Mordax et al

I’ve known about Astro-turfing for a long, long time, but it’s rare to spot such an obvious example of it, in its natural habitat.

Astroturfing, if you didn’t know, is corporate marketing disguised as regular posts/accounts/discussions on the internet. Its accounts, owned by marketing firms, that exist solely for the purposes of marketing but hide it as if they were regular users. Companies LOVE to do this these days.

Here we can spot the most obvious corporate shill blog ever. Its almost a crash course in what not to do. First you have the absolutely generic username, which is the first tipoff. Its the kind of username only a spam account or twitterbot would use.

Then you have all the empty reblogs, with not added content. There are no fun little tags with comments about the blogger’s reaction to the post. There’s no attempt to add anything to the post. Everything reblogged is either on corporate message (DC universe) or a very popular post probably re blogged from the ‘recommended posts’.They layout is completely generic, as is the user icon, which doesn’t even have anything to do with the blog’s material. If this were an actual DC fan-blog it would have a DC related name and icon. Instead, the name and icon are as obscure as possible to make the account seem ‘generic’ as if it were a ‘random user.

The only original post is the one I have captured, the newest at the time, urging people to see Batman v Superman despite the ratings, and it sounds exactly like a corporate soundbite. 

Frankly the blog, and especially the post are as amazingly tone-deaf as all of DC’s marketing moves lately.

Don’t think that only DC does this though! plenty of blogs on tumblr are secretly marketing blogs– just most of them aren’t as completely incompetent as this.

(( @bookshop @copperbadge @themarysue @dailydot  just tagging a few people I thought might be interested in this ))