, hype or otherwise misrepresent and manipulate is just bad mojo when it comes to the blogosphere. The denizens of this world have zero tolerance when it comes to being punked.

And yet the roll call keeps growing for blogosphere blunders that we can all learn from. A few recent examples:

The blogosphere went after one of its own recently when a contributor for the blog site Joystiq pumped up an impending video game industry announcement. Having teased his readers that there was big news a comin’, only to have it turn out to be a standard vendor announcement, Robert Summa found himself taking a chomp of that karmic weenie. Joystiq faithful went fully ballistic when they realized the news was average industry fare and called for the blogger’s head. They first got a written apology from Joystiq, followed by the abrupt firing of Summa.

Next up, those happy go lucky kids from Facebook, the high school-college social site. Smelling manipulation on the wind when the site issued “stalker-like” syndication tools for info swapping, Facebook members staged a full-scale revolt with on-line petitions, anti-Facebook coalitions and threats to ditch the site for eternity. The site’s CEO responded with a blog to members asking them to “calm down and breathe.” (!!!) That didn’t go over so well and Facebook subsequently launched privacy controls to block user info from being shared.

Then along comes the outing of LonelyGirl 15, the teen queen who built up a following in the millions with 2-3 minute videos posted on YouTube talking about her “real-life” angst. As her popularity grew, so did suspicion that she could be a fake, a viral abomination. It was the crisp editing, music overlays and soap opera pacing that eventually did her in. Oh, and the IP tie-back to a talent agency didn’t help either.

Sensing the blogosphere was preparing to open a can of whoop wrath on Little Miss Lonely, her creators revealed her secret and made a ham-handed plea for understanding in the name of art. The guys behind the site -- a few non-descript 20-somethings, one of them an unemployed filmmaker, another a lawyer -- said they made up the pubescent and the storyline in the spirit of creating a new “art form.”

BS! screamed back the blogosphere. Though many had long realized they were being played and took the hoax in stride, nearly everyone had issues with the creators’ excuse for telling the apocryphal tale. People have called for everything from LonelyGirl boycotts to her on-line suicide.

What’s all this mean for the world of PR and marcom? Simply that the karmic weenie remains in full force across the blogosphere.

The people who built up this word of mouth hotbed do not suffer phonies well. They seek out fraud between the lines of text and in the IP addresses of those who post. They can spot manipulation from a mile away. And they don’t want to have anyone exploit them by trading on their personal data.

Try even nibbling around the edges of the karmic truth and your company or client will pay the price, left to make public and painful reversals of strategy or inauthentic excuses like those above. The damage to a brand in such cases is much greater than any potential upside associated with playing the blogosphere.

So if you’re tempted to pull one on the blogosphere, proceed with caution. Or just don’t proceed at all.