How to kill fake blogging and “experiential marketing” on the Web
I talked to a buddy of mine the other day for the first time in a while. He’s one of the most creative people I know.
I asked him what he’s doing for a living. He said “experiential marketing.” I had to say “What’s that?” He said, “I’m paid by cell phone companies to go into bars with two hot chicks. We party with people and show them our new video cell phones. We drink with them, take photos, let them use the phone, then get them to give us their e-mail address and send them the pictures later. They end up having a great experience and associate it with that particular cell phone brand.”
He’s not supposed to tell the people he works for the company. He’s supposed to be just a cool dude with some hot chicks who happen to like this particular cell phone.
BLEAHHHHHHH!
This seems really sinister to me.
And as everyone knows, the same thing is done on the Internet, with splogs (fake blogs), and on useful, established forums, personal blogs, user reviews on sites like Epinions.com and Amazon, and on social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. People are paid to do this. They’re instructed to register as regular users, ingratiate themselves to the community, master the “lingo” and worm their way in under the guise of a non-commercial average Joe, and casually drop wording into their posts about the stuff they’re paid to shill.
Media sharing environments are full of this stuff. There are a lot of new videos on YouTube that look like they’re done in someone’s bedroom, yet have big money behind them. This is done to either sneak in mentions of a product, or launch a “hip & happening D.I.Y indie video channel” (think “lonely girl”, but even sneakier.)
I have no problem with commerce on the Internet. In fact, I love it. I order most of my stuff on the Web, and am loving that services like eMusic and iTunes store may one day help put major labels and studios out of business (if iTunes ever nixes the damn DRM.)
My problem is when it’s deceptive. And I know why companies do it: because people have stopped paying attention to conventional commercials. People mute the TV, or use TiVo. Or just ignore commercials. Or just look at the pretty colors and dig on the bland, loud, crappy fake rock music and forget the message.
But when I go look at a forum of user reviews, I want it to damn well be by actual users, not by subcontractors of subcontractors of the manufacturer posing as users.
HERE’S MY IDEA:
How about coming up with a free basic service that would utilize user tagging like social bookmarking sites (Digg, Del.icio.us) and like Akismet Spam use to identify abusers by I.P. address, habits, links they post, and other machine-learned indicators. Then integrate this with a database connected to a FireFox plug-in to make posts by those users (and sites entirely run by those companies) simply not show up. We could “keep the lights on” with revenue from licensing commercial and multi-user licenses.
I think a great name for this service would be “Stink Fight.” Because it would fight the stink on the Internet.
Any programmers or companies who want to do this, contact me. I’ll help do some of the other heavy lifting to get it off the ground.
– Michael W. Dean
(Idea somewhat inspired by that silly “De-Xeni” FireFox plugin.)
October 22nd, 2007 at 11:50 pm
Rather than delete the shill posts, why not highlight them with an ugly icon that says, “I’m a shill!”?
(Idea somewhat inspired by Pirated Phono Phunk after I changed the CSS.)
October 23rd, 2007 at 12:48 am
lol. We’ll make that an option.
I used to be on a cracker forum, now defunct.
The moderator got sick of script kitties on the site and added code that added a big red “AOL USER” tag on all AOL users’ posts.
October 24th, 2007 at 5:20 pm
Interesting idea, but I’m not sure that it could work. I love all forms of using the power of community, and some heuristics, to filter out antisocial content. Really.
First of all I’m not sure if it’s really that big a problem. Maybe I just don’t visit the places that you do or maybe it’s just the right time to start doing it so that it will be good enough when it will be needed.
Some thoughts and critics. First of all, logging the IP is worth almost nothing. I don’t know how those guys work but if I were them I would use a special application to make things faster. And then it would be really easy for all of them to go through an anonymizer proxy. Just a config setting from the HQ.
Then the links can be tricked too. Just use a redirection service like tinyurl.com. OK, it’s not really a showstopping problem because the service itself can also check if there is a redirect. Habits are a good thing to filter on because they are hard to cover or change. They are just hard to learn and process programatically. I’ve read an article about how the forum users are actually given away by their very own comments. Some university did some research project where they were quite successful in identifying the users by their comments. And of course the ‘other things’ part is hard too
But probably filtering the urls is good enough as a first iteration.
But then there is the problem of all such systems, you have to somehow filter or recognize the malicious users. If you build such a system then the guys who are affected will attack it with false data. This is usually the point I always stop thinking
but probably one can find a good enough solution to this (e.g. by using collaborative filtering or by calculating a trust metric for each user and the new ones always start with low trust).
The biggest problem I can see is that there is really now money in here. At least not the way you think there is. I don’t think that anybody would pay for anything like this. Why would anyone by a commercial license? Or what is a multiuser license? Have you ever seen any (successfull) community service that sold licenses?
The only way you can make money out of this is going the ‘web2′ way (hate this word
): get famous, get big, get bought out. Or instead of being bought you can use this site as a very strong marketing tool if you have a startup. That’s not a bad option BTW. I’m working on a few things that will hopefully bring money this way. OK, there is one more possible way: open the API and let big blog and forum providers use it. Try to get some money from them (or increase the chance of being bought out by one of them). The open API is a must anyway.
October 24th, 2007 at 5:23 pm
Great response. Thank you.
>Have you ever seen any (successful) community service that sold licenses?
Yes, Akismet spam. (anti-spam system). It blocks the spam on here quite well, and works with user tagging. Free for basic use, pay for commercial.
A problem with my idea is that selling it is that most people in a position to buy it probably LIKE the type of spamming I’m speaking of. They make money with infrastructure on ALL internet traffic, not just the good kind.
October 25th, 2007 at 5:20 pm
Yepp. Then your only hope is the ‘web2 way’, i.e. getting big and known enough because it seems to attract money. Like during the first internet boom :). Or you can use a service like this to market yourself (if you have an internet related business). Doing it in small doesn’t really cost too much. Say 40USD/month. Hosting is cheap. If you need to spend a lot on hosting that means that you gained a lot of users and then you won :). The main problem I see is that there may be not too much need for such a service (yet).