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Originally Posted by Cyclefrance
Take the point, but the law of returns suggests that, unless you have a forum running into thousands of active participants, the gain in return for effort is going to be far too low to make these forays by the spam merchants anywhere near being cost-effective.
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That's my point!! If you look at the actually number of "views" for any given forum post... on most forums it's well below 100. The number of click-throughs for your ad sham would be some number 100 or lower. But I think the reality is that it doesn't MATTER. If these marketting firms find a way to make their clients believe it's a huge return by presenting a hundred glossy excel charts... it doesn't matter if it actually makes money or not. If there's a client paying for it, it'll happen.
The problem with the true guerrilla posters is that their goal is to actually *infiltrate* the community. They don't come in with one-liners, they hang around and build a whole new identity. It may take them a month or two before they start shilling. Then what these blokes do is get 50-100 different forums where they're established... then *blam*, they hit them all with their prepared schtick.
Maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe those people are just as "real" as any other forum entity. I guess you could call it the new grass-roots campaigning method. The reason I don't like it is b/c it stinks of deceit. If I watch a commercial on TV and it proclaims, "Buy from mywebsite.com, fast, safe, secure shipping!", it's in one ear, out the other. But if someone I "trust" from a forum says the same thing, I might run out and buy from mywebsite.com, thinking it's a good product. But the reality could be that the site is trash, and they've just bought a new grass-roots ad campaign to bring back customers... and their product is still trash.
It's honestly going to get to the point where you can't trust *anyone* online. The only thing you'll be able to measure a product by are those aggregrate ratings that thousands of people vote on. Sucks.
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Originally Posted by Skunks
For example, I suspect that this is all a sham for the company marketing sham forum acts as a means of marketing.
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