02.06.11
Novell Explains How it Creates Fake Hype and Buzz
Summary: Novell’s Frank Days speaks about marketing strategies and we have examples from the news
Novell’s PR people are a circus whose whole purpose is to deceive people. Marketing in general has nearly zero value to society. It’s supposed to create urges that do not naturally exist (jealousy, deception, and affinity are among the methods that appeal to psyche) and it generally takes people off course, typically into consumerism, unnecessary wars, and love or admiration of very malicious (but affluent) people. This post is not about the public relations industry, which we wrote about before. It’s about this new article titled “How To Create The Most Popular Blog On The Internet”. Novell is mentioned in it:
I just came back from lunch with Frank Days from Novell (he’s an awesome marketer to follow @tangyslice) where we talked about this concept at length. He pointed out that in the 1990s, corporate Web sites allocated 80 percent of their content to company information and 20 percent to industry information. Today that has flipped. In fact, companies like Novell are curating content from other sources on their Web site to create a conversation around relevant topics for customers and prospects.
Here is a shameless new puff piece posted in a site like this one. It is considered “news” by Google News, but it reads more like a press release disguised as independently-published information. How does such fluff get in there? Perhaps, as Bruce Perens once explained it, Novell is just ‘planting’ some more junk in the Web. Perens wrote:
just about every PR firm offers to help “manage the perception of your company in online communities” these days. What do you think that means? Astroturfing Slashdot, Youtube, etc. In my various manangement positions it’s been offered to me. Indeed, some of the companies offer to create negative publicity for your competition that way – HP had a publicity firm for its Linux activities that told us it would do that when we wanted. I never asked them to do so and hope nobody else did either. This stuff is just standard these days. You’ve got to expect it.
Watch this new example of Novell’s Fog Computing hype (paid-for ‘studies’ and the likes of these) influencing new coverage:
A separate Novell research report published in October also found that organizations are looking at private clouds as the “next logical step” after implementing virtualization. Novell’s report said organizations generally were adopting cloud technologies much faster than expected.
Novell published this ‘research report’ just in order to sell some of its own proprietary software products, as we explained at the time. The bottom line is, be careful of what you read about Novell in corporate news sites. Not only are they corruptible and gullible but they also offer article placements for money. Weeks ago we gave an example even of blogs that Novell paid in order to ‘plant’ articles there. That’s how shameless Novell has become. █
