An entertaining debate has taken place on TechCrunch in the last few days following a guest post by viral video marketer Dan Ackerman Greenberg. Dan’s post, “The Secret Strategies Behind Many “Viral” Videos”, scoffed at the idea of naturally viral videos, and claimed that “These days, achieving true virality takes serious creativity, some luck, and a lot of hard work”.
However, some of the hard working tactics Dan described included paying bloggers to post, orchestrating debates in forums and on YouTube with multiple logins, and using email lists to send out links. Which got not only readers up in arms, but TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington himself who commented on Dan’s post: “I will post a longer response to this later, but frankly I’m disgusted.”
Michael allowed Dan back to respond to some of the 400 comments but it seems to have been a good exercise for all involved, demonstrating the extent to which the blogosphere values transparency.
Thanks for picking this up, i’d missed the story. Of course they’re not the only consultancy employing these “secrets” but you can’t help but feel bad for the guy; he thought he could be open about it and *now* his integrity’s being questioned
His company is certainly not the only agency working like this.
Marketing agencies need to decide from the outset their policies on being in the UGS environment and then educate clients on the benefits of playing by the rules. Online activity needs to be approached like any marketing campaign, a sustained long-term approach gets results.
Shooting for the quick buck just doesn’t seem worth it when you read stories like these and any client caught in the negative fallout will find out the hard way – you get what you pay for!
[...] is a great example of a ‘viral’ which as we’ve mentioned before, is a word that gets thrown about too easily! But it’s a charming, high-quality, witty piece [...]