Guerrilla Spam Goes National

My investigation into CNN's possible guerrilla marketing campaign went national today. In the past 6 hours, the story has been picked up by some little names like Wonkette, Metafilter, TechDirt, and Ad-Land. Since this story is spreading like wildfire, CNN's PR people will likely respond to my request for a denial or confirmation. My guess is that they will deny it.

Anyhow, while I wait for the verdict, I wanted to answer a question I recently received: "why does 10 spams mean anything when there are over 10 million weblogs?"

First of all, most of the blogs in that statistic are dead, and haven't been updated in years. As I mentioned earlier, these spams have targeted mid-to-high level bloggers. CNN appears to have ignored all but the top 1000 bloggers (I'm #876 last time I checked).

So we take 13/10,000,000 to 13/1000 and we have something that seems more significant. Now consider how many blogs have even discussed CNN at any length? According to Blog Pulse, CNN is mentioned on every day on average by 0.15% of the 10,032,827 blogs its identified. Read this list of the posts that Blog Pulse is using to create that statistic. I am yet to find a case in which CNN is being mentioned as anything besides a source of news.

If you asked me to guess, I'd say CNN has hit 13 out of 30 or so potential targets.

Also, as far as those malicious keywords are concerned, there is an interesting pattern I wanted to point out. Read these three posts that got spammed with the search terms. See if you can see the pattern:

1. CNN: Television's Great Orifice

As a recovering masochists, I know all to well the difficulty of suppressing the daily temptation of a nice, sizzling, self-inflicted chemical burn on the back of my thigh. In the past, I would control my masochistic ways by subjecting myself to 4 hours of Microsoft Minesweeper, while listening to marathons of Weather Report, the Rippingtons, and the “best of” Lawrence Welk. Thankfully, though, I have now come to realize there is a better way…

I’ve come to bring you the good news – and I am speaking directly too you fellow recovering masochist brothers and sisters – you too can suppress ‘the urge’. All you have to do is watch CNN for an hour. After the hour is up, you will ask yourself: “why am I doing this to myself?” And at that point, a chemical burn seems very disagreeable. Thank you CNN.

2. CNN's Nancy Grace is a putz.

Now she’s complaining about how it became a circus at the end. The irony, of course, is she doesn’t seem to realize she’s one of the acts participating in it. Man, I have to turn this off before I end up throwing a brick through the screen. Wow, she’s a major putz. Unbelievable.

3. Nancy Grace, CNN Headline News (my personal favorite, btw)

Does anyone else find Nancy Grace to be exceedingly annoying? And I don’t mean she’s annoying in that annoying-but-gotta-watch-type-annoying. No, I mean she’s utterly intolerable and unwatchable annoying.

See it? CNN would consider these posts "good buzz", if it weren't for one major problem: All of us encourage the readers not to watch CNN. As Joe Kelley put it, we all called it not "annoying", but "utterly intolerable and unwatchable annoying."