(This blog post is a reworking of a comment I left on True Mosquito’s post on the same subject.)
Cylone Dairy, which has been splashing itself across the internet of late, is obviously the first act of a "slick" internet marketing campaign to get people talking about cloning. For the record, I’m all for having that discussion.
But is this the right way to do it? Creating a website for a fake, cloned milk dairy business? Taking out ads in DailyKos for said business (theCyclone Dairy tile ad is there as of today, March 28)? What’s the point of doing it quite this way?
The "man behind the curtain" behind Cyclone Dairy is likely to be an anti-cloning group of some kind. But as far as pretending to be a business you’re not, this one is pretty lame (they could learn from someone who knows how to do it right). In Cyclone Dairy’s case, people smelled b.s. on this fabricated interent "phenomenon" from the get go. And that hurt the potential for discussion, in my opinion.
Check it out. Here’s what bloggers are saying less than a month into this sock puppet campaign. William thinks iFood & Water Watch is behind CD, and he may be right. The blog post he points out has a slough of comments, all time-stamped eight days later at exactly the same second (I guess no one was taking the bait after the first week, so, cue the sock puppet brigade!).
Now it may not be Food & Water Watch, and if that’s the case, I do apologize to them. But regardless of who’s behind Cyclone Dairy, this kind of marketing campaign is deliberate, coordinated, and easily botched. It’s called "astroturfing," the hiring of a media outfit to help create the appearance of a grassroots uprising around a chosen cause (fake grass roots = astroturf). The McCain camp tried this last year, as you may recall, and it didn’t go so well.
The reason this particular bit of astroturfing isn’t working is that the true villain (cloning) is obscured by the fake villain (Cyclone Dairy). "Marks" in this con job will be more outraged by the company (and DailyKos for accepting ad money from them) while bloggers like WIlliam above will be more interested in unmasking the fake villain than engaging in the discussion that will lead to the Great Big Realization: CLONED MILK IS ALREADY IN THE FOOD SUPPLY.
There. I said it. Happy, astroturfers? 
But my guess is that once people realize that Cyclone Dairy is a fake, that there’s no cloned milk dairy to fight against, they’ll feel tricked and unlikely to continue the conversation as envisioned.
It would have been far better to have constructed a campaign that allowed people in on the joke immediately and to inspire them to spread the word virally to others who might enjoy the joke, too.
Instead, the Cyclone Dairy campaign comes off as cynical by tracking down discussions like True Mosquito’s, and creating sock puppets ("Melissa" is most likely a sock puppet — the profile was created shortly before the comment she made was posted. Furthermore, her argument seems forced and unlikely — who takes the time to come to fill out a profile and comment in order to defend cloned milk?). They come off as cynical, too, by taking out fake ads on lefty social network sites that cloud the point of the campaign, and otherwise treating potential allies in a way that makes them feel like dupes instead of allies.
Too bad. Food from cloned animals, and what cloning might do to the genetic pool of US livestock, is totally worth talking and arguing about. Instead, we’re disassembling a poorly executed internet campaign.
Tsk. Tsk. Tsk.
UPDATED: Blogger Williiam K. Wolfrum thinks Ben & Jerry’s may be behind Cyclone Dairy.
UPDATED 3/31: Looks like "CyClone Dairy" has been handing out free bottles of milk in Union Square in NYC.
* The editorial board of Iinois State University’s Student Daily gets sucker punched by Cyclone Dairy. They teach ya how to Google in yer School of Journalism, kids?
UPDATED APRIL FOOL’S DAY: Is today the day we find out who’s behind Cyclone Dairy?
* Bil’s right. Ben & Jerry’s claims responisibility for CyClone Dairy.
