Internet Marketing Dirty tricks: Mayor of New York to learn to code

According to the BBC "New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has resolved to take an online computer coding course.

The mayor is joining more than 180,000 people currently taking part in Code Year, a campaign to encourage more people to programme.

"My New Year's resolution is to learn to code with Codeacademy in 2012!" he wrote on Twitter.

- BBC  6th January 2012.

"Participants in the course receive an interactive lesson each week, via email.

The campaign promises that participants will be "building apps and websites before you know it".

It has proved a hit on Twitter with thousands using the hashtag "#codeyear"."

Codeyear is a campaign by the company codeacademy - the company mentioned so prominently in the article.  The whole article reads like a press release for the company, and I would bet my hat that it's wording originated in codeacademy's PR department.

It may be somewhat surprising to learn that companies can manipulate large news organisations into running adverts as news items, but it is a trick used by PR agencies all the time.  Nick Davies in his excellent book "Flat Earth News" exposes how propoganda (government and PR related) is disseminated into the main stream media through the pressures on news organisations to produce a large amount of content quickly.

There are several obvious giveaways when looking for PR planted news stories:

1. A prominent mention of a company, or campaign run by a company / political organisation
2. The article will espouse specific benefits of the product
3. The article will mention research by a grassroots organisation
4. Often the company's product addresses a specific outcome of that research by providing a solution.

Codeacademy's campaign is doubly effective in that they have leveraged a major figure to promote their campaign - Mayor Bloomberg (One wonders what he was offered in return).

As the BBC pointed out in their expose on Internet Marketing here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b018xy2b/The_Internet_Millionaires_Club/

Twitter testimonials are often a valuable tool for internet marketing.

By Jez with 2 comments