Verily I say unto thee, that Jerry McBride spake thusly:
> Borked Pseudo Mailed wrote:
>> Bear in mind that Microsoft DOES hire people to do these sorts of
>> stunts. It has agencies like Edelman and W-E to do its Web
>> marketing and smear campaigns are well documented (let me know if
>> you want to see an accumulation of these).
>>
>
> Please do.
This kind of "marketing" activity has many names, including Buzz; Viral;
Stealth; Word-of-Mouth; Conversational; Guerilla and Influencer, but the
end result is the same - deception. It's that deception which transforms
this activity from mere "advertising" to profoundly unethical behaviour,
which in many cases may actually be illegal (Sec. 5 of the Federal Trade
Commission Act, that prohibits "unfair or deceptive acts or practices").
Microsoft contracts these Marketing/PR firms to provide so-called Street
Teams of shills to infiltrate forums and newsgroups to spread "Buzz" for
their products, and also discredit the competition with FUD. Just Google
for any of the above terms, and you'll find pages and pages of companies
that provide such "services", most of which quite openly and unashamedly
describe their "Paid-to-Post" and other Stealth Marketing techniques.
--
K.
http://slated.org
.----
| "At the time, I thought C was the most elegant language and Java
| the most practical one. That point of view lasted for maybe two
| weeks after initial exposure to Lisp." ~ Constantine Vetoshev
`----
Fedora release 8 (Werewolf) on sky, running kernel 2.6.25.11-60.fc8
13:43:26 up 56 days, 21:26, 4 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
|
|
