Just An Online Minute... Fakes Don't Make It In Blogosphere
The site, alliwantforxmasisapsp, went live at the end of last month. But the blog was so obviously phony that readers immediately voiced suspicions.
In retrospect, the giveaways were laughable. The marketing agency that created the blog, Zipatoni, first registered the domain name under its own name. Didn't they know this information was easily discoverable?
What's more, the content was clearly not consumer-generated. One post dated Nov. 22 read, "stick this ad in your girl's vogue cosmo people who live real simple or your dad's national maxim geographic sports for men. whoever, they'll get the point."
The ad accompanying that post showed a downloadable picture of a PSP sandwiched between copy reading, "This is not an ad," and "It's a reminder that... someone close to you wants a PSP for Xmas."
Since the effort was neither clever nor funny or in any way edgy, it's hard to imagine that many real bloggers would encourage their readers to print and hide the post in other people's magazines.
Plenty of people agreed, deeming the effort an insult to their intelligence. The blog's comments are now shuttered, but irate consumers aren't easily silenced.
One enterprising YouTube user, "Babylonian," created and uploaded a 50-second video montage of the blog's pages. "This is a video response chronicling all the obvious evidence against alliwantforxmasisapsp.com," Babylonian wrote. The clip, prefaced with the caption, "Sony's failed attempt at viral marketing," ends with the commentary, "Sorry, Sony. We're not that stupid."
Of course, Sony is only the latest company to be caught creating a phony blog, joining Wal-Mart and McDonald's, to name two well-publicized examples. Chances are other big brands have fake blogs of their own out there, just waiting to be exposed.
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