CNN Guerrillas in the Midst: A Viral Marketing Campaign Exposed | Nick Lewis: The Blog

CNN Guerrillas in the Midst: A Viral Marketing Campaign Exposed | Nick Lewis: The Blog: "This is CNN: the only major news network using your blog for an experimental guerrilla marketing campaign. [updated 4/28]

Last week, CNN appears to have attempted an unusual marketing campaign in the blogosphere. The campaign combined blackhat search engine optimization techniques, viral marketing tactics, and guerrilla comment spam. Unlike the majority of comment spam, this spam appears to only target blogs that have discussed CNN in the past 3 months. So far, 13 separate instances of the spam have been found. Most alarmingly, the spammers may have also left malicious keywords in 4 out of 13 of the targeted posts; its suspected the intent was to use google's keyword stuffing detectors to censor them. According to my sources, as of 4/27/05 CNN denies that they had anything to do with this. "