Stop Toyota’s Twitter Spam Campaign

This entry was posted to Web by The One True b!X at 7:17:17 PM on Friday, February 3rd, 2012 and has 73 views.

As of Saturday afternoon, the campaign appears to have been suspended. See the update at the bottom of this post for details.

Early Friday evening, local news show Live @ 7 tweeted a question about people’s Super Bowl plans. My own answer, snark though it might have been, apparently made the mistake of mentioning Super Bowl commercials. This was an apparent mistake because here’s what I got in response — not from Live @ 7 (from here on out uninvolved in this story) but from automobile manufacturer Toyota.

More specifically, from an account named @CamryEffect5, which, it turned out, was busily marching along tweeting seemingly any Twitter user who happened to mention Super Bowl commercials, pitching a Toyota sweepstakes in conjunction with Shazam. But, wait, why the 5 in their user name?

Because there’s actually ten such accounts, starting with @CamryEffect and encompassing the set from @CamryEffect1 through @CamryEffect9. Why? Pretty obviously to get around Twitter’s hourly usage limits in order to conduct this campaign.

According to the sweepstakes rules, the campaign is administered by Creative Zing Promotion Group out of Orlando, Florida, specializing (says their @CreativeZing profile) in “brand activation & engagement, promotions, social media & events”. For the campaign, they appear to be using LocalResponse out of New York City, and who (says their @LocalResponse profile) “helps marketers respond to real-time consumer intent”.

What’s especially galling about the spam campaign is that every single one of those ten accounts has been verified by Twitter. Were these ten related accounts operating in concert to avoid rate limits for a coordinated spam campaign promoting pornography, does anyone believe Twitter would have verified them? (Presumably, Twitter verified the accounts before the campaign got underway. Otherwise, Twitter itself is complicit in a spam effort.)

So what’s to be done? Easy. Visit the profiles of each of @CamryEffect, @CamryEffect1, @CamryEffect2, @CamryEffect3, @CamryEffect4, @CamryEffect5, @CamryEffect6, @CamryEffect7, @CamryEffect8, and @CamryEffect9, and using the drop down report them all as spam.

In addition, if you’re so inclined, retweet this tweet telling others to do the same. It “helpfully” carbon copies all the relevant parties as well.

Were this not Toyota, and instead some fly-by-night operation pushing pornography, I’d imagine it’d be shut down pretty quickly. Let’s see if, despite being a major automobile manufacturer, it can be shut down before 3:00 PM this Super Bowl Sunday.

Update: Saturday afternoon, after The Next Web posted about Toyota’s spam campaign, someone claiming to be “Kimberley Gardiner, National Digital Marketing & Social Media Manager, Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A. Inc.” posted a comment saying the campaign has been suspended.

We apologize to anyone in the Twitterverse who received an unwanted @reply over the past few days. We were excited to share the message of our Camry Effect campaign in a new way and it was never our intention to displease anyone.

We’ve certainly learned from this experience and have suspended the accounts effective immediately to avoid any additional issues.

To my knowledge, this statement appears nowhere else, and hasn’t been mentioned by either Toyota or Shazam on Twitter. But as of this update, all ten CamryEffect accounts have been made private and have not tweeted since approximately 12:00 PM PST.

Update: Just some aftermath housekeeping: Creative Zing confirms that while they were administrating the sweepstakes itself, there were not running the above social media campaign for it.

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This entry was posted to Law by The One True b!X at 4:22:06 PM on Tuesday, December 6th, 2011 and has 33 views.

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This entry was posted to Readings by The One True b!X at 2:48:32 PM on Friday, October 21st, 2011 and has 5 views.

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This entry was posted to Comics by The One True b!X at 6:38:01 PM on Wednesday, October 19th, 2011 and has 25 views.

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This entry was posted to Readings by The One True b!X at 7:53:13 PM on Monday, October 17th, 2011 and has 13 views.

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This entry was posted to Comics by The One True b!X at 12:54:13 PM on Thursday, October 13th, 2011 and has 29 views.

The third post in this series covers the second week of the second month of DC Comics’ line-wide relaunch. In part one I looked at all of the new first issues at once, while in part two the coverage schedule went weekly. This week featured thirteen second issues, and the launch of two more mini-series. [...]

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This entry was posted to Fandom by The One True b!X at 12:05:23 PM on Thursday, October 6th, 2011 and has 286 views.

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