If you don't know what viral marketing is, it's basically paying a marketing firm to do "undercover" work. Which basically means one of their employees pretends pretends to be part of the pack and goes into groups of people to sell a product or idea without them knowing. All major companies nowadays use this. Nintendo, Microsoft, Sony and even some third parties use this technique.
It's clever, although some people would find it deceiving. There is one major difference though that I'm noticing in gaming.
The japenese companies seem to be buying "positive" viral marketing, which means they're selling their products. Microsoft, on the other hand, is notorious for astroturfing in a negative way. Recently I'm noticing that Natal viral marketers are calling every slight criticism of Project Natal as "trolling", even going as far as being very nasty. Sometimes they even create a conversation using more than one account. This has been happening a lot lately, particularly in the last couple of weeks.
My impression is that since Microsoft is about to show Natal again, they're preparing the environment with viral marketing to stop all criticism. I think that's a negative way of going about it.
What do you think of viral marketing? Should it continue? Should it stop? Should it be more honest?
How about negative viral marketing, like smear campaigns against competitors. Particularly when these competitors don't fight back, is it fair? How should it continue or not continue?
