It's a bird, it's a plane...no, it's BS.

Boys, boys, boys when will you learn that sneaky behavior only makes you the butt of our blogging jokes? Did you actually think you could fool the community? There is a law--it stems from sincerity and share, put that in your boardroom--and there's a new Sheriff in town (psst: they safeguard us from your SPAM).

But hey, at least you're Internet famous now...this type of notoriety is a hard pill to swallow, eh?  The self-policing community, not Superman, is this girl's superhero :-).

From my pal David at Marketer's Studio: "This YouTube video documents Time Warner putting up “Superman Returns, The Movie” as a YouTube user, then having >7000 fans in a week. The “fans” are all accounts created the week beforehand. They’re stuffing the ballot box, as it were, to get more visibility for the Superman Returns movie. To me, this is spamming a Social Media community."

Well said my friend...and here's the illuminating 4-minute video:

Comments

[V-+a%S(p#E*rsT=`hE..]gra_Te[]

We lure creepy jerkbag corporations like Time Warner/AOL to the blogo/vlogosphere, where we can then attack and humiliate them.

I love to see this happen, their true colors showing.

I'm glad Jason Calacanis dumped Weblogsinc. on Time Warner/AOL for $25 million, then resigned a few days ago.

Jason, one of my favorite bloggers, doesn't need them, but they need him. Now they don't have him.

Expect to see a lot more corporations attempting to scam the blogosphere, YouTube, Digg, etc., then get debased and persecuted by us. This is our primary goal: to lure them in, then wig out on the chumps.

[V-+a%S(p#E*rsT=`hE..]gra_Te[]

I'm removing my Time Warner/AOL ad from my sidebar right now, and they can sue me if they want. I don't care. I'll rip their guts out.

[CK]

Why must they pollute our pristine plane? Oh right...to sell us junk that didn't do well at the box-office.

No wonder they label we marketers 'evil'. I do love our new set of Superheroes, these self-policing communities protect us--and they shine.

[Paul McEnany]

And, thus the beauty of the communities created around sites like youtube. They're somewhat self-correcting.

If there are too many brands, or any brand violating the social contract they entered into when they joined, the community backlashes, and begins to withdraw support, forcing the host to correct the problem to survive.

I've got a post coming about advertising in a finite space that seems rather apt. Essentially the premise is that for any medium, to get free content, an advertisee will pay a certain amount of time and a certain number of advertisers in order to view. The catch is that the advertisee also gets to choose those advertisers. It's another self correcting mechanism. Sure, you can make a shitty, boring, poorly targeted ad, but you will also be closing down an avenue of future conversation when the advertisee turns you off in favor of someone else.

It's not entirely a straight line from your post to there, but it's essentially the same aftermath. Advertisers in these communal spaces are forced to adhere to the standards of the space they're invading, or risk the consequences of ignorance.

Good stuff, and amazing how that guy seemed so damn interesting.

[V-+a%S(p#E*rsT=`hE..]gra_Te[]

People come together in a social space, and soon enough, or too soon, the dying and ignorant companies, in a last ditch effort to save themselves, try to milk the cow they think they see.

"People are blogging each other? How can we invade that space and turn a profit there? How can we jump in and do what we always do? How can we toot our worn out horns and get candy?"

Business As Usual is dead, yet the corpse keeps flinching, so we pop its lights out with crowdsourcing and clown-bolstering technics.

[Cam Beck]

Put this up against how the distributor (Fox?) is treating the TRUE and DEVOTED community that kept Serenity afloat, as you wrote about in an earlier post.

The underlying message here is, "If we can't control it, we don't want it," and I think that shows that they just don't get the sharing economy. That they're doing this with crappy movies shows how they hold their audience in complete disdain.

GREAT find.

[Lewis Green]

"Hey! Superman is Superman! He doesn't need to cheat." But Time Warner is simply human, and we humans struggle to resist temptation. As for Time Warner's efforts on YouTube, like so many other things, they aren't very good at cheating either.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

[David Reich]

I'm sure many companies are trying to use YouTube, MySpace, blogs etc to surreptitously get out a marketing message. Time Warner just did it in a sloppy way so that they got "outed."

I don't know if YouTube has a password system like you have when you post a comment on a blog, but something like that might cut down on spammers. Otherwise, it's part of the price we all pay to have access to a free service, just like having to suffer through commercials on free TV.

[gianandrea facchini]

bloggers unite hit again! great job and great post.