The problem with outsourcing your gorilla marketing is that it can cost big bananas with a hard to quantify return

I worked in community marketing for few rather large software companies. The struggle is real. Almost every CMO I worked for seemed to make it their mission to squeeze any life out of social conversation with actual users and replace it with bland, boring "on message" communication about synergies for leveraging pivots enabling disruption at enterprise scale.

For every Tweet that goes out on the company account and every blog on the company blog. But that's not what we're talking about here - we're talking about vague sources like low-impact social media snippets getting cited on low-reputation blogs until someone more reputable comments on the apparent trend. There are absolutely marketing people who do that "unofficially".

Different ballpark. Original comment is about shadier methods of marketing not official stuff landing on the primary domain of Apple. I have 1st knowledge of a travel tech company laying off their entire marketing team during COVID that then got hired by a brand new company to find different and riskier approaches on how to keep the funnel alive despite the travel restrictions without direct risk of exposure for the brand.

Tbf comment you replied to never said they were direct hires. Outsourced workers sitting around is possible. You seem to have customized their more general statement

Can confirm though, being acquainted with PR people in the field for >20 years; everything on TV is scripted these days.

Chatted with some of my PR friends coworkers over the years at Christmas parties and the like. They claimed stunts during MTV specials, other "candid" moments from the last 20-25 well known to pop culture were actually organized by a PR company they worked at (never that they worked on that project; such work was reserved for whatever PR rockstar PR firm hired)

But all this too could be PR sales pitch to impress; society is full of hearsay to titillate

That only applies to tweets that are published on behalf of the company, not tweets from sockpuppet accounts that have no direct connection to the company and are made to look like a regular consumer.

It's Guerrilla Marketing. It comes from guerrilla warfare, not gorillas the large ape.

Yeah and why they outsource that? First is effectiveness of reach as you mention. Second is the ability to have a clean official record.

Wake me up when an extremely capitalistic company, in the past caught with dirty hands on numerous topics, will reject increasing massively a legal revenue stream with no strings attached. Right, exactly how to become a trillion dollar company and keep it.

I grok that specifically for apple their echo chambers do majority of certain work themselves, but claiming with 100% confidence thats all is a bit of a stretch. If I was a personal close friend with their head of marketing, I would maybe believe that. In any other case, hard logic prevails over anonymous online claims.

It is multiple layers of approval, but there is no reason to think they wouldn't approve this. At least not from the limited information I have. The approval is about covering themselves, so if they won't get sued (either because it is legal or they can cover their tracks) they will approve it. There is more than lawsuits they track, but the exact set of things is different for each company and I have no idea what Apple works on.

Thus this could be Apple marketing, or it could be someone independent.

Shit posting looks like natural use of social media so it's actually preferred

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2017/02/20/reddit-i...

“I have worked over 100 of these kinds of campaigns and never had it come back on the client. I’ve been doing viral marketing and reputation management since 2005. =In the past year I’ve worked for a major entertainment network to magnify a rumor within sports entertainment, as well as damage control on a rumor that came out of an actor being hired on a film before the production company was ready to announce that casting.”