Wikipedia and viral marketing
According to boingboing, some companies use wikipedia as a viral marketing tool. Boingboing describes a recent incident in which the BBC was caught doing this (although it was learned later that it wasn’t an official BBC ad). This insidious advertising is really dangerous as it calls into question the inherent validity of *all* information. This is not merely “garden-style vandalism” but the erosion of the public trust in information.
Some of the comments are truly horrendous, like this one:
I can’t say who I am, but I do work at a company that uses Wikipedia as a key part of online marketing strategies. That includes planting of viral information in entries, modification of entries to point to new promotional sites or “leaks” embedded in entries to test diffusion of information. Wikipedia is just a more transparent version of Myspace as far as some companies are concerned. We love it (evil laugh).
On the other side, I love it from an academia/sociological standpoint, and I don’t necessarily have a problem with it used as a viral marketing tool. After all, marketing is a form of information, with just a different end point in mind (consuming rather than learning).
Who said that, Goebels?
See Wikipedia’s page listing viral marketing history.
For more on corporate ethics and truth in advertising, see “Truth in advertising: breaking the spell of consumerism” (An Interview with Kalle Lasn by Derrick Jensen) and the Media Foundation.