In this Marketing Over Coffee:
Learn about Running Traffic, Coordinated Inauthentic Engagement, Finfluencers and more!
Digital PR consultant Eric Schwartzman is based in Manhattan. Contact him here.
Past Interview on Black Hat SEO and the Search Engine PR battleground
Running Traffic
Coordinated Inauthentic Engagement as a tool to lift organic traffic
Deceptive Mass Influence
Validating with Narravance
Finfluncers moving 10 stocks a day
The latest version of Pump and Dump
The Goblin Gang
Copypasta pushed to the next level with AI
How to marketers adjust to the post fact world? Pick both tribes.
Celebrity Battles and LinkedIn Mafia
Sign up for the text line: 1-617-812-5494
Join John, Chris and Katie on threads, or on LinkedIn: Chris, John, and Katie
Sign up for the Marketing Over Coffee Newsletter to get early access!
Our theme song is Mellow G by Fonkmasters
Speaker 1 – 00:00
Today’s episode is brought to you by Insta360. Their new camera, the X5, shoots in 8K in 360 degrees. And we’ll talk
about it more today.
Speaker 2 – 00:15
This is Marketing Over Coffee with Christopher Penn and John Wall.
Speaker 1 – 00:24
Good morning. Welcome to Marketing Over Coffee. I’m John Wall. Today we have Eric Schwarzman with us. He’s
been on the show a number of times. When we initially started talking, this was way back in the days when
podcasting first began. He was in very early doing all kinds of stuff, but over the years, he’s moved into other spaces.
And most recently, he’s been digging around and finding kind of getting behind the scenes on what’s been going on
in marketing and digging deeper than just the stuff that we see in the trade rags every week. And the last time we
had him on, he was talking about black hat SEO, and there was a lot of things going on over there.
Speaker 1 – 00:57
Basically, the big takeaway for me that melted my brain was that all of this stuff out there about how the algorithms
work was just pr, that search engines are putting this stuff out there saying that this is how the algorithm works
because that’s cheaper than actually fixing the algorithm or making things happen. And so because of that, all this
black hat stuff was actually working well. He’s got a new article out that’s in fast company and has been really
running wild about botnets and what’s going on. So he said, hey, do you want to get on the show to talk about this?
And I jumped at the chance. Eric, thanks for joining us today.
Speaker 3 – 01:30
Hey, thanks for having me. It’s good to be back.
Speaker 1 – 01:33
So talk to us about this article. We’ll have links in the show notes so people can dig into it. But the big thing is the
grip that botnets have on every aspect of society. I mean, it seems like there’s no end to where this is having impact,
and that’s causing trouble.
Speaker 3 – 01:49
So let me start by just telling you how I got the idea to go down this road. Because when I was on the show last time,
I had just written a story about a black hat SEO. And part of black hat SEO is a tactic called running traffic. I heard
that. I was like, what does that mean, running traffic? And guys would say to me, oh, yeah, we’re running traffic. What
does that mean? Well, so it’s one thing to rank, right? And sometimes if you’re working on ranking for a keyword, you
might rank for a week and then lose your ranking. You wonder kind of what’s going on There. Well, there’s sort of two
pieces to the puzzle. On the one hand you’ve got a rank, but then people have to actually click on your result for you
to keep the ranking.
Speaker 3 – 02:35
So what people will do is they’ll basically hire bot farms to click on their results while they’re ranking so that they
don’t lose their ranking. So you get the ranking and you run traffic, meaning you run bot traffic to that result to
register to Google that it’s a result that people like. And when there was that big leak, that Google leak about a year
ago, there was a piece in there that suggested that in fact this is the case, that they reward not just the ranking, but
the click on the ranking. And so I’m thinking about running traffic. What is this? I wonder if people are doing this in
social. And then stuff started to happen, like in the world that didn’t make sense.
Speaker 3 – 03:22
Like we saw, like, and I’m not gonna say what because I don’t want to get political, but there’s been some pretty crazy
stuff that’s happened over the last five, 10 years, right? I’m thinking, man, is this real? Is this legit? And then
sometimes like I would see things on social media that were trending that didn’t seem like they made sense to me.
But then I’d start to see them more and I’d start to think out, maybe it does make sense. All these people like it. And
it did actually change how I felt. Like I thought, well, gosh, if everyone’s doing it must be good. It’s like, it’s like the
greasy spoon diner with the line out the door. You know, you think, oh, that they must be great because they’ve got a
line out the door.
Speaker 3 – 04:03
Well, I think that same logic applies to social media. Oh, oh. A lot of people like this. A lot of people are commenting
on this. It might, must be good. I don’t know if you watch Saturday Night Live, but there a couple episodes, maybe
three or four weeks ago, there was an episode where they did one of those little movies and it was the one where the
star from Anora was the host on the show. And the thing was, what do you do on a weekend in New York? Oh, you go
to a pop up and you wait in line for a slice of pizza. Oh, you go here and you have, you know, pizza mixed with sack
salad or you have a special donut.
Speaker 3 – 04:41
And it was sort of a joke about these pop ups and how they get trendy and there’s these huge lines. But then when
you get to the front and actually get the pizza or the donut. It’s okay, it’s fine. It’s nothing amazing. But the truth is this
is probably bot run traffic as well to making these things look popular that aren’t popular. And so I figured I gotta get
inside of this. So I started asking around people in black hat SEO search circles if anyone knew anyone who did
social media manipulation. And nobody in the SEO world did, then something really unusual happened. And this, I’m
gonna just have to share it with you.
Speaker 3 – 05:25
And I’m sure some people who are listening to this will feel the other way, but I’ll just share sort of my experience
and what got me down this road of look to look into this. So Hamas, which you know, the US calls a terrorist
organization, infiltrated Israel on October 7, 2023 and they killed 1200 people and they took 250 prisoners into Gaza.
And the very next day, on October 8, the very next day, there were these protests in Times Square which were pro
Hamas. And I thought, you know, this just doesn’t make sense. Something’s going on here.
Speaker 3 – 06:08
And so I networked through to a threat detection company and they were sort of analyzing this and they saw that in
fact it was bot traffic targeted on organic pro Palestinian shares, which had framed the issue as one of personal
freedom and liberty that were being promoted with bot traffic. So think of it this way. Somebody shares a post about
an innocent child, who’s more innocent than a child, the child is the ultimate victim, and the child is injured in the
crossfire. And there’s a picture of the child on social media and it’s organic, it’s a real post and it’s posted there. What
was happening was those posts were getting hit with engagement, coordinated inauthentic engagement from bot
farms based in Russia, China and Iran. Now why would Russia, China or Iran promote these points of view? Well,
very simple.
Speaker 3 – 07:13
They’re looking for divisive issues that are going to fracture the west, that are going to get people disagreeing and
arguing over things in the West. And so what they do is they use this state sponsored engagement from these bot
farms, and I’ll tell you about those in a second to make something seem more popular than it really is. And then once
they get that initial boost, right, then it can actually go viral organically. Because we’re in this game now where table
stakes is a certain amount of engagement just to get up the newsfeed. But just like on Google, right, it’s one thing to
rank, it’s another thing to stay to keep your ranking. The same is true in the social media algorithms. It’s one thing to
jump to the top of the newsfeed, it’s another thing to stay there.
Speaker 3 – 08:05
So you can jump there with the bot traffic, but then if you want to stay there, you need organic traffic. It’s sort of the
perfect storm. And so what I did was I got into this, I started looking to this and I saw, wow, it’s not just happening in
politics, it’s happening in the capital markets, it’s happening in crypto, it’s happening in financial services, it’s
happening in pharmaceuticals, it’s happening in lifestyle marketing, it’s even happening in celebrity gossip. It’s
incredible. So you and me and all these folks out there who are thinking, oh well, just be authentic and just be
smarter and just be funny, or here’s my formula for how to go viral. None of that matters anymore. It’s all about
coordinated, inauthentic engagement. That’s what gets something to go viral on a social media newsfeed.
Speaker 1 – 08:57
Okay, yeah, you’ve opened up Pandora’s box for us. There’s a million things we can dig into on this, but before we do,
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Speaker 1 – 09:44
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Speaker 1 – 10:30
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All right, so you’re starting to pull this thread and we had seen, I’ve even seen that Meta calls it coordinated
inauthentic behavior. Like that’s the call for this.
Speaker 3 – 11:16
That’s it, man.
Speaker 1 – 11:16
So you kind of find out about this.
Speaker 3 – 11:19
It’s also known as deceptive mass influence. Although deceptive mass influence as a campaign strategy predates
social media.
Speaker 1 – 11:28
Interesting. All right, so what’s happening now? Because obviously this wasn’t one of these things where somebody
from Fast Company said, hey, go chase this down. Like you’re kind of pulling threads and it’s all coming together. So
like, where did you go next? And at what point were you like, okay, this is going to be a whole story.
Speaker 3 – 11:42
So I went to these threat detection guys. They have a company called Naravance. And I was going to them because I
thought they were going to get me on to the information about Hamas and how this bot traffic out of Russia, Iran
and China had been targeting these organic shares of, you know, these, these horrible images of image of injured
children. And what they said to me was, yeah, that’s terrible, that’s going on. But we’re also monitoring the capital
markets. And I said, what’s going on there? And they said, well, you know, there’s about 10 stocks a day that move
based entirely on social chatter. So if you check this chatter against the EDGAR database or you look at press
releases or you look at product announcements or really any material disclosure from a publicly traded company,
there’s none.
Speaker 3 – 12:40
But all of a sudden they’re flying on social. What’s going on there? Well, a lot of times what happens is someone will
load up, typically on a thinly traded stock, not necessarily a penny stock, which is defined as a stock under $5, could
be a $10 stock, $12 stock, something like that, but a stock for which there’s not a lot of trading volume, and a stock
for which a 10, 20, $30,000 investment could actually move the stock price because there’s not a lot of trading. And
so what will happen is these finfluencers, financial influencers, will load up one of these thinly traded stocks and
then they’ll start posting on Discord because it’s really popular there. X. And if they have a podcast or something like
that, they’ll start talking about how this stock’s going to move. It’s going through the, going to the moon.
Speaker 3 – 13:34
And they actually have these codified sort of slang epitaphs that they use. They’ll say, come on, fam, load up now,
buy the dip, keep pushing. And it’s sort of like language for coordinated buying and selling. This idea that, hey, we’re
going to get a bunch of people to buy this stock so we can pump it up. And then once we pump it up, we’ll dump it.
And this is what’s called a pump and dump scheme. Interestingly enough, when I was researching this, I found that
the first real pump and dumper was Joseph Kennedy. So JFK’s father, okay, the way that he made his money was he
had a pool of private wealthy investors. And at the time, the hot stock was RCA Radio Corporation of America. That
was the tech stock at the time.
Speaker 3 – 14:26
And what they did was they coordinated buying blocks of the stock amongst these wealthy pool of investors so they
could drive up the price. And once they reached astronomic levels, they all dumped it at the same time and the stock
collapsed. Now, everyone else who bought at the top lost their asses, right? But they made a boatload of money. It’s
kind of like the Trump coin, right? You have a few wallets loading up on the coin before it’s announced, it gets
announced, it climbs way up the big wallets, dump all their holdings. Everyone else loses their asses who bought at
the top. That’s a pump and dump scheme. And interestingly enough, you know, there was a group called the Goblin
Gang, which was a famous pump and dump group of individuals that A podcast, that, a discord channel, that Twitter
account.
Speaker 3 – 15:17
And they were doing these pump and dump schemes. And they were hauled into court and they were sued. But the
judge ultimately dismissed the case because he said excitement, even if it is exaggerated, does not meet the
threshold for securities fraud. And shortly thereafter, Bloomberg published an opinion column and the headline was
pump and dumps are legal now. So that’s kind of where we’re at now. Pump and dumps are legal. If you’re an
investor and someone’s talking about a stock, you know, going through the moon, you have no claim against them. If
you buy in at the top, they sell and you lose your money. But I started to see that, right, and that was incredible
seeing that whole case. And then I started to see that this was happening in lifestyle circles as well.
Speaker 3 – 16:06
I saw examples of it happening in big Pharma, particularly around infant formulas. A lot of sort of bot farm driven
competition between major players there. And also in the Finserve sector.
Speaker 1 – 16:22
Yeah. And so you’ve talked about impact there, but you’d also done some stuff that you’ve dug into as far as what
these farms look like and what kind of tools they’re using and how that’s working. Can you give us at least working
knowledge on that?
Speaker 3 – 16:34
So in the old days, bots were largely software driven. And the way they worked is computers, typically at data
centers would access APIs of social networks and sort of manipulate things that way, engage through the API and
so, you know, that’s easier to detect. Also pre AI, the format for sort of posting comments was called copy pasta.
This idea that you would just cut and paste the same comment over and over again and just give that to a data entry
person and say, hey, post this comment. Here’s 12 comments. Post them everywhere. But they’re very easy to
debunk because you see that there’s the repetition.
Speaker 3 – 17:16
When you introduce AI into the equation with some sort of a workflow, you can actually have Persona driven
comments because you can say, hey, you could create an AI driven account, give it a profile picture, you can give it a
bio and you can actually program it with workforce to engage so it can dwell and embed in a specific community
like, I don’t know, K Pop or perhaps Formula one Racing. And what that bot could do is it can actually get friends in
that community and engage in that community and sort of build trust before it gets activated. This is really key. This
is something that the Russians were really good at. They would basically build their bot network a year in advance of
needing It. So that once these accounts were embedded, they were.
Speaker 3 – 18:08
And this is a term they use the industry, they were warmed up. They were already. They had some history, they had
some friends, they had some engagement, they had trust through engagement, and then they would get activated,
and then they would go rogue for whatever. You know, the purpose was that the actors wanted to see them used for.
And the reason, one of the ways we know this is true is because these threat detection companies that monitor the
activity during discussions around war in Ukraine or discussions around Vladimir Zelensky’s wife buying a sports car,
or discussions around Hamas, or discussions around the Israelis, you see the same bots and engaging in different
languages on flip sides of the issues. So. So you could see, oh, one week this bot is, you know, pro Ukraine tweeting
in German in this network.
Speaker 3 – 19:06
The next week, the account is, you know, talking in Hebrew about God. So. So it’s obvious if you actually do the work
now, what happens in the capital markets is they basically delete the accounts. So they’ll create all. They’ll spin up
these accounts on social media, they’ll use the bot networks to engage, and then they’ll delete the account that did
the original tweet when it’s over, because they don’t want to leave any sort of paper trail. But the way it works on
Twitter is if someone retweets a tweet from an account that gets deleted, that residue remains behind, right? So you
see these sort of traces of this, you know, manipulation and deception left behind by all these retweets, which is just
fascinating, right?
Speaker 1 – 19:57
It’s.
Speaker 3 – 19:57
You can’t 100% change your, you know, trace your tracks.
Speaker 2 – 20:02
And.
Speaker 3 – 20:02
And so the danger is, you know, if somebody like the New York Times gets a headline wrong and a bunch of bot
traffic, you know, gets pushed onto that headline and it goes viral, they can change the headline later and update it
and print the retraction, but doesn’t matter, because you can’t put deceptive mass influence back in the bottle, you
know, so it’s. It’s. It’s incredible what’s happening, and we’re all being affected by it in terms of what we believe is
true. It’s no longer about the lie. It’s about the amplification of the why. That’s where the. Where the real risk is right
now.
Speaker 1 – 20:41
Okay? And the article, there was a quote in there talking about how people don’t Google things or, you know, or, God
forbid, look at newspapers and things like that. I mean, they go to TikTok, they go to Instagram and. And that’s just
the source of where they get their info. And there’s been a lot of stuff, you know, I’ve read about infowars and other
things, talking about how, you know, these violate our normal communication norms. You know, the fact that
somebody can go create an account and tell a bunch of lies and just vanish and have no impact for it, like that just
causes all kinds of trouble. But so my question is, kind of the way this has evolved, do you see any way out of this?
Speaker 1 – 21:17
And obviously, TikTok Instagram, these people just want more engagement, more traffic, so they don’t really care. So
kind of, where do we go?
Speaker 3 – 21:26
Well, so there’s no one listening to this podcast right now that is going to find out for the first time that there’s
misinformation on social media. We all know it, we hear it all the time, right? But we keep on scrolling. You know, we
keep out pulling out our phones and scrolling because frankly, if you’re looking for, you know, a media experience
that fits into short periods of time and delivers the maximum dopamine release, it’s social media. So we know that
it’s wrong, we know that it’s lies, but we keep looking at it, and a lie repeated becomes truth. And so this is sort of
where we’re at now. So here’s how I see that sort of changing the game for us as marketers. We used to make
arguments based on facts and we used to agree on facts.
Speaker 3 – 22:21
But what’s happened is there are no common facts anymore. There are liberal facts and conservative facts. Right?
We are a divided world now, largely as a result of social media. And trust in mainstream media has completely been
undermined. Because if you are mainstream media and you want audience, you’ve got to trend on a newsfeed. You
can’t trend on a newsfeed unless you’re hot. Unless you’re coming in hot. So basically, the news feed has polarized
the mainstream media, and so the mainstream media is now less trusted. Liberals don’t trust conservative news.
Conservatives don’t trust liberal news. So the truth is we don’t know what the truth is anymore. We have no shared
truth. When there’s no shared truth, sentiment becomes more important. How we feel becomes more important than
what we think. Right?
Speaker 3 – 23:17
And if how we feel becomes more important than what we think, then we’re totally susceptible to being influenced by
social media. It’s about the opinion makers, it’s about the influencers. It’s about these folks who conform with our
beliefs. On wedge issues. And so we might as well go along with them on others because they’ve done the hard
work to research it. Like anyone who reads this story is going to think, oh, Schwarzman knows bot farms in this
whole world because he’s done the research. If they agree with me on my politics, if they disagree with me on my
politics, they’re going to say, yeah, that guy’s a blowhard. He wrote this story, he doesn’t know.
Speaker 3 – 23:57
So it’s sort of like we’re sort of being forced into these tribal, you know, silos where we basically just are drip fed
whatever is being fed out by the influencers in our tribe. And that’s kind of where we’re at. So if you’re a marketer,
right, you can either pick a tribe or you could pick both tribes. But just remember, you’re not going to change how a
conservative feels by communicating through a liberal and you’re not going to change how a liberal feels by
communicating through a conservative. You need someone in that tribe to carry the water for you or your message
is just going to get absolutely discounted before it even gets hurt.
Speaker 1 – 24:42
That’s an interesting, because we’ve seen a lot of cases where people are forced and they choose a side, but I hadn’t
thought much about that. You could have two different sets of messaging and, you know, have one in each tribe.
Speaker 3 – 24:56
Think about Gore’s Inconvenient Truth, right? It was this liberals thought, oh, what a great movie. He made this great
movie. He’s going to convince everybody of the importance of fortifying our world for climate change. Well, the truth
is all he did was go to universities and give that speech. He didn’t go to the churches, he didn’t go to the military
bases, he didn’t go to the places where conservatives are convening. And so the message, it never landed for that
reason, right? And also because he is who he is, he’s not going to be able to carry the water to that community. So
really it is important to figure out who is your representative in that community. Now the thing about this whole bot
farm world is you don’t even have to have a relationship with them anymore.
Speaker 3 – 25:49
You just find the person in that community who’s saying what you want to say and then you target it with inauthentic
coordinated engagement, right? So you take the message from the conservative who’s saying what furthers your
means for your marketing message and you just target it with a ton of engagement and it goes viral. You never even
had any relationship with them, you know, and I think that’s where we’re headed. I mean, you see that for China and
Russia and Iran, the issue is not Hamas. The issue is how do we divide the American people so that weaken them.
How can we find issues that they’re disagree that they disagree about and promote the heck out of them to get them
fighting? Right. That’s the objective.
Speaker 3 – 26:42
And so they don’t have to have a relationship with the pro Palestinian person who uploaded the photo of the horrific
photo of the child that was tragically injured. Right. They just target it with engagement and it meets their needs
because everyone gets excited in the US because the US Supports Israel and gives them arms.
Speaker 1 – 27:04
Okay, as I said, we’ve got a link to the article in the show Notes, so people can check that out. But before we got in,
you said that this has actually opened up. You know, as you’ve begun digging, you’ve found more things that you
want to start running with. Like, what other things have you been led to from this? Where. Where do you see yourself
going next as far as things to investigate?
Speaker 3 – 27:23
Well, so it’s interesting on the celebrity gossip side, you know, if anyone’s been following the news between Justin
Baldoni and Blake Lively, who had a disagreement over how she was treated on the set of a movie, and it led to a
lawsuit. And after the lawsuit was filed, there was all this engagement that she claimed that Lively claimed was
inauthentic to tarnish her reputation. And as part of this article that I wrote for Fast Company, actually brought in an
independent threat detection expert to look into that. And we saw that, in fact, yes, there was a huge amount of
inauthentic engagement around negative things that had been said about her by others. So there was some
interview that she had done two years ago where she had asked the interviewee if she was pregnant. The woman
wasn’t pregnant. She just had a pot belly.
Speaker 3 – 28:27
And that was two years old. It got pulled up and targeted with fresh engagement, you know, to. To tarnish her
reputation. Other things like that where basically, like when they want to assassinate someone’s character in the old
days, they would have to comb through all the documents and then try to, you know, send people onto the talk shows
with talking points about how this person was a bad person based on what they did in the past. Now they just find
the tweet and target it with fake engagement. And. And so we’re seeing a lot of that in the lifestyle and celebrity
space, and I’m definitely interested in digging deeper into that.
Speaker 3 – 29:04
And then I’m also seeing some stuff around a sort of LinkedIn mafia that’s doing fake engagement online to build
thought leadership so that they can sell these pricey classes to others about how you can be a thought leader on
LinkedIn and also have seen evidence of ad fraud to the tune of 90% of programmatic advertising being bot
impressions. So it’s just crazy how deep this goes. And yeah, I’m excited to be reporting about it for Fast Company
and hopefully other publications too.
Speaker 1 – 29:43
All right, that sounds good. Yeah, we’ll keep in touch with you on that and see where this goes. If you want, you can
sign up for the marketing of our coffee Text line at 617-812-5494 to get the latest as it comes out on that. Eric,
thanks for joining us.
Speaker 3 – 29:57
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 – 29:59
That’ll do it for this week. So until next week, enjoy the coffee.
Speaker 2 – 30:02
You’ve been listening to Marketing Over Coffee. Christopher Penn blogs@christopherspenn.com Read more from
John J. Wall at jw5150.com the marketing over Coffee theme song is called Melo G by Funkmasters and you can
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