by skypecaptain

Recently I received a tip that someone was spamming Trulia Voices with advertisements for Realtor.com. The allegations which are detailed on this page were basically that a user was repeatedly responding to individual queries with short answers that provided links back to Realtor.com (you can see all the answers on their profile). The Voices community is alleging that this user and others (see Real Estate Pro in Thousand Oaks) are working for Realtor.com – based on the zip code they identified, which just happens to be close to Realtor.com’s headquarters.

Tying an individual’s identity to their Zip code is a bit of a loose connection – though it certainly looks suspicious.

Catching people by their IP range however, is a much stronger case.

Virgil Griffith’s Wikiscanner has already caused a bit of a kerfuffle as it has nabbed some pretty high profile companies making changes to Wikipedia database. Companies like Ford, Dell, Wal-Mart have all made some controversial edits to pages on the wiki and been nabbed. Wired Magazine’s 27bstroke6 blog has been keeping track of all of these changes.

So being curious, I ran a number of Real Estate 2.0 companies through the engine and didn’t expect to find anything terribly interesting. I did find however, that someone from Trulia’s IP range (see Wikipedia scanner results) had been spamming Wikipedia with links to their community profiles. You can see the changes on the following pages:

• New York City
• Pacific Heights, San Francisco, California
• Bernal Heights, San Francisco, California
• Russian Hill, San Francisco, California

The changes, which were all made late last year, have all long since been erased by Wikipedia editors.

In both of these cases, I suspect these moves were not officially sanctioned policies – rather the actions of overzealous individuals.

It does raise the issue of the ethics in spamming social media sites and more importantly, the possibility of the PR blowback because of it. In this age of greater transparency, the actions of a single individual (however well-intentioned) can have a negative impact on your corporate image, and all it takes is a passionate community or a simple tool like Wikiscanner to hold you accountable.

Share on Facebook