There’s an email floating around on Twitter that perhaps you’ve already seen which depicts a particularly ‘low-blow’ approach to marketing a brand, in this case, asking folks to write bad reviews of the Meizu M1 Note on the Internet to show a competing phone in better light. If you haven’t seen the email, then here it is:
https://twitter.com/MrAmbiDexter/status/600732250569736192
We reached out to Shankar Bhattarcharya who allegedly authored the email and he has responded claiming that the email was doctored by someone on Twitter. Quoting from the email Bhattacharya sent us:
“I have not sent any mails like these. It's a fake screenshot. I had never attempt any such practices to promote brands.This type of things happens in twitter so i have not replied anything.I have no association with ZTE, i just played their contest to win the phone.People at twitter do such activities to promote themselves (sic)”.
If Bhattacharya’s claim that the email was ‘faked’ is true, then this is just a case of someone trying to create bad blood using social media. Most consumer brands have a heavy presence on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, and while there are a lot of benefits that come out of that, these brands also open themselves up to surreptitious marketing tactics that attempt to hurt the brand’s image.