Great post from the Church of the Customer blog about how the US National Pork Board shoved out a cease and desist letter to a breast-feeding activist who was parodying their ad campaign “Pork: the other white meat” with “the other white milk”.
Unfortunately Jennifer Laycock (the activist) has a strong social network who she encouraged to spread the bad word about the Pork Board’s heavy-handed tactics. It worked and the CEO apologised and relented.
A little while ago it was easy for big companies to show their might whether they were right or wrong and let the lawyers fire off standard letters to scare consumers. The shift now is that size no longer matters, distribution does. Would you change the way you talk to your consumers/listeners/readers/viewers if when they talked back they were much louder than you?
A new company’s popped up - Super Expansion - who apparently are “dedicated to finding the most aggressive, underground ways of promotion via online guerilla marketing”, hat tip to Entrepreneur’s Journey. They seem to have three businesses. The first is using MySpace bulletins to promote sites, the second is an automated ad-poster for Craigslist and the third is a service to seed ads on bulletin boards.
The MySpace one is probably the most interesting, they say:
We’ve created a network of account holders who, between them have thousands and millions of friends. By having these multiple account holders place your bulletin it looks like genuine, organic buzz. Whether you’re a brand looking to drive traffic to a jump site, or a band establishing a following, our bulletin program is a way to spread authentic buzz to a large group of people.
I’ve suddenly realised why random normal people ask to be my MySpace friend. It’s so I can be collated and sold as a bulk campaign. I’m sure that is does alright for awareness, but only in the same way I could name you drugs like Xanax, Cialis, Voixx and Ambien. In other words I know they exist but have no need for them and certainly wouldn’t buy them a bulletin from someone who I don’t really know.
The interesting thing about MySpace is that there are some people who have very high levels of trust with their friends. They tend to be ’supernodes’, people who have well-regarded links with lots of individuals that cross friendship groups and individual locations. It would be a much more sensible and valuable business for ‘Super Expansion’
if they worked with their clients to explain their products and services to supernodes and get them to buy in to (and promote) these products. But I guess that would be a bit harder than sending our a load of spam bulletins, wouldn’t it?
