Is CNN Messing With Blogs?

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A very weird story says that CNN is using guerilla marketing to boost its search engine rankings and destroy negative publicity by placing posts on various blogs.
It started with Nick Lewis at smartcampaigns Lewis said that so far, he’s found 13 separate instances of the spam within the comments of his posts that said negative things about CNN.
He also claims that CNN is posting press releases to comments sections on other blogs with negative posts about them.
He says he set up bait posts on his blog to see if they would be spammed by CNN and he claims they were.
Given that blog posts show up very fast and with high rankings in search engines, reputation management requires some guerilla tactics. It is hard to imagine though, that CNN would bother in the instances cited. Is this man nuts? Time will tell.

Comments

1. Nick Lewis says:

   April 28, 2005 at 5:48 pm

   Correction: I didn’t set up any bait posts. What I did was assume that marketing guerrillas would be using technorati or some other service to track their campaign. I first posted about this on the late at night on the 17th of april, and on the early morning of the 19th someone found the post through a technorati search for “CNN” “spam”, and then several other variations (bear in mind that practically no one was aware of this at the time). After that they never left another spam. But 13 had been left between the 17th and 18th.
   I also corrected a few of the Inquirer’s rather nasty distortions on this story at http://nicklewis.smartcampaigns.com/node/381

   Reply
2. Random Culture says:

   April 29, 2005 at 10:36 am

   CNN and Blog Spam?

   Nick Lewis, at SmartCampaigns.com, claims that CNN is engaging in some pretty shady blog spamming tactics to create buzz and affect search engine rankings. Nick saw some strange comment activity on his site and decided to see is there was

   Reply