viral marketing:

Marketing phenomenon that facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message.

Information

Viral marketing depends on a high pass-along rate from person to person. If a large percentage of recipients forward something to a large number of friends, the overall growth snowballs very quickly. If the pass-along numbers get too low, the overall growth quickly fizzles.

And now some bloggers are wondering if CNN is using the technique. It began when blogger Nick Lewis noticed an unusual comment under a post he put up about CNN.

Lewis initially suspected CNN of being behind the mysterious posts. Lewis thought CNN might be trying to jam blogs critical of the network by spamming them. The network, or a surrogate, was posting comments on blogs using a technique called “keyword stuffing,” Lewis claimed.

Keyword stuffing was a technique commonly used at the height of the dot-com boom to raise a site’s search-engine ranking. Stuff a site with common search terms, or keywords, and its ranking would rise. But search engines are wise to the technique. Now, when search sites detect blatant keyword stuffing, they often penalize the offending site by delisting it from their indexes, or removing it from the first 100 results.

Lewis said CNN may be keyword-stuffing sites critical of the network, causing the sites to be delisted by search engines.

“I don’t think their motivation is malevolent so much as experimental,” said Lewis. “My guess is that this was a pilot experiment, to see if it would fly.”

Lewis also suggested the network may be trying to create buzz with a viral-marketing campaign. Even if the buzz is negative, chattering on blogs may encourage viewers to watch the network’s new programming.

CNN has denied any involvement according to this Wired article.

Time Warner recently had computer tapes containing information on 6 hundred thousand employees go missing. The term being used is ‘lost in transition.’ If they were stolen and not merely misplaced and they are in the hands of someone who knows how to use them, it’s going to be even harder to tell who is targeting blogs and their comment sections. Bank America lost back up tapes containing information on 1.2 million federal employees. Ameritrade lost information on 2 hundred thousand customers ‘in transition.’