[iyulaev]

Big company decides to pull a grassroots-focused marketing campaign. Picks an inappropriate venue. Backs off.

Is fb, for example, a more appropriate venue, selling likes and all that? They explicitly allow sponsored posts that appear to have been made by friends. I think the marketing person figured that stack overflow was similar to fb for nerds. Whoops.

[BrandonMarc]

Yep. Reminds me of the time WalMart paid a couple to blog about their RV trip across the US, without the couple disclosing the entire trip and blog was a WalMart marketing experiment: http://kevin.lexblog.com/2006/10/13/fake-blog-walmart-gets-c...