One of my sites, nancies.org, is the unofficial Dave Matthews Band fan site. I started it in 1998, and I continue to operate it in no small part because I can play with a new technology and have a million visitors check it out in just a month. It’s a great testbed. But it’s a big site, and one of the more popular parts is the discussion board. Thankfully, we have a great team of volunteer moderators who run the boards, and I don’t have to spend much time on them. One of the recurring problems, though, is boardspam.
Every few months, we see somebody start a new account and immediate start a new thread that pitches a product. Sometimes it’s really lame, in the faux conversational tone and weak attempt to make it relevant to Dave Matthews Band. “Hey, have you all heard about that great new Jennifer Anniston movie coming out, The Good Girl? I bet it will be awesome. Do you think Dave Matthews will like it?” Checking the IP address reveals that it’s a major movie studio, which is totally pathetic. But sometimes it’s really lame, a straight-up advertising pitch. (“Click here to buy MP3s of your favorite artists!!!”) Our crack moderators erase those before more anybody sees them and then block the ISP that the traffic came from, so it’s really a big waste of the advertisers’ time.
But this takes the cake for the lamest boardspam ever:
Travel Promotions
By diane_torres on September.26.2005, 1:23 AMThis board might be interested in knowing about a great promotion I’m working on with Polident. If you buy five boxes of specially marked boxes of Polident, you receive a free companion airfare voucher. Check out www.polident.com for the details.
There’s so much about this that’s stupid that it’s hard to know where to start. Our own surveys show that 10% of the site users are 13-16, half are 17-21, a third are 22-30, and the remainder are under 40, so I’m really not sure who’s going to be buying Polident. But there’s not even an attempt to weave this into conversation, such as pointing out in a discussion about an upcoming concert that anybody looking to buy a plane ticket could benefit from their grandmother’s Polident. It’s just a whole new thread about Polident.
The company doing this is named, ironically, IntelliMinds. They brag about their work on discussion boards, about how they were hired to “conduct a smear campaign against the launch of a competing product,” and so they started a discussion on a one MSN discussion group and there were “close to ten messages at the end of the campaign.” Like, OMFG!
Their promotion of their “relationship marketing” explains the stupid e-mails that I receive on a weekly basis, some offering me “great prizes” in exchanging for running ads (I respond and ask how I will pay our bills with “prizes”), others making patently offensive offers. This is apparently what passes for “relationship marketing” or “buzz marketing” that advertisers are all aflutter over these days.
It’s transparent, and it’s lame. Nobody is being fooled. Well, other than IntelliMinds’ clients, presumably.
It makes sense to me… if they get even 1 half of one percent of of thier audience to respond. they’ve done thier job and will make thier clients money. The sheer volume of emails and board visitors is what they count on to meet thier margins. Its that one half of the one percent of people out there that buy products because of spam that force the rest of us to have to deal with it. They are the same people who keep the Home Shopping Network on all the time.
This is a really interesting discussion. Nancies are getting more and more rights every day. Our right to choose the best sock is also expanding. For example, check out the latest from http://sock.com
When ever I see how marketeers think and work, I always have Bill Hicks’ “Kill Yourself” routine pop up in my head.
Paul wins.
Is that polident deal still available?
I blame this phenomenon on Karl Rove, who made famous the whisper campaign. It is a shame that someone pays money to contribute only noise.
“Is that polident deal still available?”
Mark, you are in luck: http://www.polident.com/polifly.aspx
In fact, I think the real aim of the Polident spam message at Nancies was to have Waldo post about it at his personal blog — where all the real geezers hang out, of course.
Damn you, IntelliMinds! *shakes fist*
Haha. Thanks Jon!