Cheating on YouTube
November 21, 2006 by Howard Greenstein
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.
As an organization that is supposed to be discussing the Ethics, among other things, around Social Media, I thought I’d throw this out. Watch the 4 minute video, then Discuss.
That’s sad, and just another item on a long list of corporate screw-ups in the social media realm.
And I think this guy’s video is great. It’s a little dull, and he could have used a light behind the camera, but it’s great. It shows the raw, sincere power of a simple digital video.
This didn’t edit out his couple of stutters. He didn’t reshoot after his wife/girlfriend/sister/mom (probably mom
yelled in the background. He just did his thing and expressed his frustration with the sheer lame-itude of the Superman pushers.
Bravo.
Good find Howard. This is so important to call out - so many people are trying to ‘game the system’ as they did with Google Pagerank and other search engines. The difference is that the way they gamed the search engines was largely invisible, or at least not easily identified as injurious to the public good. In speaking with some search engine marketeres last week at the Search Insider Summit, I was a bit dismayed with a few of the tactics they employ and how they might use this same philosophy to approach social media.
Clearly, Time Warner has done this with Superman - and in fact has hurt their corporate brand as well as the image of the man of steel (or should I say man of ’steal’ as in stealing the top spots on YouTube). This is not acceptable and we can not stand for it.
Another interesting comment I heard at the search event was how companies use SEO to de-emphasize those who have complaints about a company or its products. Deliberately promoting other content to overtake the first page of search results and push those with complaints or negative opinions to the bottom of the search results. Rather than trying to listen to the complaints and improve the product, or correct the problems with customer service, they want to silence the critics.
This too, will not stand.
It reminds me of the announcement earlier this year regarding BMW.de getting removed from Google search results for the use of “blackhat SEO” tactics. A major corporate name tries to engage in “not-so-ethical” practices to gain some form of market share or SEO positioning.
In addition to more acknowledgement and awareness of best practices related to social media contribution, the communities themselves may need to incorporate filters in their systems (similar to improvements in search algorithms) designed to catch and (hopefully) prevent these types of things. If there is a possibility to leverage a system (correctly or incorrectly) for the opportunity of financial gain, the unfortunate conclusion is that it attracts a lot of interested parties, not just the corporations or SEO’s.
I have a question about corporate resort to black hat tactics - perhaps this is the place to ask it. I have a friend who is a corporate critic, and she was not only pushed off the front page of search results - she was pushed back a few pages. In trying to figure this out, she discovered her link was being used on splogs. Now we’re both wondering if it’s a current corporate tactic to provide links of *opponents* to spammers in the hope they will be penalized. If we suspect this, what’s the best way to research and hopefully expose the culprit?
By the way - where’s the best place to report social media “cheating”? Right before Black Friday, I was on Digg, and I saw a Wal-Mart post about their Black Friday sale get 700 votes instantaneously. They also downrated anyone who tried to point out the vote inflation. I also found supporting splogs. I tried to report this to WOMMA and left comments on several blogs that had expressed recent interest in Edelman/Wal-Mart affairs. However, no one seems interested.
Gadfly:
Excellent points, both.
Where, exactly, can one “report” abuse of social networks?
Social Media Club has one of our core values a commitment to divining what the proper ethics are in social networks.
Whether we can be a clearinghouse or an ombudsman for such issues is another question that I’ll bring up with the team. Thank you.
Gadfly: there are some competitive analysis tools that may be able to assist you with this. If I am reading your comments correctly I’ve seen similar types of “googlebombing” to others as well and while there may be difficulty in getting the links removed, there may be ways to combat the issue.
There’s a lot of chatter about how Digg can be gamed in recent months, and it would seem that YouTube and others face similar issues, especially as they gain popularity and users. I would first think that these entities need to take ownership of the problem, less they themselves lose users and fail.
A first step would be a reporting system on known/suspect spam offenders. The nest step is in data analysis to recognize patterns in spam tactics. Google does this today and has been doing this for a while. There’s a reason Google is still the most popular search engine, and its not because they’re marketing team was so successful.
Die clone Script gibt es aber sie halten doch nicht so lange wie man denkt! Google löscht sie doch eh aus den Index
thx
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