Honest mistake or scandalous domain-parking marketing ploy?

On Saturday morning, Molly and I woke up and looked around online for something interesting to do.  I had just given her a sweet new bike for her birthday, so we thought that maybe we should find some reason to ride bikes around town.

While scanning through my daily reads, I noticed that my friend Amy (founder of the fantastic "Cheapskatin’ LA") had written about what sounded like a super Saturday event — the "2nd Annual LA Tamale Festival".

Amy diligently linked out to info on the Tamale Festival at two sources: Upcoming.org and SocialDomain.  Both have extensive previews of the event and make it sound like the event is no small tamales, if you know what I’m saying </bad joke>.  The write-up on Upcoming even boldly claims that the organizers "anticipate 60,000 (attendees) due to the venue SALAZAR PARK which is centrally located in Los Angeles."

Ourselves anticipating an afternoon of sweet steamed masa, Molly and I mapped out the route from our house in Silverlake to Salazar Park, which worked out to being about 7.5 miles each way through central and East LA.

After over an hour of pedaling through urban Los Angeles, we hungrily arrived at an empty Salazar Park in East LA.  Well, the park wasn’t totally empty…there was a community center full of septuagenarians sitting in folding chairs against the wall as Latin dance music played — apparently, senior citizens revert back to middle school habits at co-ed dances — but there was certainly no tamale festival happening.

When I got home, I looked more closely at both the Upcoming and the SocialDomain promos for the event.  Both link to a site that curiously does not exist: latamalefestival.com.  If you go there, don’t click the links as they are just ads owned by the domain owner.

There is an actual 2nd Annual LA Tamale Festival, but it looks like it isn’t until November 10-12.  So I wonder, were the false posts on Upcoming and SocialDomain merely accidental, or was someone intentionally creating false marketing listings in order to drive traffic to the domain-parked latamalefestival.com site?

Hopefully the answer is the former.  I’m an idealist when it comes to social media, and I’m not yet ready to see fantastic sites like Upcoming become corrupted with spammy marketing and false lead generation ploys.  (And by all means, no disrespect to Amy and Cheapskatin’.  She simply reports the events from around town that she stumbles onto herself.  She certainly shouldn’t be expected to do any investigative reporting as to whether an event is actually legit).  And finally, if the festival did in fact happen and we somehow missed it, please kindly let me know.

On a lighter note, even though we didn’t get any tamales, at least our 14.5 mile round-trip ride through central LA allowed us to see what simply must be the best selling taco stand on the planet:

This entry was posted on September 10th, 2006 and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.