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Stanford Spammer On TechCrunch…?

It is still not quite clear to me whether the recent TechCrunch article “The Secret Strategies Behind Many “Viral” Videos” is some “clever” publicity stunt (as some comments suggest), or if indeed the author means and does what he claims to do.

It is an interesting article, so read it and make up your own mind about that one until Michael Arrington from TechCrunch will post his views - should be interesting because he writes in comment no.3 “I will post a longer response to this later, but frankly I’m disgusted by this.” and in comment no. 5 “I think it would have been better to have published this anonymously, and certainly without the links to Dan’s business.”

So for now I assume that this is not a fake or “clever” marketing campaign and that Dan Ackerman Greenberg, the author of the article (”co-founder of viral video marketing company The Comotion Group and lead TA for the Stanford Facebook Class. Dan will graduate from the Stanford Management Science & Engineering Masters program in June.”) is really the social network spammer he proudly claims to be.

To be fair: of course individuals as well as companies have tried to game video sites in the past. The techniques the author describes in the TechCrunch article are not really new, some of his tips like “Title Optimization” would even make sense - if only he would not suggest that lying, cheating and faking is a good thing as long as you get many views for your videos…

Highlights From A Viral Marketing Lowlife…?

From Dan Ackerman Greenberg’s article:

“Blogs: We reach out to individuals who run relevant blogs and actually pay them to post our embedded videos.”

“Forums: We start new threads and embed our videos. Sometimes, this means kickstarting the conversations by setting up multiple accounts on each forum and posting back and forth between a few different users.”

“Every power user on YouTube has a number of different accounts. So do we. A great way to maximize the number of people who watch our videos is to create some sort of controversy in the comments section below the video.”

“Also, we aren’t afraid to delete comments – if someone is saying our video (or your startup) sucks, we just delete their comment. We can’t let one user’s negativity taint everyone else’s opinions.”

And he concludes:

“The Wild West days of Lonely Girl and Ask A Ninja are over. You simply can’t expect to post great videos on YouTube and have them go viral on their own, even if you think you have the best videos ever.“

This is of course totally arrogant and so narrow minded - and not true (watch the brilliant Chocolate Rain - 11 Million views so far). If Dan Ackerman Greenberg is for real I wonder what they teach their students at Stanford - it seems that business ethics is either not part of the curriculum or that Mr. Greenberg missed a couple of those classes…?!

Those Who Defend Spamming…

Maybe even more interesting - and shocking to me - are some of the comments made on TechCrunch and some of the other blog posts discussing this/what appears to be a social network’s spammer article. If it now all was to turn out to be a “clever” publicity stunt there will be some bloggers who’ll have quite a bit of explaining to do. But this would also be an interesting scenario - a bit like in “The Wave” by Morton Rhue.

Also interesting: as the Times Online reported back in February “Fake bloggers soon to be ‘named and shamed’” (Shlashdot discussion) some of the practices that Dan Ackerman Greenberg seems to promote could be illegal in the UK from December 31 2007 onwards…

Of course laws and regulations can not be the only answer to social network spamming. More important I think are entrepreneurs who feel strongly about ethics - and they exist: Richard Branson (Virgin Records/Airlines etc.) is one of them. He is of course not related to online video in any way, but a good example for an extremely successful businessman who feels strongly about ethics and the choices he makes.

I always keep coming back to TechCrunch because Michael Arrington is also someone who repeatedly brought up the issue of business ethics on his highly successful blog. So it remains to be seen whether this was all a publicity stunt to uncover the tactics of social network spammers or, as I tend to think, the Stanford spammer is real and so is his sad business…

viral, video, techcrunch, stanford, spammer, web 2.0, youtube, ethics