 "Samsung reportedly offered money to developer to promote event")
Samsung does quite a bit to market its product line-up and brand. New evidence now indicates that the company may not mind splitting hairs about it. A blog post put up by an Android developer claimed that a Korean PR agency representing Samsung approached him with an offer of $500 (Rs 30,360 approx). And the offer was to mention the company’s upcoming developer competition on the community Stack Overflow.
The developer in question, Delyan Kratunov, detailed the conversation that took place between himself and marketer John Yoon in the post. John Yoon is the CCO for viral marketing company Fllu. According to the post, the first stage of communication was initiated by Yoon on one of the developer’s earlier posts, inviting Kratunov to email him on the developer’s blog.
When Kratunov emailed back asking for details, the marketer responded saying that Fllu is responsible for “getting the word out about SSAC (Samsung Smart App Challenge) for Stack Overflow.” And the conversation didn’t end there.
Smartphone leader Samsung may have offered a developer money to promote its event
The blog post showed that, for a sum of $500, Kratunov was required to come up with a series of four “casual and organic” questions, which focused on Samsung’s upcoming app challenge. The questions were supposed to pan out for a month. Apart from these questions, the PR firm also wanted him to respond to other questions on the topic that it would feature for the event.
The developer even put up examples of acceptable questions which were provided. These included “Anyone know anything about SSAC?” and “Need some feedback on the app I am about to enter for the Samsung Smart App Challenge.” While the PR firm specifically asked Kratunov not to spam the community, the over all endeavour was a clear case of astroturfing. The terms define the practice of masking paid content in the disguise Internet comments, blog posts, tweets and other forms of communication.
In response to the allegation, Kratunov received an email from James Yoo, Director of Operations for Fllu. In the email, the Fllu executive denied that Samsung was in anyway connected to the firm, while stating that the claims being made were false.
In the follow-up email sent by Yoo, the executive said, “Our request to promote [Samsung via Stack Overflow] is a breach against their Terms of Service and could result in your account being terminated. We do not condone such actions that contradict the respective forum policies and would like to redact any correspondences made.”
From all the evidence presented, though, it does look like Fllu was trying to present itself as a firm acting on behalf of Samsung. And the job description seemed to include astroturfing. From the last email put up by the developer, it looks like the $500 offer has been pulled after being made public.
In the past, another instance of astroturfing cropped up when Samsung Taiwan confessed to having an external PR firm pay people to post anonymous comments bad-mouthing its smartphone rival HTC.
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