04.17.11
Corporate brand spamming on YouTube or ‘Mobilizing your local lickspittles’
One things associated with GE’s tax cheat news is the corporate giants’ p.r. spamming of YouTube, via its various loyal employees.
Obviously, General Electric isn’t the only big US business to ever try this.
UPS, for example, spammed YouTube with videos of randomly chosen people doing karaoke versions of its “That’s Logistics” tune. Advertised as a fun contest, these started showing up right after al Qaeda sent printer bombs through UPS and FedEx offices in Yemen.
The attempt seemed designed to distract people from much more frequently seen news on the UPS-flown bomb packages.
Whatever their inspiration, they were unsuccessful, for easily explained reasons. They were horrible. Most of the people in them could neither sing nor hold the rhythm of the tune.
In a similar vein is GE’s current line dance contest.
It’s possible GE instigated this as a bit of innocent fun built off Alan Jackson’s “Good Time” tune.
The more cynical reading is the company knew the New York Times was readying a piece on its tax avoidance.
And knowing well what the impact of it would be on user-created media content, it mobilized one preemptive counter p.r. effort encouraging employees to make their own line dance commercials and upload them as (1), examples of all the corporate happiness associated with GE, and (2), as video spam that might soak up poorly crafted search terms on the company.
The only problem with the plan is that all of the employee line dance commercials really suck. And that wouldn’t matter if people didn’t have the tax avoidance news always in memory when viewing such things.
However, they do. And so everyone comes off as astro-turfing lickspittles — whether they are or not — dancing out their joy for a giant firm that, at least in the short term, is thought of as a primary example of corporate evil.
So only morons see anything good in them.
Don’t believe me?
Well, here are some great examples of miscellaneous white people dancing and keeping rhythm, often not quite adequately. All made for the sake of dry humping the legs of the bosses.
So contrived and icky, they’ll make you sweat.