Does a Viral Video about Data Management Require a Paid Bitpipe Promotion?

March 21, 2011

The answer is, “Military intelligence.” A viral video, to me, is a YouTube link that some person calls to my attention. The viral videos are oddities, and I see comments about American Idol flub, angst ridden teens, or exploding diet cola containers. But Bitpipe? Back up. Read the Bitpipe page here. You see a plug for Netezza, recently acquired by IBM. You see the IBM logo. You see a register and log in screen to learn about a “viral video” that criticizes Oracle.

Bitpipe charges to post and promote white papers. I did a test for a client years ago. My recollection is that the service, founded by some former Thomson Reuters engineers, charged big money for Bitpipe’s marketing service. My test generated quite a number of inquiries, but after filtering them, I found that few were substantive. Information about Bitpipe’s business is here.

I am not concerned with Bitpipe. What interests me is that IBM, which is having engineers comment on Reddit just like college students, is now paying big bucks to inform people Netezza has a viral video. I just looked at my iPad. Yep. A link to popular YouTube videos. I just looked at Daily Rotation. Yep, an option to see a list of hot user generated videos. Guess what? No Netezza. Ergo. IBM and Netezza are trying to market and sound really cool at the same time.

Next will be a print ad in the Wall Street Journal with execs in zoot suits explaining the benefits of Netezza’s system and its somewhat confused options for search and content processing. First, the game show and Watson. Then Reddit posts about inventing the computer. And now a viral video promoted on a service that only an information technology student in an engineering school can love at term paper time. I there a viral video news release winging its way to me now? I hope not. For fun, run a query for “viral video” on Bitpipe.

Stephen E Arnold, March 21, 2011

Freebie

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Database, Marketing, News, Search

Comments

Comments are closed.

Search the site
Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive

Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.