Over at TechCrunch a guest poster, Dan Acker Greenburg, has revealed how the company he works for creates viral videos on YouTube. Go and read the details, but it basically boils down to marketing tricks, and less to do with the content itself.

Wait — that doesn’t do it justice.

It basically boils down to manipulating structures within a social system to promote videos that are seemingly popular through an organic (i.e. “real”) sense of popularity.
Wait — that doesn’t really do it justice, either.

What it *really* boils down to is creating multiple puppet accounts, creating fake controversy to pump up the pageviews, and under-the-table renting of popular bloggers opinions on given videos, and / or the bribery of certain email list owners to pimp said videos.
Yeah, that’s about it.

Right now, the post is absolutely burning up TechCrunch with almost 200 comments, and you can bet there will probably be more. Mike Arrington himself seems a bit taken aback by how honest the post is, but is anyone *really* shocked?

Are your (or anyone’s) sensibilities *really* that delicate?

I mean, its been a year now since the Edelman Wal-Mart fake-blogger fiasco. And around the same time I was posting / ranting regularly about how Digg might or might not be manipulated.

In fact, one of my last thoughts on the topic was that the best marketers are going to be gaming Digg in a way that is not visible to most people; that Jay Adelson’s rhetoric about not having any submissions being manipulated were total hubris as well.

Bottom line is that this post pulls the curtain back on a phenomenon that any rational thinking individual would already suspect.

That is, when there is financial incentive and opportunity to game a system — even when that system has the appearance of being “open”, “transparent”, and built upon the goodwill and trust of its users (how typically quaint!) — someone will do it.

And the best of them will do it in such a way that no one else will even *know*.

At times like this I almost feel bad for Ted Murphy, one of the guys behind PayPerPost. Not just because I met him and he seems like a nice guy. But rather that he tried to build a business that was attempting to do something in a fairly open and transparent way, and with the new Google PageRank adjustment is getting burned for it.

Whereas guys like Dan Greenburg? They’re paying bloggers and list owners under the table where Google will _never_, *ever* be able to tell, and they’re making out like bandits. And that’s besides the practice of creating puppet accounts to pimp their “viral” marketing tactics.
Again, am I surprised and shocked? Not really.

But I think we should all take anything that seems viral and organic with a grain of salt these days. Because no matter how “real” something popular seems, there just might be a marketing or PR firm behind it.

There’s nothing intrinsically good or bad about it (but, really, mostly bad), but clearly in an age of “social media” and “user generated” content