According to its website (I will not link to these folks, for reasons that will become obvious) Special Ops Media is:
…and interactive agency committed to providing cutting-edge creativity, superior client service, and industry leading return on investment.
“Cutting-edge creativity” apparently includes using what most of us call comment spam to spread the message for at least one of the company’s clients. Comment spam is pretty easy to create: Find a blog, choose any random post, and dump your spam (filled with links, of course) in as a comment. But there are some reasons why it’s a lousy strategy:
1. A lot of blogs that get spammed, like this, don’t have enough readers to make it likely anyone will see your spam.
2. Every time someone posts a comment at this blog, it gets emailed to me, so I know it’s there almost immediately.
3. When comment spam does sneak by the excellent filter in WordPress, I delete it. And I have the option of blacklisting the sender.
Mostly, it’s a lousy strategy because occasionally comment spam will result in a post like this, drawing attention to the underhanded methods being used by what otherwise appears to be a reputable company. That’s bad for the public image.
TAGS: SPECIAL OPS MEDIA, SPAM, PR
Thanks for the info about How not to do PR!
Keep up the great work on your blog. Best wishes WaltDe
Yeah — there is a very special hell for comment spammers. Fortunately this problem is not too difficult to combat, if you’re willing to moderate comments and close comments on older postings. I do that on Contentious.com, which gets slammed with comment spam.
What amazes me is that Corante doesn’t appear to do much to prevent comment spam. I wrote about this yesterday:
http://www.rightconversation.c.....ommen.html
Thanks,
- Amy Gahran
RightConversation.com
Contentious.com
IReporter.org
Editor, Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits
But then again, I might be a bit naive; look at the kind of spam Dan Gillmor is getting (that’s really a link to his blog, not to online casino games ;-))
It’s not about PR, it’s about Google Pagerank. Comments are usually added automatically by spiders or something, and their main goal, as far as I know, is not to even to be read by people, but to be indexed by search engine spiders. More links from blog comments to their site means a higher pagerank. And many blog engines don’t have WordPress’s Spam Karma or even anything similar to its built in spam filter. And the thing is: I think it pays off.