Just when I thought the dust had settled on this one, up popped a tweet to me from someone called Jess Elliot.  This said:

@RichardStacy Seriously Dick, you’re a one trick pony, can’t u come-up with anything else other than talking about #LRNY? You’re so boring.

The tone of this had the ring of some familiarity about it given previous tweets and blog comments from people that seemed to be interestingly close to the agency involved in the #LRNY campaign.

It was also a little at odds from comments such as this from Corrine Weisgerber, Assistant Professor of Communication at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas, who has done an excellent presentation on usage of Twitter.  She said:

@RichardStacy Somehow I overlooked your tweet. Great post on #LRNY. I agree:  not authentic & executed with a traditional marketing mindset

So, I wondered who Jess Elliot might be and looked at her Twitter stream.  She joined on April 6, shortly before the #LRNY campaign kicked off and of her 35 tweets since then, 25 of them have been concerned with promoting Land Rover or the #LRNY campaign.  I therefore replied to Jess thus:

@JessElliot I talk about plenty of things other that #LRNY – unlike yourself whose entire twitter stream seems to be dominated by it

This drew the response

@RichardStacy Ugh…so boring.  It’s really quite sad, grasping onto #LRNY.  You’ll get more attention by writing about something else. 😉

I therefore asked:

@JessElliot Jess, you only joined Twitter on April 6. You have tweeted almost entirely about #LRNY or Land Rover. Do you work for Wunderman?

Which drew the response

@RichardStacy Who?, i actually had to lookup what that meant.  No, i prefer to still be in school.  So, your boring, ugly & dumb-great combo

So Jess is still at school (university for those in the UK).  That might explain a few things, but, if representative of  Twitter usage among students in the US, presents an interesting picture.  This goes something like – joined Twitter and then 9 days later decided to take up the cudgels in defence of Land Rover’s #LRNY campaign and reply to people commenting on the #LRNY tag along the lines of:

@totale There is no hashtag in a any commercial. Thanks for the imsightful contribution.

And

@cara19 Hi Cara, I understand you’re frustration; been there before. I hope that the dealer will resolve soon. Email LR NA about it or call.

And

All the discussion about the campaign, but how about those beautiful 2010 Land Rovers! Have you seen them? http://tinyurl.com/dkfoj8 #LRNY

And

@PaulRushing LR Twitter. You couldn’t be more wrong. Everyone is saying how successful the campaign was. Please check your facts.

She gets into quite a spat with Paul – resorting eventually to

@PaulRushing I’m really sorry, I didn’t want to have to do it; but you’re the first person that I have to nominate for the #assclown award.

Admirable stuff indeed.  Quite incredible that a brand such as Land Rover which, in the US in particular, has a reputation for producing top-end SUVs targeting middle-aged men can start a Twitter campaign and instantly attract such support from female college students.  If that is the case I would be forced to reverse all my opinions about the #LRNY campaign and agree with @KeithRhodes that the campaign is an astonishing success.

I decided to have a look at that tweet to @cara19.  It was a reply to this:

@JessElliot I admit I used the # in vain. My frustration level dealing w/LR NA is at such a level that I let off some snark. I apologize.

This seemed to me to the continuance of an earlier conversation, not registered in Jess’s Twitter stream so when I looked to see what this tweet was ‘in reply’ to – I found the page no longer existed (had been deleted?).  Again strangely familiar behaviour given @KeithRhodes (Wunderman employee behind the campaign) previous removal of tweets he had sent to me.  I therefore wondered if I could find out more about what Jess had actually been saying on Twitter but subsequently deleted.  So I  put #LRNY into Twitter Search.  Stangely enough Twitter Search only allowed me to look back 18 days – very odd, especially when previously I had used Twitter Search to track back the whole campaign (Note, this doesn’t appear to be just a #LRNY issue – Twitter Search doesn’t now seem to allow you to track back very far in the past, even using advanced search.  Have I missed something here?).  No matter, a quick old-fashioned Google search on #LRNY threw up hastags.org which had a lot of the earlier conversation and this showed that Jess had indeed been far more active that her current Twitter stream suggests – activity which has subsequently been removed such as RTing @KeithRhodes’ posts and producing the like of:

WOW!!! Video of the 12″ all digital instrument panel on the 2010 Range Rover on CNET. Incredible! http://tinyurl.com/dckm3j #LRNY

Which Keith himself then RT’d.

You can check it all out here http://hashtags.org/tag/LRNY and you can check out everything Jess still has in her Twitter stream here http://twitter.com/JessElliot

(Just as an aside – there are interesting lessons here.  If you delete your tweets, they will dissapear from your twitter stream, but they will only dissapear from the digital record entirely  if they have neither a #tag or are in reply to someone else).

Now perhaps Jess is indeed just a college student with absolutely no connection to Land Rover or their digital agency Wunderman as her most recent reply to me would seem to suggest.  I simply present you with the evidence and allow you to reach your own conclusion.

If, however, you come to the conclusion that Jess is indeed connected to either Land Rover or Wunderman it presents further guidance on what should be the rules of behaviour in the social media space concerning important issues such as credibility and transparency (not to say common sense) as well as highlighting the importance, in my opinion, of ‘outing’ instances where such principles are not respected.  For this reason I will continue to keep an eye on developments around #LRNY and highlight any other examples of inappropriate behaviour if they appear (sorry Keith, Jess et al).

I await further enlightenment on the identity of Jess as indeed I still do concerning the identity of the ‘consumer’ who apparently filmed the Land Rover press conference which was then posted on YouTube and became the basis of the tweet Wunderman instructed its paid tweeters to promote; the identity of ‘Jack Smith’ who posted rather unflattering comments on my blog which came from a computer registered to WPP in New York (WPP is the parent company of Wunderman) and, of course the identity of ‘anonymous’ who left a ‘friendly’ comment about me on the blog of Chris Baccus (I notice Chris has deleted this post – which is a shame, but understandable since he works for Wunderman, Detroit)

Update: As I complete this post I notice that Jess has replied and also posted to the #LRNY tag.  I present her two responses:

@RichardStacy it’s called being a fan #assclown. My dad had one & he bought me one when I turned 18. Wow, ur crazy, stalkers act like this.

And

JessElliot Please unfollow and stay clear of @RichardStacy he’s stalking me and making me feel uncomfortable.  I’m blocking him. #socialmedia #lrny

Well there you have it.  I am a stalker and Jess’s activity in support of Land Rover is motivated purely by the fact that her Dad had one and bought her one.

I am certainly following #LRNY – not quite sure that qualifies as stalking.  If it is, it is stalking that needs to be done.  As for stalking Jess – easy to make that cry to try and throw up a smokescreen, but not quite so easy when you see who started this conversation and in what way.  Lest you have forgotten this was a tweet to me from Jess stating:

@RichardStacy Seriously Dick, you’re a one trick pony, can’t u come-up with anything else other than talking about #LRNY? You’re so boring.

Anyway, the evidence is all laid out in this and previous posts.  I recommend you read it and come to your own conclusion.

Further update: I was just having a look at what sites were refering people to my blog and noticed one was this on account of the fact that I left a comment there.  I then saw that underneath my comment was this:

Richard Stacy, get over it already and stop pushing your unintelligible nonsense all over every blog that I end up at on this topic. I’m trying to do some research on this topic and all I see is you self-promoting and trying to ride the coat-tails of a campaign that generated so much buzz that it’s still being talked about all over the world. No one cares what you have to say since your thinking is flawed and you have absolutely no credibility. Go back to your angry little life so that we can quickly forget about you.

This was actually acarbon copy from the comment after mine on Chris Baccus’s blog.  The difference was that comment was anonymous and this comment said it came from a Dick Stacy.  Notice the usage of the term Dick and compare with Jess’s original “Seriously Dick, you are a one trick pony etc etc”.  Could it be that Jess is the originator of both of these.  I guess we will never know.  Perhaps Jess’s enthusiasm for social media is waning.  I notice her latest twitter post is:

What I hate about twitter, it’s a paradise for voyeurs, stalkers and the obsessed. At what point do peoples fantasies become their realities