Wednesday, April 27, 2005

CNN Guerrillas in the Midst: A Viral Marketing Campaign Exposed (or "CNN Spam")

Nick Lewis (blog)


Last week, CNN attempted an unusual marketing campaign in the blogosphere. The campaign combined blackhat search engine optimization techniques, viral marketing tactics, and guerrilla comment spam. Unlike the majority of comment spam, this spam appears to only target blogs that have discussed CNN in the past 3 months. So far, 13 separate instances of the spam have been found. Most alarmingly, CNN may have also left malicious keywords at least 3 out of 13 with the intent of using google's keyword stuffing detectors to censor them.


*If* this is true, it is very disturbing, and another piece of evidence that the media is afraid of blogs. They are purposely sinking posts that criticize them, and that is not a good thing.
If this is not true, and just some conspiracy theory, then it still makes a very good read. And it could very well happen, because it is all very possible to do. If you have a minute read this article, because it is a very current topic in the world of blogging.

Oh yeah, and always delete comments that you think are spam.

2 comments:

Canis Ex Machina said...

Spam spam spam spam spam spam. ahem. Sorry. I'd like to believe that this isn't true, but then american news companies do have something of a global reputation for being schweinhunds

Ookami Snow said...

Most companies, media or not, have shady sides (American or not). Exposing the negatives hopefully will limit the evilness. Although, I don't really like CNN that much anyways...