La CNN manipola la blogosfera?

Oggi si vede che è giorno di cospirazioni.

Sta girando rapidamente in Rete la teoria di Nick Lewis, secondo il quale la CNN avrebbe fattto uso di discutibili tecniche di marketing online (in sostanza spam nei commenti di alcuni blog), per trarre un vantaggio competitivo sui concorrenti:

"Last week, CNN appears to have 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, the spammers may have also left malicious keywords in 4 out of 13 of the targeted posts; its suspected the intent was to use google's keyword stuffing detectors to censor them. According to my sources, as of 4/27/05 CNN denies that they had anything to do with this. However, these findings are part of a much larger and more important story: CNN is gambling that they can use the blogosphere to gain a competitive advantage over their seemingly invincible arch rival Fox News[5]. If CNN’s viral marketing tactics succeeded [1], than make no mistake: Fox will retaliate; and they are likely to use the exact same methods. Allowing these guerrilla marketing campaigns to continue could result in our blogs -- leftwing and rightwing alike -- to become the battlefield in ratings war between two of the largest media giants. Some people feel that the comment spams were mere PR, and nothing to worry about.

Others, like myself, believe that we must do our best to avoid a world where we constantly have to second guess whether or not we are talking to PR spam, or a human being. In the end it’s up to each of us to decide how far we're willing to go to defend the blogosphere from marketing imposters. "

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Comments

[Scritto da: Giuseppe Mazza]

La solita, sottile, linea rossa che separa le "relazioni pubbliche in Rete" e lo spam. A volte ci si domanda se chi fa determinate campagne lo fa in buona fede pensando di appartenere al primo gruppo o si renda seriamente conto di essere sprofondato nel secondo.