Shilling on forums

I'd like to get people's opinions on this thread from the Acoustic Guitar Forum (AGF).

I'm also posting this because it is a really great example of a lot of things from class.

Based on this thread alone, I dismissed the idea of purchasing a Blueberry Guitar without ever even having played one - definitely a negative impact. But there are also people in the thread who clearly had never heard of Blueberry and now view them as a purchase option - definitely positive.

The thread is long, so here is a blow-by-blow:

• "Blueberry Guitars" is a new company owned by Danny Fonfender trying to gain market share. Their point of differentiation is that their instruments all have elaborate traditional Balinese carvings.
• A lot of posters on the AGF are deeply knowledgeable. Kevin Gallagher, who starts eviscerating Blueberry on page 2, is a professional guitar builder, as are many other frequent posters. As compared to the average guitar consumer, AGF members care much more about tone and much less about aesthetics, so it should be obvious already that Blueberry's venue choice was a mistake.
  
• "stewart4328" and "Sammy_L_D" are clearly shills for Blueberry posing as regular forum members. My guess is they are from some rogue marketing firm who suckered Blueberry into hiring them to do a "new media campaign."
• On page 5, Fonfender himself steps in and writes a butt-hurt response, which just makes things worse. Note the swift reply by the moderator "cotten," and the ultimate locking of the thread by moderator "wthurman."
  
• Blueberry wanted free advertising, but instead ended up with an epic flame war.

Here's what I'd like people's opinion on:

1. Even though the thread was derailed, do you think stewart4328's post was ultimately good for Blueberry (i.e. increased sales)?
2. Is this kind of shilling (not disclosing your association with the company) ethically acceptable?
   

Even Horses Can't Escape Facebook

Fur was flying yesterday after Adelinde Cornelissen's elimination from the World Equestrian Game's dressage competition. Her horse, Parzival, had blood foaming from his mouth resulting in disqualification. The Chronicle of the Horse was at the competition and immediately tweeted the information and posted pictures on Facebook (http://bit.ly/cbPtet, http://bit.ly/bUF6Zb). This led to an onslaught of comments from fans for and against Adelinde as well as the posting of pictures of her using rolker in the warm-up ring (http://bit.ly/bgV0K9). Rolker is a riding technique where the horse is forced into an unnatural head set by applying extreme pressure to the bit; its use is banned by the FEI, which governs the WEG competitions. Once the training pictures were posted, the tone of the comments took an angry turn. Fans began to accuse the FEI stewards of not thoroughly examining the horse and overlooking obvious abuse. Considering the recent debacle with Sapphire’s elimination at the World Cup and the pictures posted of illegal training methods being used in the ring under the steward’s noses, it's no wonder fans were questioning their ability to govern properly. Without saying a word, Adelinde had launched a massive marketing campaign that was rapidly degrading her brand.

Even in the insulated horseback riding world, which has long shunned technology, social media is having a major impact. While professional riders don't have much time to actively manage their public image, with the speed at which information travels online, perhaps they should make time. Heavy weight riders like Anky Van Grunsven, who is frequently in the headlines for bad behavior, have product lines branded with their names; damage to their reputation can mean thousands of dollars in lost revenue and sponsorship. Social media has obvious relevance to top riders but local trainers and boarding facilities also need to get into the game. The horse world has a dedicated social networking site, Equestrian Life, that smaller businesses have finally begun to use as a platform to advertise their services. My former employer, sundanceequestrian.com, even has a blog on their web page that they publish to the barn Facebook site. Unfortunately the majority of the horse industry is still unaware of the impact social media marketing can have on their business. A few of the top barns in the US don’t even have websites. As our professor pointed out, it’s possible to have a social media marketing campaign for your business without even knowing it; hopefully the horse world will wake up and take advantage of these new marketing tools.

Social Media Etiquette

By now you guys should be starting to get your feet wet in the wonderful world of social media. You will soon all have a Twitter account, and I encourage you to explore some of the other tools we discussed in class. For those of you who are somewhat new to these sites, I think it is very useful to check out this post Tamar Weinberg put up on her blog on social media etiquette. It should give you a good idea of what is generally frowned upon in various social networks.

http://www.techipedia.com/2008/social-media-etiquette-handbook/

Let's get started with some YouTube videos

With the beginning of the quarter quickly approaching, I hope you are all settled in, well rested and ready for some very interesting discussions. I’ve decided to kick off this blog on the lighter side, with some recent YouTube videos, that you can check out when you have some time to kill.

First up is YouTube’s ‘Life in a Day’ project. If you haven’t seen it already, I recommend you check it out (http://www.youtube.com/lifeinaday). The purpose of this project was to try to capture what the world looks like from the perspective of everyday people around the world. So on July 24^th, people were asked to record a snippet of their life, and post it to YouTube. By the end of the day more than 80,000 videos from 197 different countries were submitted, and YouTube has complied and organized all of these videos in the ‘life in a day’ channel.

The second video is more on the odd side, but heavily related to social marketing. In the hope of going viral, Ikea created a video where they released 100 cats in one of their stores and filmed what happened. So far they have over 2 million views, so at least it is generating attention. Below is the commercial they produced from this project, and here is a link to a ‘behind the scenes’ look at the project (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCB7RqGS684). Let’s see where Ikea goes with this.

Finally, here is a political campaign video from Vermont that tries to ride the popularity of the Old Spice campaign. The video is pretty amusing, though I’m not sure it would make me vote for him.