from Hacker News

Jonathan's Card revealed as viral marketing campaign

by AlfaWolph on 8/10/11, 3:46 AM with 97 comments

• by patio11 on 8/10/11, 4:44 AM

  I like the Wikipedia suggestion most of the time: assume good faith. He works with Starbucks at his day job. He decided to do a hack using an API he was exposed to there. This is not exactly nefarious, even to the severely-damaged-evil-meter version of nefarious which includes "intentionally and with forethought committing the sin of marketing."

  I have often used work technologies/clients at play and play technologies at work.

• by alanfalcon on 8/10/11, 4:30 AM

  I'm not so sure that I trust "coffeestrategies.com" (to me, a random stranger on the internet with an apparent anti-Starbucks agenda) more than I trust "Jonathan Stark" (to me, a random stranger on the internet with an apparent pro-Starbucks agenda)...

  I'll say this: if it's truly a corporate sponsored viral marketing campaign, it's a very good one. I'm not convinced by this random blog post though that this isn't just someone genuinely doing what he says he's doing.

  http://jonathanstark.com/blog/2011/07/14/broadcasting-mobile...

• by carsonm on 8/10/11, 4:47 AM

  Nah. I don't know Jonathan, but I've followed him on Twitter for quite a while after reading his O'Reilly published book on iPhone web app dev. (I think he's also the guy who took over maintenance of jQTouch.) Anyway, watching the whole thing evolve on his Twitter stream, it sure seems sincere. "Suspected to be a viral marketing campaign" might be a more appropriate headline here.

  Conspiracy theories are fun to think about, but too many things don't add up for this one. Thin evidence of it, a potentially anti-Starbucks agenda by coffeestrategies, the fact that Jonathan is a real live person with tons of professional credibility, and the fact that in order for it to be true, Jonathan would have had to pro-actively lie to all those of us who follow and trust him.

  That's strikes me as exceedingly unlikely.

• by jonathanstark on 8/10/11, 7:53 AM

  Big thanks to all of the folks who have supported sanity on this thread. My thoughts here:

  https://www.facebook.com/notes/jonathans-card/the-real-deal/...

  Peace, j

• by mdwrigh2 on 8/10/11, 4:13 AM

  "Since you don’t care, you might as well click on the paid advertisement below so Google will send me $.50."

  I hope the author knows, this is a clear violation of ToS for AdSense and will likely jeopardize his account status.

  Edit: Sent the author an e-mail, hopefully he fixes it before it becomes an issue.

• by geraldalewis on 8/10/11, 4:49 AM

  1) I read the 'The company later had its employees comment on my blog with fictitious postings' out of context. It's not referring to `Jonathan's Card` but to the `Pay it Forward` campaign. Just pointing that out since it seems like others were not clear on that detail either.

  2) Calling those `Pay it Forward` posts "fictitious" isn't merited. I would not be surprised to see an employee of any company posting a defense of the company they work for.

  3) Anyone on HN who read "but unfortunately failed to anticipate that I can see the originating IP address of incoming comments" and didn't say to themselves "how does OP know they were trying to obfuscate their identity?" should be embarrassed.

  It's always a good idea to read posts critically, and it's always a good idea to accept the least cynical understanding of a situation until compelling evidence is provided to the contrary.

  I'll consider this submission as bait until something substantial is posted.

• by clemesha on 8/10/11, 4:29 AM

  Does this mean the below is a fabricated statement?

    Response from Starbucks: "We think Jonathan's    
    project is really interesting and are flattered
    he chose Starbucks for his social experiment"
  

  - http://twitter.com/#!/jonathanscard/status/10066971227443609...

• by kellishaver on 8/10/11, 4:32 AM

  I really don't think this is the case at all. I've known Mr. Stark for some time now and he is an honest man of integrity - a good, decent guy.

  It's an experiment, exactly as he says it is. I discussed it with him the very first day he started the project.

  I'll choose to believe my friend on this one.

• by sahillavingia on 8/10/11, 4:29 AM

  I think there's a pretty big difference between a guy trying out something cool and an elaborate viral marketing campaign constructed by an agency.

  I think this was the former, honestly. Maybe I'm just not jaded enough yet.

• by AlfaWolph on 8/10/11, 3:48 AM

  ..which I don't think takes anything away from it. It was still clever in implementation, concept, and now we can just add viral campaign to the list.

  Also, I think it's worth pointing out that the people at Metafilter were on it from the start. I don't know if that says anything about liberal arts and social science types being more cynical and skeptical or if the science and technical crowd types here are just easily entranced by the technical implementation of something and don't see the forest for the trees. It's probably both.

• by barefoot on 8/10/11, 4:21 AM

  Unless I'm missing something, I don't think it's been "revealed as a viral marketing campaign". So, Jonathan's company has worked with Starbucks in the past - am I missing something? Is that the extent of what we're working with here? If so, you might as well conclusively claim that I'm a Starbucks employee paid in part to sweep all of this under the rug.

• by hv23 on 8/10/11, 7:30 AM

  Disappointed with the misleading title of the post-- "Jonathan's Card revealed as viral marketing campaign".

  Browsing the comments, it's clear that a lot of people are jumping to conclusions without reading the full blog post (as is the wont of many on the web), which suggests /some/ link between Starbucks and this campaign-- but is circumstantial at best. It's anything but the smoking gun that the title would have you believe.

  What really happened is another story (I'm inclined to "assume good faith" in this instance), but I'm tired of seeing disingenuous titles of articles around the web that are used to blatantly misinform.

• by citricsquid on 8/10/11, 4:55 AM

  The only "bad" thing in my eyes is the cover up, if it is indeed being covered up. However until it's proven otherwise I'm going to assume this is good old finding-shit-where-there-isn't-shit which the internet is oh so good at!

  Even if the guy does work Starbucks (directly or indirectly) it's a clever idea, I enjoyed looking at it (and wish I could have taken part) and this won't change if it was some "viral marketing".

• by saalweachter on 8/10/11, 2:54 PM

  I'm generally willing to give someone a pass for repeatedly emphasizing that their statements/projects/opinions are not in any way affiliated with their employer. I don't often make statements tangentially related to my work, but when I do I try to be as clear as possible that I am just a dude and not a spokesman, and beg people not to blow my statements out of proportion and get me fired.

  On the other hand, this man appears to be a marketer, so I assume that he has plenty of opportunities to try out his marketing ideas at work, and doesn't do them as a side project. I think the biggest question I have isn't "did he do this on his own time, or during his 9-to-5?", but "were 'real' people putting money on the card, or did the Starbucks marketing department just refill it when necessary?" As long as it was real people putting the money in and taking the money out, it's still an interesting social experiment, even if it was crafted as a marketing campaign.

• by benatkin on 8/10/11, 5:41 AM

  I am disappointed after reading the article. Based on the title I expected to see some evidence. A business relationship that may not even be current and scrubbing the site doesn't count.

• by robryan on 8/10/11, 4:26 AM

  I think it changes from cool project for people with a bit of extra cash to give others coffees to just another piece of viral marketing. Especially since it was stated he was within no way affiliated with Starbucks, even if this does have nothing to do with them he should still mention this affiliation.

• by Urgo on 8/10/11, 4:21 AM

  Created by Starbucks for marketing or not it still is a cool idea. I haven't actually made it into a Starbucks yet myself but I have the image on my phone ready to try it out if I am near one.

  It makes sense though if Starbucks is running it though since it never stays empty for long and never gets too much of a positive balance. They feed it just enough to keep people interested but make it empty enough that people still have to pay half of the time because its empty.

• by ja2ke on 8/10/11, 4:19 AM

  It's totally hindsight driven, but the fact that he started every HN comment with the same "Jonathan here" type canned greeting should have probably raised an eyebrow.

  (amending this: after reading up a bit I don't agree with my own original post. It's a very odd thing to do -- I don't ever see anyone on HN post like that -- but he's not a fictional person or anything like that.)

• by rodh257 on 8/10/11, 4:28 AM

  Saying he wasn't affiliated with Starbucks was dishonest (if indeed he was working for them, which I don't think this article really proves), but really does it matter that much? We were all interested in the experiment, can't we applaud some good marketing?

• by chaostheory on 8/10/11, 4:43 AM

  Fake or not, I really liked it. It was different and most importantly it made me feel good. If this is advertising I don't mind. It's a lot better than normal commercials I tend to ignore.

  I just wish they didn't pretend that they had nothing to do with it.

• by collypops on 8/10/11, 4:26 AM

  Now I feel pretty foolish for spending a few hours of my time developing a mobile app to use his API.

  http://jonathanstark.com/card/#api

• by metafour on 8/10/11, 5:25 AM

  Not sure how credible this is but the article does have a comment from someone saying that the twitter feed said the card had money when in fact it did not. They allude that this is part of the marketing ploy.

  Did anyone else experience this?

  My guess would be that it's just not updated in real time and they just happened to go at the wrong time. If we're giving the benefit of the doubt...

• by LiveTheDream on 8/10/11, 11:58 AM

  I didn't know it was possible to manually clear Google's cache of a web page. Turns out, it is: https://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answ...

• by kapilkale on 8/10/11, 4:35 AM

  Whoever ends up being responsible for this-- kudos to them; it has been an entertaining experiment. If it was Sbux, it does make me wonder how many of these viral campaigns I've missed because they've been better guised.

• by Shenglong on 8/10/11, 4:23 AM

  How stupid do you have to be to send comments from Starbucks HQ... Wow. For such a clever plot, this is a really sad ending. Reminds me of the Mona Lisa story a few days ago.

• by xer0x on 8/10/11, 4:42 AM

  This is awesome?! A viral marketing campaign directed at us! Wow.

    Response from HN could be: "...we are flattered that he chose HN for his social experiment"

• by dadads on 8/10/11, 4:03 AM

  Wow, everyone here fell for it, me included. Although I have to admit, this is the first time I've seen a viral campaign involving the creation of an API.

• by athst on 8/10/11, 5:45 AM

  marketing campaign or not, I think it's really clever. If all marketing campaigns were even half as interesting, we'd all be a lot better off.

• by FreshCode on 8/10/11, 6:18 AM

  If it's true, this is so genius.