A caveat for viral marketing advertisers

Let me set the stage: You are walking along, minding your own business, when suddenly you get a SMS text message reading: "Outbreak: I'm infecting you with t-virus, my code is ******. Forward this to 60022 to get your own code and chance to win prizes. More at t-virus.co.uk." With the recent hysteria over mobile phone viruses spreading over bluetooth, you could be forgiven for panicking. In fact, it's nothing but an ill-conceived viral marketing ploy from Capcom, the maker of the videogame "Resident Evil" to promote the release of a new version. Web-surfers could navigate to a page on the company website and send *anyone* an SMS text message similar to the one above, *without* the phone owner's knowledge or permission. It seems clear that while viral marketing campaigns have enormous potential and allow advertisers to leverage comparitively tiny budgets into potential pop fads, some responsibility is called for. Anti-virus company Sophos has this to say about the T-Virus spoof and similar viral hoaxes:
"Many virus hoaxes:
--falsely claim to describe an extremely dangerous virus
--use pseudo-technical language to make impressive-sounding (but impossible) claims
--falsely claim that the report was issued or confirmed by a well-known company
--ask you to forward it to all your friends and colleagues
--As usual, you are urged not to pass on warnings of this kind, as the continued re-forwarding of these hoaxes simply wastes time and email bandwidth."
As viral marketing for commercial purposes becomes more popular, it seems that there is an ever-finer line between an innocuous self-spreading advertisement and spam. Technically speaking, since the company (in this case Capcom) only enables third parties to send the SMS message to phone users and does not send them directly, it doesn't meet the traditional definition of spam. However, it seems to me that companies should use some 'best practices' to avoid foisting messages on unsuspecting people via email or phone that leave them bewildered about where the message came from and even whether it might be dangerous or not. It would seem wise for viral marketing campaigns in which anybody can pass on content to anyone else with the click of a button to take measures to lessen the confusion/alarm of the recipient. The following are just a few suggestions:

Use so-called "captchas" (images of text that can only be read by real humans and must be re-typed before a form can be submitted) to prevent automated 'bots' from abusing the system and ensure that a real person is doing the sending

Require (or at least strongly recommend) for senders to enter a valid email address and their real name, or at least a nickname that the recipient would recognize, before they can pass on the viral ad, and include that information with the message

Inform senders that their IP address and associated information will be recorded and that any abuse of the ad campaign could result in civil or criminal liability

With some generally accepted Best Practices, viral marketing campaigns on the Web can continue their phenomenal success without generating a backlash from angry consumers.