Brand Central Station

Sounds like Minneapolis-based Fallon may be the big winner of the Microsoft business currently under review.  They were up against a very hot Crispin, Porter + Bogusky for the business.

AdRant’s Steve Hall provided his own, unique perspective on not just the possibility of a Fallon win but also on a CP+B loss.

Blogs, podcasts, discussion boards – they all constitute the part of the blogosphere we refer to as “social” media. That means these tools are often written by civilian, non-journalists and encourage feedback (usually in the form of posts) from readers and other like-minded individuals.

This recent post on the CNet site, however, shows one of the inherent weaknesses in the social media model. Spammers or, worse yet, well-intentioned but clueless bloggers can do more damage to the brand they are promoting no matter what their intent.

In this particular case, it’s the Microsoft Xbox 360 that is the vehicle for a reckless and less-than-successful bid to convince the video game blog “Joystiq” to cover the US introduction of their product. Here’s a summary of what happened:

Over the weekend, editors at the video game blog “Joystiq” reported that they received a series of crudely written e-mails. Each one, purporting to be from a different writer, alerted them to the fact that Xbox 360 kiosks–which play demos of games and show off the next-generation Microsoft console’s multimedia capabilities–at Wal-Mart stores would soon be featuring a playable demo of “Perfect Dark Zero.”For example, writes Joystiq editor Vladimir Cole, PootAmbassador penned a missive that went, “A sales associate at Wal-mart said they get a playable demo of Perfect dark 0. Has anyone else told you or am i the only one who knows?” 

To make matters worse, the phantom publicist continued to post comments on the Joystiq blog – usually using poor English and names that sound more like something that would come out of a late-night, fraternity party than anything else.

The offending flack didn’t seem to realize that the techno-geeks at Joystiq would be able to track all of the messages back to their originating IP address (which they did) or that action can be taken against them thanks to the CAN-SPAM law.

All of this work (if that’s what you want to call it), is lumped into the category of “buzz marketing” by the mainstream marketing and business press. This poses a potential problem for buzz marketers and other WOM providers. As long as there are buzz/word-of-mouth marketers intent on using “stealth” to trick journalists and consumers to pay attention, they’ll always face a skeptical public and an even more skeptical media.

Let’s face it, lying to the public is bad policy and a very bad practice. I hope the XBox 360 doesn’t suffer as a consequence of this action.