Viral anti-marketing

[firecat]

via liveavatar, for whatever good it will do:

Can't say it much better than The_Red_Shoes did, so I'll just repost it:


"Our goal for sponsored communities is to give businesses an opportunity to connect with their customers, give you special deals -- free stuff! -- and information. More and more companies are moving to blogging as a form of communication -- people are starting to understand that there's a huge potential for conversation, and they want to reach out and have that conversation somewhere where the tools are already built in, like LJ."

Jesus, that's disgusting.

Fortunately someone has already come up with the idea of viral anti-marketing:

How many pages of NO can 10 million users generate? Let's find out!

If you don't want more sponsored corporate anything in LiveJournal as seen here in this post, leave a simple NO in the comments to that post and then pass this on to your flist asking them to do the same.

Pass it on.

ETA: lysana pointed me at this clarification of the original post. I don't particularly want sponsored communities on LJ, but what I really object to is the notion of "sponsored features" that paid/permanent users would have to view ads to use. Note that I consider "this feature sponsored by foo" to be an ad, so I'm not entirely sure my objections are covered by the clarification, but it helps.

Comments

[sinboy.livejournal.com]

Looks like it's only for communities that are created as sponsored communities. If it means seeing ads in communities created by non-paying members just because they're non-paying, I'll consider leaving LJ.

[firecat]

The part that worries me is the part about there being additional "sponsored" features created that are available only if you are willing to see the "sponsorship". They helpfully point out that you don't have to use the features, but I want a blogging site where you have the option of paying for features and not seeing ads. I don't want a blogging site where you both have to pay AND have to look at ads if you want to use all the available features.

[windsea.livejournal.com]

Done.

Two things

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

1) Wasn't the shirt from which you got this icon on threadless.com? They're involved in the sockpuppet marketing campaign on scienceofsleep, which has been outed as one of the "sponsored communities".

2) On your size-friendly clothing links page, could you add the "overseas" keyword to Instant Attitudes? We do ship internationally, though it's not a seamless process -- the customer has to contact us to get an accurate shipping cost. But we've sent shirts to England, Australia, Sweden, and Germany at the very least. Thanks!

Re: Two things

[firecat]

Thanks for letting me know about threadless.com.

Change made!

Re: Two things

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

Further research on threadless.com reveals that they do a lot of sponsored design competitions based on movies, about which they are quite up-front. They may be innocent victims of someone else's incompetence in this case.

making_light has had some discussions about astroturfing lately. I tossed them a heads-up about this mess, and there's a specific discussion of it over there that you might want to read.

Re: Two things

[firecat]

From glancing at threadless.com's home page, it did look like they were being pretty upfront about the kind of association they have with the movie.

Thanks for the making_light pointer.