whispering

[ritualcoffee]

hey! has anyone had any experiences with "whispering" campaigns? Going into communities online and dropping names to create a buzz? It seems sketchy to me but I would love some input from you guys.

thanks

[evinrude]

Seen it done in a number of places. It's usually fairly apparent. Some new person shows up in the community, drops a url or two, and usually doesn't participate in much else in the community. If they see a post that they think the url drop could correspond to, or prove "helpful" they'll post.

More subtle approaches include joining the community, becoming an active member, and slowly start dropping urls. The object is to not look like spam, of course.

In communities that allow (or encourage) signatures, dropping the URL is as simple as posting one seemingly on-topic message in a high volume forum.

I dunno, just seems rather tacky to me. :) Seen it a lot in email listserves.

[ritualcoffee]

that is what i thought, can we say "shady!"

I have a feeling my target market would freak out.

[mivox]

Heh... read wmw's very own Terms of Service and see what the position is about promotional posts and URL dropping. :) That kinda sums it up for me...

Imagine if you are a member of an online community, and someone suddenly joins up and starts talking about some product or website constantly. They'll quickly become very tiresome, and probably get shooed out soon, if the community is worth belonging to. ;)

[Marcia]

>Seen it a lot in email listserves

When I worked chat we saw it a lot in chat rooms. It wasn't called whispering, it was called spamming ;)

Thing is, these companies hire people to do it and have no real control over how it's done. It ends up looking bad for the company that's being promoted if it's not done very tactfully, which it seldom is.

Now, there are legitimate ways of doing "discussion marketing" but it's not a high hype situation; it's a legit means if done the right way.

[ritualcoffee]

thanks for the backup - it will help me explain to upper management why this isn't something we should even consider.

[Mark_A]

"whispering - it will help me explain to upper management why this isn't something we should even consider. "

I would also be wary of writing it off... whispering could be confused with word of mouth which is simply normal human interaction.. if you provide something good people will lilkely tell their mates (note they tell their mates you dont...)

It could also be confused with targeting peer leaders which again is not some prat entering a news group and dropping a URL but persuading influential peer leaders to sponsor use or approve of your products in some visible way, it could be as innocuous as getting a reporter on a high volume radio show to review your website or promote an online competition for a goodie or other ..

Seen Nokia's new game?
Heard about the Harry Potter website or the Blair Witch project site .. of course if you sell something real boring .. as I have done then the opportunities may be less exciting :-( sad innit

[ritualcoffee]

well it all started becuase someone mentioned "whispering" - nobody knowe what it was, so "joy that is me" got to go dig around about it. Considering our market, the idea of dropping names and links would be really bad. I can understand the use of it in entertainment or politics - but the high tech community would recognize what it is pretty fast. Also, I checked out the TOS on a number of communities that our market hangs out in - and whispering is pretty much banned anyways.

[rpking]

This is a bit incidental, but only today I noticed an unusually large number of hits to a certain page on our site.

All the IPs seemed to be of Far Eastern origin, and came from a discussion on a message board on yahoo.co.jp.

I checked out the page through babelfish and discovered that somebody has posted a reply in which all they have done to answer somebody's question is drop a rather long and complicated URL to our site.

The result?... so far 350 visits from that source today!

Trouble is, even though we would like more Far East customers, the message board is in Japanese and that page is in English. Probably won't generate any sales but is an indication of how powerful an innocent link can be on a popular discussion.