Is Nokia Guilty of Blog Comment Spamming?
Disclaimer: I’m not in any way suggesting that Nokia is responsible for the comments listed below. They may have been made by an outside agency, well meaning loyal customer or even a competitor trying to sabotage them. This post is intended to present a collection of blog comments referencing the Nokia URL and discuss the issues involved.
Today I was moderating some comments on my mobile phone blog and spotted 3 comments from the same IP address of 81.149.107.196. All the comments were under different names but two had the same email address.
All three of them were promoting http://shop.nokia.co.uk and using the sort of language that kids use when they leave comments on YouTube.
A spam blog comment in my opinion is where a company enters a comment for the sole purpose of promoting a commercial service. When a company does this multiple times without disclosure and without using real full names one might assume they are trying to falsely represent themselves as consumers – something that is illegal under the UK Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 laws.
To be clear – as a blog owner I’m quite happy for companies to leave the occasional comment linking to their own products as long as they are upfront and honest about it. What bloggers don’t like is companies leaving comments under false names pretending to be a consumer to disguise the fact they are promoting something. This is unethical and according to the OFT may be illegal too.
To see if any other blogs had received similar comments I did a quick search on Google and found the following. Click the images to see the live blog posts.
The Register
Mobile Jazz
Trusted Reviews
The Nokia Blog
Symbian Guru
Engadget
Gizmodo
Cnet
Boy Genius Report
Esato, Daphne joined and made 2 posts. Both about Nokia.
2nd post on Esato
Post category: Marketing Tweet
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.
Comments
Read the 25 comments below, or add your own!
I started thinking it might be someone just building up some kind of online profile for other purposes, but the MO with so many examples suggests a strong connection.
It is most likely a subcontractor working for Nokia, though marketing PR based not SEOs – I frequently catch otherwise legitimate SEO firms comment spamming on my blog for clients.
Nice one Patrick. I would say “busted”.
I’m not sure if these people are really trying to promote (spam) Nokia by Commenting on Blogs but what I do sense is, they are trying to get your trust by placing a link (brand) you know and then spam later with the links of their own.
When I say they are trying to get your trust, it means the IP from where they post comments. Few blogs auto-moderate comments, if these links slips through in (which means their IP being authorized to post comments) they later spam with tons of links and the blog moderates them due to the fact the IP is in authorized list.
If you do manual authorization, you know what you do… I really believe this is motive for the spammers of above.. but I might be wrong. I would never believe Nokia commissioned some spammy marketing agency to do this!
What’s your thought about this Patrick? Do you really think they are trying to promote Nokia or trying/eyeing your trust on them to spam the sites later?
You might be right Vinay but the IP I tracked on my site didn’t ever post again. Just 3 posts with Nokia links in them.
Hey. I’ve got a great new Nokia phone. You can buy one to from shop.nokia.com.
Sorry, I couldn’t resist….
Following a tip off it appears that the IP address above has a security certificate registered to https://exchange.ispysearch.com/ which presumably is the same people as http://www.ispysearch.com/
It will be interesting to see how Nokia respond to this Patrick as they are a very credible brand in the online PR and social media space, doing some great work.
It would be unfortunate if it is a case of bad old fashioned Astroturfing, even if it wasn’t planned or commissioned by them. If it a case of sabotage, then that’s really serious stuff….there is no place for this kind of strategy through social media. It’s counterproductive and unethical.
If it is an example of a PR, SEO, social media or full-service agency being a bit over zealous and heavy handed, creating SEO PR to either a) impress Nokia enough to get themselves on the agency roster of b) testing an SEO PR campaign then they have forgotten one of the golden rules of PR/social media engagement – TRANSPARENCY.
Call me an old cynic, but the correct use of punctuation in staceyM2’s post makes me think that this might not written by someone who naturally would say ‘pretty sweet’…. I’d love to be proved wrong though.
StaceyM2…..where are you? Can you clear this up for us?
Busted! Great work Patrick.
Yeah, looks like I Spy Search are the ones doing it. They mention Nokia here too:
http://www.ispysearch.com/team.html
You could be nice and contact them… or you could test how trading standards now enforce the changes in the consumer protection act which has quite harsh punishments for undisclosed word of mouth marketing in something that is quite obviously a business to consumer marketplace.
I’m sorry if I’m being brash, but this is a major corp. I’d out them like a Bulldog!
Good on you for doing so quite well so far.
Perhaps Nokia will open some high PR blog space for the little mom & pop shops
to post links.
Again, well done catching and sharing this!
All,
As posted earlier today this activity has been conducted by I Spy Search not by Nokia itself. As such we take full responsibility for these posts.
We fully accept that this particular tactic is not best practice through social media and we have put an immediate stop to this activity. We acknowledge that clearly we have not monitored internal activity to our usual standard. I spoke to Patrick Altoft this morning to acknoweledge this and to apologise for these posts.
We have informed all agency staff that this practice should not be engaged in and have put measures in place internally to safeguard against a repeat of this situation. We take fully responsibility for this as an agency and apologise for any misuse of these blogs.
Regards
Nick
Thanks Nick. I appreciate your honesty and don’t want the issue to drag on any further than it has.
I am on the other side of the fence and can offer a distinction between SPAM and blog commenting for marketing purposes.
1) Blog SPAM is generated using a bot that enables black-hat marketers to randomly rotate any one of 5-10 comments to millions of crawled blogs
2) Blog outreach/marketing/commenting is legitimized by relevancy. If a blogger asks for the best place to buy a Nokia R2D2 and the commenter responds with a personal reccomendation; it is not spam.
3) Marketing is not evil.
Daniel – blog commenting is 100% fine, blog commenting when you do it under a false name isn’t.
That’s where the line is.
Completely agree Patrick, however I do have to admire the response from Nick Jones (iSpy) in response to this.
It’s not about spamming, it’s about transparency. According to IABC code of ethics, among others, you MUST say who you are when you speak on behalf of a company.
Loving the disclaimer as well Patrick- better safe than sorry
Brilliant post Patrick. I think this is the first time I have seen a UK SEO Agency actual get caught out for Black Hat SEO Techniques and let’s be clear, this is for a major client.
I do have to admire Nick though for responding as opposed to avoiding the situation.
Agreed, transparency is key. It’s better to be honest and upfront as opposed to sneaky comments.
Anyone who owns a blog will normally know IP Addresses are tracked when comments are left, I think you done well Patrick to spot this and think more Blog owners should do the same.
“Daniel – blog commenting is 100% fine, blog commenting when you do it under a false name isn’t. That’s where the line is.”
This is a joke, right? Who uses their real names in comments except the 0.01 percent of the population that has decided to build an internet personality for business purposes … or who are idiot 14 year olds who don’t know yet that Google’s database (and tattoos) are forever.
(And no, Tonya isn’t my name … or sex. And my e-mail isn’t tonya@aol.com.)
I really need your help.
I have an assignment in reference to finding out information about Nokia in general. I need the best blog sites that are more likely to provide me with the following information; the type of “best practices†or productivity improvement projects that are are actually being installed (e.g ISO 9000); the estimated cost of such projects; and their completion times.
I need this information preferably tomorrow so immediate response are most definitely welcomed (needed in this case, being that I have to submit this on Monday) lol.
Please email me responses as soon as possible once again. Thanks in advance.
lol, that is amazing… at what extent can a big company like nokia go to their PR increased.
Your web page doesn’t correctly work in safari browser
In fairness the agency involved dealt with this issue quickly, highlighting that a) Nokia have a successful reputation monitoring system in place and b) the agency concerned followed issues management best practice and communicated their position quickly and at a senior level.
We are seeing more and more of this type of clumsy and reputationally dubious link building from search specialists and more recently from PRs. On our own site econsultancy.com and on other networks.
To try to ensure best practice in this area and to clarify the grey area between SEO and PR, we have created training workshops to provide skills and an understanding of the reputational issues for organisations when outsourcing this type of SEO led activity.
At the risk of Patrick editing this, but I hope that he feels that it is relevant, here is an overview of our SEO PR training courses.
More than likely they used an external SEO consultancy probably one based abroad who did the comment spamming. This is why people should make sure they are dealing with a reputable company and really get to know the techniques that will be employed on their behalf.
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