How to spot a viral marketing campaign - busting ThatGirlEmily

Good morning, class. Today's class is going to deal with how to spot a viral marketing campaign.

Our subject today is the blog from ThatGirlEmily. At first glance, this appears to be the blog of a woman who found out her husband has been cheating on her with her best friend. This woman scorned is going to spend the next two weeks making her hubby's life miserable by humiliating him in various ways, the first of which is by posting a billboard on the side of a building close to where he works in NYC. Here's the pic...



Now looking at that, you feel a little bad for Emily or Steve, depending on what's between your legs. If you read the posts made by Emily, you'll see that she's a very pissed off girl and that she vows to make the next 14 days rough on ol' Steve. Fair enough, but reading through the earlier posts makes me a little suspicious.

Here are some clues into how this is fake:

1.) She has no profile. Well, at least not one that has anything other than her gender is female, and an email that goes to a generic GMail account. Normally when people start blogging they err on the side of too much information that they assume no one will ever read.

2.) Comments are turned off. This is to avoid anyone calling her out as a fake and having it seen by everyone. Seems like if you just started a blog you'd want to know people's opinion on what you write, right?

3.) Normal people misspell stuff and don't use correct grammar. A lot. This sounds like text copied from some chick-lit novel. Don't all those start with a heroine who is blindly devoted to her hubby and then her world gets turned upside down, at which point she must gather all her strength and fight against her oppressors?

4.) Amazingly enough, there is a private investigator who has been hired by her brother (thereby proving all men aren't in fact evil), and this private investigator is immediately available to promptly get to work on her case.

5.) There is a post for every single day. Gee whiz, that's convenient. If you'll notice, my posts are generally gapped, because I don't have time to post every day. Also, I don't have something to say every day. Despite being a successful real estate agent, she has plenty of time to write incredibly lucid and well-thought-out posts.

6.) Coincidental that this is happening in New York, isn't it? 'Steve' works in NYC, while she runs her real estate biz in the suburbs in New Jersey. Isn't it incredible how shit like this never happens in Omaha, Nebraska? Funny how everything on TV seems to happen in New York or Los Angeles.

7.) She says she's going to unleash 14 days of hell on ol' Steve. Allow me to quote:

It’s going to be 14 days of vengeance. 14 days of unbridled revenge. 14 days of Steven looking over his back to see what’s coming next. Because I’ve decided that 14 days is precisely the amount of time I’ll still devote to that faithless and deceitful husband before I wash my hands of him completely. These 14 days will be a message to all of those nut-sacks who betray their family. Remember in Jamaica, on our honeymoon, when you said we were now a family? Me and you. Oh, you remember! It was on the terrace, in our white satin robes, right after you came prematurely. (Shoulda seen that pattern!) 14 days of misery for Steven, 14 days of reprisal for me, and 14 days of fun for all of you reading this blog!

Welcome to Emily’s 14 Days of WRATH! Wait till you see what I’ve got in store for Steven tomorrow – a wine tasting party with a twist!

I guess we'll be back tomorrow to see what happens, won't we? Why 14 days, anyway? I'm guessing it's because that's how long this will take to get word out all over the place with man-haters everywhere. This was on the main page of FARK.com this morning, which coincidentally serves as a place where a lot of mainstream media vulture types get their news. What a bizarre coincidence that the first day she posts her declaration of vengance and decides to unleash 14 days of fury that it gets posted on a site with 2 million visitors. If this were real life, it would have been posted on like, day 9 of her vengence spree. It's pure genius submitting a link like this to Fark. Not only does that site get incredible traffic, but word of this will also go out to the media outlets that use stories from Fark as material. Besides, it's not news, it's FARK.com.

8.) After a little detective work by my friend Matt, it turns out that ThatGirlEmily (notice how every identification is the same exact name?) joined a couple of forums, here and here, and posted the exact same message on two different sites. All of this on a day when she was showing real estate to a psychiatrist, running home to post, then going to a PI appointment to find out ol' Steve was cheating, then running home to post again.

9.) Now this one's the clincher. In her billboard that's pictured above, it's supposedly located in New York close to his office so his coworkers can see it, right? Well apparently there's another one with the exact same wording on it that's on Sunset Blvd in Los Angeles. Here's a picture of that one, thanks to BoiFromTroy:



Everything happens in New York or Los Angeles.

Now, since I've (hopefully) convinced you that this is a viral marketing campaign, does that mean I'm not going to check back for the next 14 days? Nope. I'll check back. If I were really against this sort of thing, I'd refrain from posting about it. After all, isn't the point of something like this to get people talking about it? Just like the Blair Witch Project and Subservient Chicken, the marketing buzz is going to be better than whatever the actual product is.

How the hell do you go about getting a job doing shit like that, anyway?

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This post is tagged ThatGirlEmily, cheating husband billboard, fark, and viral marketing