Is the OHHA Paying a Company to Spam?
Logging in to Harnesslink’s YouTube account today I noticed a couple of people had left a comment on the main channel page. Strange, because the channel has been around for nearly a year and has only had one comment up until this week.
Even more strange is that both the comments relate to the new Ontario Harness Horse Association sponsored website Get Sulky, and both appeared within 1 day of each other.
Some Background
The Get Sulky website was built and ‘promoted’ by a company called ‘Launch! Brand Marketing’, who profess to be the “experts in promotional marketing”. According to Kelly Spencer from Grand River Raceway the website’s designed to “appeal to male leaders ages 18-34” and is “being driven virally by a team of Viral Marketing Professionals at Launch! (the agency working on behalf of the Standardbred Revenue Allocation Committee).”
(Read more about the project here.)
After a bit of digging I found hundreds and hundreds of comments all over YouTube basically spamming this Get Sulky website.
Could this be the Viral Marketing Professionals at work?
Here are a few of the comments I found promoting Get Sulky on YouTube:
From a user named whitestormj on this page
English please…..Google Get Sulky to get your fact straight..until than ur out of it.
From a user named jergrow on this page
BUDDY! You are SOO missing the point, google get sulky
From a user named franride on this page
BUDDY! You are SOO missing the point, google get sulky
From a user named Annibaby85 on this page
ahaha harness lovers check out get sulky!
From a user named jmars899 on this page
interesting indeed. Sulky is the way to go get google get sulky
Often the comment related to the video it was on, as in this one “haha Souljah Boy’s New Dance- Get Sulky!! Google that”. This means there are real people making these comments.
Using Google, I found over 500 comments spamming YouTube, and a few more spamming various websites, blogs and forums.
The accounts that made these comments are all from Canada, were all registered in May 2008, and most have subscribed to all the Don and Ron videos - which it looks like Launch! Brand Marketing produced.
Those accounts are also leaving comments on the Don and Ron videos themselves, to make them appear to be popular. From what I can tell, nearly all of the comments on the Don and Ron videos have been made by accounts that are set up to spam YouTube.
It looks to me like there is a concerted effort to spam YouTube and other online websites. If this is part of the “2 years of work by the Standardbred Revenue Allocation (SRA) Marketing Committee,” then it looks like their money wasn’t put towards the best use.
Here’s a comment left by somebody who was spammed by one of these accounts:
Hey Spam Whore,
Just because you’re too stupid to write anything intelligent, and have no friends in real life, don’t annoy others with your spam. I have deleted your stupid message within 5 mins, reported you to administrators and blocked you MORON.GET A LIFE, PATHETIC LOSER.
On the Get Sulky website, they allow users to comment on some videos they have uploaded. I noticed some of the names that are spamming YouTube happen to be the same as those also leaving seemingly legitimate comments over on Get Sulky. This is most likely a badly implemented effort to make the website look busier and more popular than it actually is.
Side note
Does anybody get these videos?
Update
Before publishing I send this post to John Walzak, COO of OHHA. He was aware of the commenting campaign and replied with Launch! Brand Marketing’s response:
Alas, if only it were true that good marketing “just happened” spontaneously. If only people could find out about a product magically without ever having to see, read or listen to someone talk about the product’s positive attributes. Everyone would automatically “just know” and then buy it/do it/wear it/own it. Shazaam!
But that’s not reality. In fact, people “don’t just know,” - they have to find out about it somehow, and in the online marketing world it is an accepted industry practice to seed a “viral marketing campaign” with a few paid bloggers. This is done to achieve critical mass as quickly as possible. In the blogosphere, people are open about expressing their opinions on what they like and don’t like – marketers simply kick start the process with a few paid blog posts (and we don’t make it a secret.) We aren’t out to fool anyone.
The initial GetSulky.com blogs are designed to promote the beautiful sport of harness racing. As respectable marketers we abhor spam (the unsolicited sending of emails), all our work is permission-based. It is our job to get things going for our clients – but where it goes is then up to the blogosphere to decide. So what you are calling spam is in fact an opportunity for people to freely express their opinion.
Reading the above and John Walzaks response, I got the impression that they believe it’s ok to spam other websites and mislead people, as long as your not sending out unsolicited emails. (Definition of social media spam.)
Do you think this reflects positively on the harness racing industry? Is this the kind of image of racing we want to portray to young people, that of manipulators and spammers?
