Earlier, I was reading an article about Alternate Reality Gaming, a primer for marketers interested in mining that virtual space. And they mentioned an interactive marketing company here in Seattle that I thought I’d check out, called Neverstop. I’m never able to tell much of anything about marketing shops by their websites, as they typically fail to convey an honest or complete picture of what they really do, and Neverstop’s site is no exception. One item on their site really stuck with me though, enough to post it here. I can’t link to it directly, thanks to useless Flash programming, but if you navigate through their menu hierarchy down to “Services > Guerilla Marketing > Viral Community” you will reach a stark white page with this simple sentence on it:

Neverstop can develop an effective viral strategy to infiltrate targeted online communities to reach people at a peer-to-peer level.

Does that sound the least bit insidious to anybody else? Maybe I’m just paranoid, but how can I be sure that they didn’t just target and infiltrate me and my ad hoc online community, covertly and obliquely convincing me to pick up and re-transmit their message, drawing me neatly into an Alternate Reality Game of some sort? Or how do I know that one of you out there reading this, one of my regular commenters isn’t here on behalf of some company, trying to study and “infiltrate” this community? How do we know none of us are advertising avatars (advatars?)? Fact of the matter is, we don’t. And as technology advances, converging more and more with marketing, we’ll be able to make those distinctions less and less. What’s the logical response to a situation that defies logic? Do we welcome the infiltrators with open arms? Do we share with them our simple humanity and hold their hair back as they vomit out the destructive manipulative viruses they’ve swallowed? Welcome infiltrators. Welcome liars and thieves and manipulators. You’ve come home. You’re among friends now. People who care about, love and respect you as humans, just like us. Infiltrate usto your hearts content; we’ll only draw you further into our embrace. We have no other choice.