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Who's behind hundreds of identical tweets promoting Transformers 2?
Twitter has been flooded with hundreds of identical messages praising Transformers 2 today, and most if not all seem to be from brand new accounts. The accounts don't have any followers and they don't follow anyone, which sounds to us like they're just shills.
But if no one's reading them, why bother?
One reason could be to bias Twitter search results, since these messages will show up in a "Transformers 2" search, which is how we found them. The messages all read:
Im waking up still, got a late start to theday. Oopsy... I watched the new transformers last night at12:01 at night, haha. Super good ...
At first it seemed like just a few, but since we didn't believe so many people were still waking up at 1:00 p.m. EST with the same poor punctuation, we did a search on that entire phrase and found hundreds of similar messages. (We're looking at a search results status that says "1014 more results since you started searching" even as we write this.)
Who's responsible? Some crazed fan trying to tip the balance in favor of his or her favorite film? A viral marketing campaign from an overzealous outside PR firm? We have no idea. When we asked around, we were told that this may or may not happen with other films, but we've been unable to verify that yet.
We reached out to Paramount to see what they had to say about this weird find, but they had no comment.
What do you think is going on?
UPDATE: Shortly after SCI FI Wire went public with this discovery, the flood of repetitive Transformers 2 tweets stopped as mysteriously as it began. Which still doesn't answer the question—who was behind it all?
By Roger Workman at 2:41 PM ON 06/25/09
Sounds like a Decepticon plot to me.
By Al at 2:48 PM ON 06/25/09
Viral marketting on another level. Not as good as real reviews or real people, but it gets attention and that's what they want, so...
By nate91111 at 2:48 PM ON 06/25/09
Roger Workman ^ knows too much he's one of them!!!
By PoppaBlog at 3:01 PM ON 06/25/09
I'm waking up still, got a late start to the day. Oopsy... I watched the new Transformers last night at 8:50 at night, haha. Super Cheesy...
No for real, I did see it last night, and it was terrible. It really was an awful movie. But there were robots and cars and explosions, that's a plus.
Personally I think it's Michael Bay sitting at home making the fake accounts. Taking a break from counting his money and doing things that are way cooler than any of us could imagine. And he strikes me as someone that would say "Oopsy" as an attempt to relate to the average Twitter user.
By Aoleon at 3:24 PM ON 06/25/09
It's definitely the Decipticons! Those evil evil robots... :)
Actually I saw the movie last night and it was "Super Good" ! LOL
By TC at 3:24 PM ON 06/25/09
Because they knew some fool would see it and bring it up in their blog.
By abfalter at 3:27 PM ON 06/25/09
Twitter has been storming public conciousness recently; particularly last week with the Iran election controversy.
And just like any other communication form it will soon enough be completely overrun by people who don't use it for it's intended purpose and are instead trying to sell things.
Can I name this phenomena? How about twitch-spam?
By mokshjuneja at 3:51 PM ON 06/25/09
this must be the decepticons in the shape of bots!! Who else can it be.. or some transformer fan crazy person!!!
By Bob the Destroyer at 3:55 PM ON 06/25/09
Sounds fishy to me, and kinda lame. This movie's reviews are all over the map and honestly is any publicity bad publicity? Now I'm hearing about "racist" bots akin to Jar Jar Binks, They're transforming machines for crying out loud not "The Jazz Singer!"
By Justo at 4:49 PM ON 06/25/09
Somebody's trying to figure out how to market with Twitter. Twitter is a fad, imo, and one that will be very brief. I doubt it'll still popular, at all, even by Christmas.
By Marty B. at 5:19 PM ON 06/25/09
Al, if it's an effort at viral marketing it's pee-poor. Twitter isn't "new" as far as social-media marketing goes. The problem is, it doesn't work unless you build up followers before you spring the product. That's one of the few things that are actually textbook at this point about Twitter as a social media marketing tool.
My theory: this is the product of the Don Murphy bulletin boards, the largest assembly of unthinkng ditto heads you find outside of talk radio audiences.
By Plirus at 5:37 PM ON 06/25/09
"Twit-spam" would seem more appropriate.
By smegforbrain at 5:40 PM ON 06/25/09
Doesn't speak well of the film if they have to resort to spam.
By spartacus at 10:13 PM ON 06/25/09
It's one of GM's detroit based ad agencies no doubt. just digg around.
By Obsesive compulsive at 12:12 PM ON 06/26/09
IT's decetispam in 2012 the dedeticons will have created skymet but no really the movie was pretty good
By Obssesive compulsive at 12:15 PM ON 06/26/09
Will anyone be angry if i say that I was the one sending the emails
By Rob at 11:43 AM ON 06/27/09
The film has gotten nothing but negative reviews since opening. I wasn't a huge fan of the original. It was okay, but I never expected much from it anyway. I'm sure this new film is at least on par with the original, and I'm fine with that.
By dal at 11:58 AM ON 06/28/09
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