Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Faking it

When agencies try to sell clients on social media strategies, we have to do something called "solution selling". It's a bit of a catch-22. To be able to prove your voodoo tactics are going to work, you have to show them that you've already successfully used them for someone else. In a media environment that changes daily, and in which being first means everything, this is kind of an issue.

So I guess that's how temptation got the better  of Jung von Matt — or so it seems.

According to Ads of The World's Ivan Raszl, this video case study by JVM, for mattress maker Lullaland, features blog mentions and Tweets that simply never happened:



For Ivan's part, he brings up the screencap of a post he supposedly made, but did not:


He then goes through the archives of every other blog referenced, and can't find those either. Even the Tweets are questionable.

If true, this is a pretty serious breach of social media karma. And odd, too, because JVM hardly need the publicity.

How would you feel if, as a client, someone tried to pull something like this on you. And how would you feel if you were misrepresented as a blogger?

Ivan says, on Facebook, "I don't mind as a blogger, but I do mind as a viewer."

I'm pretty pissed as both. Although as Dabitch on Adland points out, "This story after all, will ensure that everyone in the adblog world spends an afternoon talking about a shit spambot 'campaign'. Well played?"

4 comments:

  1. I actually watched it. It's hard to imagine how to spin this one, other than saying "the creator's family has asked for privacy during his time in rehab."

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  2. The CAPTCHA for my last comment as "materess" - maybe that's their new social media campaign. :)

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  3. There actually is a plan afoot to use CAPTCHA as advertising, David: http://www.adscaptcha.com/

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  4. The case study had holes in it before people figured out the content was fake.
    First thing's first: "...people twitter hash-tag Goodnight..."? No they don't, they tweet. Twitter is the noun, tweet is the verb. Second, I don't think people would actually lay in bed and play their Lullaland lullaby to rock them softly to sleep.

    Or maybe I'm just mad because I can't believe someone would actually go to such great lengths to fake a case study...

    -Kyla

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