The music industry’s monopolistic attitude towards music and the issues surrounding file sharing and illegal downloads is really what shot themselves in the foot when the likes of Napster burst onto the scene.  What the music execs failed to comprehend was that the people they were shaking their fist at were their target market.  It would kind of be like Brett Tabke going nuts at most of the SEO industry because people weren’t following his guide to building a great website – only to find Webcon attendences and sponsors suffered as a result.

It was basically negative PR that hurt the music industry and fueled the P2P market for years to come – even to the point that the most law abiding citizen wouldn’t think twice about downloading content illegally.  The vast sums of money paid to stars and studios vs the percevied small amount of money “just one track” or “just one album” contributes – it’s a no-brainer for most of the unwashed masses out there.

But more than fueling the flames, the music industry’s attitude towards this emerging market really held them back.  I’m sure I’m not the only person that’s thought for years that the music companies should have got in at the ground level when P2P networks started taking off and indeed, it’s verging on being ridiculous that many really only looked to adopting file downloads as a way to market in recent years.

Geoff Taylor, head of music industry body, BPI, notes in a BBC article that the industry would have been in much better shape today if it had engaged Napster, rather than fighting it.

He added that the music industry in 1999, when Napster debuted, would have struggled to create that business model because of rights issues, a lack of good copyright protection software and an inability to track downloads so that royalties were properly awarded.

The music industry took on Napster, said Mr Taylor, because the file-sharing system had no interest in developing the elements needed to turn it into a business.

Part self righteous stubborness on the side of Naptser, partly on the side of the music industry.  Things really haven’t changed that much (although I bet Napster would be a much bigger player in the market now if they had played ball).  It wasn’t that long ago a Swedish court jailed the four men behind The Pirate Bay – the largest file sharing website on the web – a landmark case because the key issue was the facilitating of distribution of copyright material, rather than the actual distribution – a technicallity that file sharers hid behind for many years.

I kept up to date with the developments of the case and I couldn’t help feeling that both sides involved were just complete wankers.   TPB held their ground and fought their corner (mostly clutching at straws) – the music firms involved did the same.  They just had more money and better lawyers (OK, and some degree of “being in the right” on their side).  I just never really felt that bothered who won.  I get the copyright issue – I really do – I get pissed off when people copy my rubbish articles lol!  And I get the “moral outrage” at the vast sums of money accumulated by the music industry.  I just have this little voice at the back of my mind that’s saying everyone involved is full of crap.  Maybe it’s just me.

The Pirate Bay was sold off and today the new owners (Global Gaming Factory) have chatted with the BBC about their plans for the site, which essentially boil down to an authorised / legitimate file sharing system where people putting files online to share (with permission) are paid for doing so.  The idea is that the P2P network can be used by the music industry to launch new material and rather than ISPs facing mass downloads of new tracks, the burden is spread across the web.  I’m not particularly tech enough to understand if there is merit to this side of the idea, but I do like the sound of it.  A legitimate company, paying big money (£4+ million) for the site and looking to create an application for the site that is innovative and importantly pulls together different “factions” of the t’internet rather than drive a wedge between them.

It kinda feels like the days of the Wild West Web – the “everyone in it for themselves” mentality - are coming to a close, as the Internet world grows up and the first glimmer of civilization appears.  I think 2008 / 2009 have been pretty important in the lifespan of the Internet.  It might not have seemed like it at the time, but I do think we look back at the “late naughties” as the point where the Internet stopped being a frivilous, chaotic thing that a lot of people didn’t really get and started being a part of life, business, education and recreation. 

Scott

Sound familiar?

With Google rankings being such a fad these days, I think it is important for SEOs to seriously think about how they sell their service to clients.  I see so many cases of small businesses being ripped off by SEOs who didn’t fully disclose the expenses involved from the start of the campaign.  One case comes to mind where the client paid the up front fee, received some “SEO work” (I use the term loosely) and then was stung for monthly “link building” fees.  While this pricing structure is commonplace in the SEO industry, it can lead to issues if your sales force isn’t exactly as ethical as they should be!

Disclosure aside, I believe at the core of the reputation problem the SEO industry has, is the common arrogance many SEOs have (myself included at times).  Arrogance isn’t a bad thing if you have the skills to back it up, but it commonly causes issues for both clients and SEOs that might end up as serious problems at a later date.

IMO, it is inevitable that the ASA (or another industry body) will clamp down on how the Internet marketing industry promotes its services.  Just as we can’t measure the environmental impact of certain promotional claims a new product will make, there are also many areas of SEO with similar levels of uncertainty.  It’s not about tying the hands of SEOs – it’s about clearing up grey areas as best as possible to avoid problems down the line.

What do you think?

Scott

1.  Submit your site to directories.

If you aren’t already doing this as part of your link building efforts, then directory submissions can be a quick and easy way to help with your SEO efforts.  As long as you train your staff member on the basics (following submission guidelines, varying anchor text) there’s not really anything that can go wrong.

Lists of directories to submit to can be found easily enough via search engines.

2.  Participate on forums

Don’t do this simply for link building – that can lead to a world of pain.  Just look at the negative publicity Jobsite got after spamming one of my forums!

But good, solid community participation can be a great way to gain exposure for your business and brand name, while at the same time helping a little with link building from your signature links.

The aim should be to build the reputation of your company, and not simply to whore yourself for links.  Don’t drop links in posts unless they are relevant – try to offer advice to offers where appropriate and generally conduct yourself as if you were attending a networking event.

Added bonus – any forums that display thread view counts can be a great way to find new keywords to target!  Unusually large thread view counts can suggest that the thread is receiving a lot of traffic from somewhere (and not just the normal forum browsing traffic).

3.  Contribute to the company blog

Even the opinions and thoughts of a junior member of staff can make an interesting read and can also be a good part of their training.  You will need to carefully focus your staff member’s efforts and not simply let them loose on your site, but done well and it can add valuable content to your blog.

4.  Monitor social networking sites / forums / competitors

If there are active communities within your niche, then it is worthwhile keeping up to date on what’s going on in them.  It might give you ideas for new features for your site, or new markets to target.

While the forum participation is an active role within these areas, monitoring them is more of a passive activity – this is information gathering for internal use, rather than participation to improve the outward value of your company.

5.  Link request emails

I’m not a fan of this – it needs to be done right.  You really don’t want to spam other sites with automated link requests – that’s bad for your reputation.  However, sending a few select link requests can be considered a more public relations role – you build a relationship with the site, not just try to get something from them.

For example, getting in touch with local newspapers for a link can lead to conversations about your business and possibly some free exposure.  Treat your link requests in this manner.

6.  Competitor SEO analysis

Scrape their keywords (grab them from title tags) and do some keyword research on what you find.  Are you missing out on some juicy keyword markets?

Ditto for backlink counts – are you missing some nice link sources?  You can usually forget all the directories and crap like that, but finding news site links on the back of some exposure can give your marketing team some ideas that will eventually help with SEO.

7.  Social networking

Get your staff registering accounts with the likes of Linkedin and so on.  Set up a company Facebook account – perhaps advertise them via any forums you participate on.  Over time this will build up a nice portfolio of contacts.

8.  Rankings analysis

Do you have any rankings bringing in traffic that aren’t number 1?  Then perhaps these are worth attention – perhaps your on page optimisation isn’t quite geared towards that term – perhaps some deep links will do the trick!

9.  Find online marketing opportunities

Small sites offering banner advertising or larger sites offering newsletter sponsorship – these are great ways to expand your marketing activities.  A staff member with some time on their hands can easily compile a master list of sites with advertising options for you to look at later on.

———–

I might update this list at a later date (feel free to comment with any suggestions).  The key here is that all this stuff doesn’t require much experience to do well – it’s all about common sense (with a little guidance from more senior staff where appropriate).  It’s good for your staff to be getting involved as well – particularly junior staff.  Just doing this stuff will not only benefit the company, but will help new staff familiarise themselves with your industry more quickly than the usual training manuals, etc.

Yes, that’s only a few weeks when Gary Robinson, Marketing Manager for Jobsite.co.uk came here and said, “[we] by no means condone spamming”.  Yes, this is Jobsite.co.uk who on their own website say, “we don’t like spam and we don’t want to send you any either”.

I have to admit it though.  Having one agency spam one of my sites in January and then another agency spam via another site in February is a little unfortunate!   I’m fairly certain they aren’t part of a concerted effort to personally spam me!  If it was, it would go down in history as a piss poor marketing campaign seeing I’m self employed and don’t need the services of a job board lol!

Come on though guys – this is really lame!

It’s one thing to put a public gloss on what your company does – it’s another to outright state you aren’t spamming when you clearly are!

It wasn’t even particularly good spam.  I’ve had more sohpisticated spam from bots on the forums!  While the email was nicely written and not particularly offensive (the poor girl just emailed the wrong person), again it was making wild claims – “we regularly keep up to speed with your blog”.   Lol sorry, it’s just well optimised for a couple of random terms – there aren’t very many posts to keep up with!

I guess it wasn’t just dumb luck that BBPR emailed me – I am a SEO after all and if your PR agency uses Google SERPs to contact people, it was inevitable they would have found a site belonging to an SEO.  So even if Jobsite did brief BBPR not to contact my other site, the chances area they would have found one of my other sites.

So Jobsite – please, please stop spamming me!  Pretty please with a cherry on top. 

I’m still waiting for an apology from your SEO agency – you can add your PR agency to the list as well.   In the meantime, I’ll mull over just how many of my network of job, business, marketing and news sites I want to cross post this on.

Scott

But I thought this might be a useful little exercise that would serve as an example for anyone reading this – you might be able to take some ideas away that could help you in the future.

What you can take from this post:

• Some ideas on how to research competitors.
• Some tips on how not to manage your online public relations!

  

Follow the paper trail of SEO services

The first port of call is a Google search for the name / URL and some additional keyword qualifiers like “SEO”.  Here: “Jobsite.co.uk + SEO“.

Only a couple thousand results so naturally my first post on the subject is there up top.  A quick browse through the first few pages reveals some information:

• Listings on “SEO directories” (i.e. directories that really have no traffic value and are only used for SEO purposes)
• A Webmasterworld thread from back in 2001, which leads to
• The Wayback machine page from 2001 – very interesting – spammy doorway page!

This all took no more than 10 minutes to find out just now (and yeh, I should have probably done it a few weeks ago when the subject was active).

  

Lesson learned – don’t claim to be clean if you have been naughty in the past!

Let’s not tar Jobsite with the spam brush because they were spamming back in 2001.  If anything, some credit is due there for being at the forefront of emerging technologies which is a hell of a lot more than most companies say.

Also, for most companies, worrying about past attempts at spamming doesn’t really need to be a public relations issue – it was 6 years ago – no need to be concerned about that.

But, if you are going to come out with public statements like:

Both the agency and ourselves take an ethical approach to our search marketing and by no means condone spamming. We have been adamant about this throughout our 12 years in search.

…then perhaps you should be sure you haven’t actually spammed in the past.  It’s not an “ethical” issue – it’s just about sending out a clear message when it comes to PR.  Given this part of the statement from Jobsite is technically wrong, I think it leads to the conclusion that the rest of the statement could be questionable.

Not a big deal – the point is that there’s a lot of stuff that can be traced back through search engines so if you are going to try and solve a situation with a definitive statement, you should be reasonably sure that what you are saying can’t be contradicted.

  

On the trail of Jobsite’s SEO agency…

This will be a tougher nut to crack.  Chances are there is no obvious paper trail between Jobsite and the SEO agency they are using.  A lot of agencies will circulate press releases announcing relationships with new clients which is an easy way to make the connection, but it isn’t always the case as some clients don’t want this exposure.

Starting this search, there are a few assumptions that can be made:

• Chances are the agency is using the same or similar link building methods for their own site as for their clients.
• This may include the same directory submissions, article distribution, PR distribution or deep linking to key pages on the site.
• Chances are the agency is UK based.

While these are unlikely to give us a definitive answer, I can use these assumptions to narrow my search a little and see what I find.

I don’t really have time to do all this just now, but I’ll will be doing it at some point and will probably post back with some details.  I thought it was worth putting this down on a post for reference.

Researching websites can be a time consuming affair, but if you do take the time you can reap plenty of rewards and it is a very useful skill for an SEO to have.  For example, a clever use of search can help you:

• Research competitors (i.e. who’s linking to them, what marketing activities are they using)
• Out spammers (i.e. find past examples of spam)
• Locate problems with new client sites (i.e. fix spam)
• Identify problematic forum members (i.e. competitors trolling your boards)
• Research new acquisitions (i.e. if you are buying a new site – does it have a history of dirty competition?)

Still waiting on the apology from your SEO, Jobsite! 

“VirginMedia, (formerly ntl:telewest) are doubting the value of TV you love and have dropped Sky One, Sky News and Sky Travel.  We want VirginMedia to keep these channels on air so call them if you want you do too.”

Do these companies really think consumers are so bloody stupid?  I confess, I like VirginMedia’s response and I accept Sky’s response as being fairly acceptable in terms of corporate marketing, but come on!

Is there really any individual in the UK that seriously believes that Virgin just turned around and said, “nah we don’t need ya!”.  Nope.

Fair play to BSkyB for taking advantage of the situation – clearly two very savvy marketing teams are at war here and personally I find it pretty damn exciting to see who will prevail!

It will be interesting to see how far these companies would go to get the competitive edge over each other.  Sure the long term war for the cable market may not be won anytime soon, but this short term battle is far from over and certainly the victor will reap significant rewards.  I think this is worth spending some time researching!

More info here.

MG

On a side note, I think it’s pretty unethical advertising on Sky’s part – they are advertising a “switch over” from cable for only £15, but as we all know cable comes part and parcel with phone service and broadband and to get BT to install / set you up you are looking at a few hundred quid.

And for any gamers out there (or anyone who needs “always on”) broadband – BT sucks ass – they always disconnect you – got loads of mates who bitch about BT all the time.

Imagine my surprise (I thought I would start with that literary faus pax to set the tone of my sheer disgust) when I checked my logs this morning to find trickles of traffic for a multitude of video sharing sites such as Google Video, YouTube, MSN Soapbox, Yahoo Video and a range of lower tier sites.  Not having ever bothered my backside to ever create a video podcast, let alone bother trying to distribute it, I was somewhat intrigued to see where the…3…extra visits were coming from.

Unfortunately my morning cup of tea and cigarette weren’t as sweet today because I wasted several precious seconds of my life watching this stupid damn video.  And no, I’m not going to drop a link – it’s not worth the effort.

So starting from the beginning…

“Viral Friend Generator” appears to be yet another get rich quick scheme – it holds all the ill-thought out concepts of MLM – low quality production, outrageous claims (2 beta testers made over $200k!), and piss poor marketing techniques.  Ironically I suspect that by tomorrow, the viral “friend” generator will only have served to make enemies across the web.  As one YouTube commenter says, “die spammers, die”…

So 3 easy steps to increase your site traffic by 300%?  Let’s hear them:

Oh no no no, but first, let’s talk about the big mistake that 99% of marketers make….

“The 2 step process” – marketers use a 2 step sign up process to get visitors into their “marketing funnel” – we’re going to show you how… *video end*

Lol.

Anyone seen “There’s Something About Mary” – know the scene where Ben Stiller picks up the hitchhiker – yes, you know where I’m going…”7 minute abs!”.  Best.  Marketing. Gimmick. Evah!  You see 8 minute abs sitting there and next to it, 7 minute abs, which you gonna pick?

Lame, lame, lame crap viral friend generator my ass.

Referral spam is hardly revolutionary and throwing out a 2 minute presentation video that doesn’t actually say anything about your company or your product is stupid, dumb ass 80’s marketing (and frankly I think it only ever existed on TV and films because I really believe people aren’t that dumb as to fall for it).

I guess though, that the people behind the viral friend generator may call it a success.  After all, they’ve had exposure – their “brand” is being talked about – and no doubt the traffic to their site has increased (probably from 1 visitor a day to 3 – 300% increase – score!).  But that’s just like convincing yourself that the dog you just clipped with your car is probably OK and shouldn’t have been on the road anyway.

The old marketing adage – even bad publicity is good publicity – is perhaps an appropriate philosophy for the people behind the viral friend generator video.  Maybe someone should tell them that the adage is in fact an in-joke between marketers poking fun at idiots making a fool of themselves and their businesses and thinking they just did something good!

If you have something that warrants the effort you are putting into any marketing campaign, then surely it warrants doing it right?  Of course, where your product is lame in the first place (or you are in fact ripping people off – which I’m not in any way insinuating that the people behind viral friend generator are…), then the approach you might want to take is to grab as much eyeball time as you can for the lowest cost.

The one thing that really bugs me about the marketing world is the righteous approach to PR that people often take, even in the face of facts that suggest otherwise.  Read: Zipatoni after the Sony flog drama, or BMM after their ban from Google – established marketing professionals still cling to their guns to try and “save face” even when it’s glaringly obvious to everyone else that the best approach is to ‘fess up and admit they were wrong.

No folks, any publicity isn’t good publicity – in fact some publicity can be terminal for your business.  Manage your outward appearance as best you can, even if it means you are going to focus on being the best moron you can.  At least you are being honest and some people will respect that – coming out with trite sales pitches is just the lowest of the low.

Example – VirginMedia’s approach to the Virgin v BSkyB drama.  Their customers have lost out and that could have hurt them a lot.  But they have stuck to their guns and released a lot of honest (albeit sarcastic) responses to the situation.  Lose a few points because I don’t get to watch 24 on TV anymore, but gain a whole lot more in respect.

MG

No doubt the likes of Slashdot have already dealt with and got over the impact the SEO industry may or may not have on the operation of their site – having implemented procedures to deal with comment spam, crap submissions and the like, Slashdot is still doing fine.  So why are newer community driven big brand sites so anti-SEO?

There has been loads of drama surrounding Digg’s approach to the SEO industry, which has been driven largely by its user base that seems to be largely anti-SEO despite many top Diggers being SEOs themselves.  A notable example was Danny’s recent article being buried.

And now, MyBlogLog is getting in on the SEO witch hunt as well, after banning SEO Shoemoney for “publishing other people’s data on the site and urging readers to spoof them”.  OK, a fair argument, but ill-timed given that the SEO industry is still fist-shaking after the recent Digg drama.

Regardless of the specifics of each situation, what annoys me is that these large and popular sites are so inadequately handling the nature and reality of the web.  Both Digg and MyBlogLog offer a system where websites can promote themselves (submitting an article to Digg; making use of MBL widgets, profiles, etc), yet they seem to be handling the Internet Marketing industry so badly.

We’re not working in a new industry – SEO has been around for years now and it really unbelievably amateurish for such large brands to emerge offering services that are obviously attractive to the marketing industry, yet are unable to manage their online PR with any level of competence.

After burying Danny’s article, the Digg user base now finds itself having lost an insightful and informative article written by one of the industry’s most respected individuals.  How does this reflect on Digg?

Eric Marcoullier from MyBlogLog talks about “staying ahead of SEO-types who try to game the system” – no offence Eric, but you (well your company) created the system and it was blatantly obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together that this was the inevitable outcome on the back of the system’s success.  You created a marketing tool and now are complaining because marketing professionals are using it.

That’s like Google complaining because small businesses who self manage their PPC campaign don’t get as good an ROI or exposure as professionally managed campaigns.

Natural selection anyone?

Here’s an idea for Digg.  Realise that a community based on anonymous voting by a predominately tech geek crowd is an inherently flawed model that will reach a critical mass and then simply fail.  Either take your community and refocus it to serve niche markets which would make good use your users’ professional knowledge – or – adapt your system’s model to accommodate mass market use to avoid one social group dominating the results.

Otherwise your site is simply going to become (or stay as) a bitching ground for geeks.  We’re all adults here (mostly) – I think it’s time we moved on from the “majority rules and the rest gets binned” philosophy.

How about creating specialist areas for your users so their votes carry more or less weight where their own specialism and past voting history is appropriate?

Here’s an idea for MyBlogLog.  Profiles, stats, networking – regardless of how your corporate strategy defines your site, it is in fact a marketing tool for bloggers – within this market, SEO plays a very significant role.  To avoid this, ignore it, or even fight against it is an unnatural way to approach the issues you are facing.  Embrace the “problems” and reassess your strategy to incorporate new ways to turn them into positives.

Don’t like half naked chicks as avatars?  Then implement a review process. PokerStars.com does this for gamer avatars – you need to wait a few days for a review and you can only change your avatar 1 time after this, but there are no offensive images at the tables.  And I bet they got way more users than you do!

Don’t like comment spam?  It’s not 2002 – there are plenty of ways you can implement self moderation / community moderation features to kill it off.

Don’t like BS communities / profiles that don’t deserve to be there?  See above re: community moderation / review process.

——————————–

The main problem Digg and MBL have is that both sites are based on a LAZY business model.  They simply setup free and easy ways for people to contribute the content and have next to no internal review processes in place.  And now the sites have reached a critical mass of users that laziness has come back to bite them on the ass – and instead of doing something about it they are pointing fingers.

Change, innovate or be remembered in Friday Foo “what ever happened to” posts.

MG

I’ve never believed this old adage – I think it’s an arrogant dismissal by incompetent marketers who can’t manage their public relations properly.  Until recently it has never really been a big concern in the online world, but with an explosion of online communities over the past few years and the more recent increase in link baiting and brand protection services, perhaps online marketing professionals should be taking their branding more seriously?

If I could be bothered hunting down “how to” link bait articles, you’d see that most recommend undertaking some kind of negative efforts in order to spark off some link love to your site.  A war with another blogger.  A campaign against a well known brand.  Posting inaccurate information to tempt righteous bloggers to correct you.  Etc.  I’m sure most people who read this blog have already seen such articles, so no need to rehash them here.

Let’s consider some examples.

A while back, Brett Tabke banned all bots from WebmasterWorld.  While this wasn’t intended link bait as such (it had a technical justification), it did serve as link bait for WmW.  Did they get more links and coverage?  Yes.  Did they suffer any negative impact?  No.

They didn’t lose any traffic (that they didn’t want to get rid of).  They didn’t lose any users over the experiment.  The site and business hasn’t suffered from it – in fact, a lot of people had a little more respect for Brett & WmW at the time for having the balls to ditch all search traffic as an experiment.

While this isn’t a great example (it wasn’t an intentional link bait exercise), it does show how positive link bait can lead to positive results.

On the other hand, 2006 saw countless cases of companies screwing up their branding online by handling their online PR badly.  While not all of these are because of stupid link baiting, the end results are the same.  Perhaps the companies have received more exposure because of it, but what is the long term impact of this?

Zipatoni launched a splog for the Sony PSP and ended up getting slated by pretty much everyone over it.  What’s worse is that their response was grossly inadequate for the scale of their screw up and ended up compounding their failure.  Now search for “Zipatoni” and you find a great deal of negative results in the top 20.

Another example from 2006 is Big Mouth Media’s ban from Google.  While this is an embarrassing slip up in itself (which was rectified pretty quickly), their response to critics in the SEO community was arrogant and badly presented and made the whole affair much worse for them when Matt Cutts told the SEO world that they were in fact penalised from Google (and it wasn’t a mistake as BMM claimed).  Again, search for “Big Mouth Media” and you find negative results (this from a company that offers online brand protection services…).

In both these examples it was entirely within the control of the companies to manage these negative situations properly, but in both cases they failed to do so and it resulted in much more negative publicity. 

Was any publicity, good publicity in these cases?

Well, there is the SEO argument that says “yes”.  After all, they did get a lot of link love from various sources so perhaps it will help them in the long term in terms of improved rankings and traffic.  Notice I haven’t linked out to them just now – I’m not a link scrooge – I just do see any point in rewarding stupidity.  If I thought for a second that these were well planned link bait campaigns and not simple screw ups I’d probably have more respect for them!

However, what happens when clients carry out due diligence before they sign up for services provided by these marketing agencies?  While a Google search might not be the first thing they do, it is fairly likely it will be part of the research.   Will a client want the services of an agency that has caused an international uproar for a major brand client or an agency that have themselves been unable to assure the service they are offering?

The overall impact is debatable and obviously there are many other factors in the client decision making process, but the point is do we really want to throw some negative factors into the mix?

Link baiting is a short term exercise that can potentially have long term positive results, but I think that all too often people neglect to consider the long term negative results as well.

Credit to those who do link bait well – it can be a useful tool, just as SEO can be.  But as with SEO, many take the basic concepts and run with them without looking too deeply into the strategic implications they can have on their site, business or brand.

MG

The site has since been taken down – I originally thought it might be a server crash due to the traffic being sent from the blogsphere and social media sites such as Digg, etc, but it seems that the site is down permanently.

I did manage to find this article though that claims to have had a brief statement from both Sony and Zipatoni on the matter:

Next-Gen contacted SCEA PR boss David Karraker who answered a couple quick questions. When asked about the magnitude of this PR mishap, he replied, “Buzz and viral marketing is a common practice across the industry.  In this instance, SCEA hired an outside agency to create a humorous ‘underground’ PSP site for the holidays.  The tongue-in-cheek nature of the site didn’t come across as intended and we have since altered it.”

Sooo…we got it wrong.  Zipatoni didn’t create an insanely bad viral site – it was just meant to be tongue-in-cheek and we all just missed the point.

Next Gen go on…

When confronted about accusations that Sony underestimated gamers’ intelligence with the campaign, he stated, “Sony just released the most advanced console ever developed, so I doubt seriously that anyone would think we are underestimating our consumers’ intelligence.  This was simply a marketing idea that was poorly executed.”

Lol Sony – way to make a bad situation worse.  I think they may be overestimating their consumers’ loyatly if they seriously think that the power of their brand is going to blind people to crap like this and a very late market entry for the PS3.

Next Gen contacted Zipatoni about the flog and subsequent backlash, but they said they weren’t prepared to comment [at this time].  Probably a good idea!

MG