This post has been updated. Also, I failed to get the anchor linking to the bottom of the page to work. Sorry if this post shows up about fifty times in your RSS reader.

In the wake of yet another widely-slammed Sony PSP viral marketing campaign (the earlier one involving graffiti that attempted to circumvent billboard regulations), Penny Arcade offers a useful distinction between viral marketing and guerilla marketing:

We need to distinguish between “viral” marketing and “guerilla” marketing. The reality is that no agency can create viral marketing, this is the sole domain of the consumer. Viral marketing is what happens when a campaign works – when we allow their message to travel via our own superefficient conduits. Perhaps it is entertaining on its own terms, divorced from the message. Perhaps it is a game or a story, like I Love Bees or other ARGs, where we take ownership in it. What distinguishes this from Guerilla Marketing is that we are aware of the message. When we are not aware of the message, or when the agents of the message misrepresent themselves, we call this “deception.”

The FTC seems to agree:

The Federal Trade Commission yesterday said that companies engaging in word-of-mouth marketing, in which people are compensated to promote products to their peers, must disclose those relationships. [...] Word-of-mouth advertising is already covered under existing FTC regulations that govern commercial endorsements. What the FTC sought to do yesterday in its staff opinion was to note that such marketing could be deceptive if consumers were more likely to trust the product’s endorser “based on their assumed independence from the marketer.”

I find it kind of ironic that Sony made the same mistake twice here. I can see why Sony Ericsson (as described in the Washington Post article, linked above) might think it needs to hire actors to pretend to be tourists and shill its camera phones, even if I do find that sneaky, evil, and underhanded. But for a video game system? Sony has enough die-hard fans who would be happy to promote its products if only the company offered something to help get the ball rolling, such as with alternate reality game promotions like those recalled by Tycho at Penny Arcade. One such game, I Love Bees, was successfully used to get people excited and talking about the video game Halo. This isn’t just about making entertaining ads—this is about letting people get involved and promoting good will toward a brand. Perhaps it’s easier to get people mobilized around a particular work of media than the hardware it runs on, but considering how quickly the PS3 overtook the XBox 360 in sales in Japan, the Sony-loyal must be out there somewhere.

Update: Penny Arcade points out that Sony has come clean. Now at Sony’s site:

Busted. Nailed. Snagged. As many of you have figured out (maybe our speech was a little too funky fresh???), Peter isn’t a real hip-hop maven and this site was actually developed by Sony. Guess we were trying to be just a little too clever. From this point forward, we will just stick to making cool products, and use this site to give you nothing but the facts on the PSP. Sony Computer Entertainment America

The damage has already been done, of course. As Tycho writes, “There is some kind of apology on the blog now, which… Whatever. I don’t know if they want a gold star or what.” Still, coming clean was probably their wisest course of action. Well, actually, their wisest course of action would be to learn from their mistakes this time around. Then again, we are talking about Sony here…