Hi Neville, good to have news from you ! Thanks for giving Seesmic a try as you could see we are still building it and will love your feedback. One simple way to increase video quality is more light Otherwise, it’s like twitter don’t think too much, don’t pay too much attention to quality, the purpose is to share thoughts quickly with your friends. Being your friend I prefer seeing you often in that quality than rarely in HD quality

See you soon !

Hi Neville: Thanks for this great videocast. As a business (or content) marketeer, I’m with you on the issue ‘is content king’. But then the rationale for my presence on the internet is communication and persuasion.

That’s not the goal of the practices you take issue with, where traffic and hype is the only goal. As legitimate marketeers, this hurts us in several ways. Not only does it become more difficult to communicate in a market place where everybody is shouting. It also risks turning the internet into a wasteland for marketing communications. At the very least, the internet has become a tarnished brand.

Fortunately, the internet is also a great self-regulating organism. We can ‘vote with our feet’, avoiding these practices, while speaking out against them. I’ll consider a bit more about the dos and dont’s of social media marketing.

Oh my good lord. If this chap really wants to see the power of viral, I would suggest he (and we) just have to wait until any ‘mainstream’ press picks up on this and starts calling some of his clients to ask them about the practices they are, by association, employing…

I mean, what do you think Nike, Oakley, 20th Century Fox, etc will do when they start receiving calls from the press about this?

Surely posting in this way singularly identifies you as someone who *doesn’t* get it?? I am aghast…

Does it really matter if they trick 100k people to view a video? Fake headlines and comment flame threads are just going to piss people off I would think. Though I guess he’s doing fairly well with it. And forum crowds seem pretty savvy. Moderators like nothing better than to bust spammers posting multiple profiles.

At the same time I find that seeding the comments can be effective when done honestly, using your real profile and thoughts.

Still it wouldn’t be viral if it weren’t a tad malignant…

-M

There is no question that astroturf (which is essentially the issue here) is bad news for marketers. I bet that a lot of the companies involved don’t want to know what their agencies or video producers did to make the campaign a success, but they are glad it worked.

It’s not “Manufacturing Consent”…but it’s not right, either. The thing is, so much of what is seen by a mass audience (say, 100,000 people) is related to SEO-without it, it is possible no one will see your content. What rational marketer would risk that? A transparent one, perhaps. A smart one, definitely.