Dumb Twitter marketing

I've noticed some friends on Twitter & Facebook have been making strange posts recently. It looks like their company has a new campaign and all of sudden campaign messages have started appearing in status updates from staff members with links to the corporate site.

Don't get me wrong, it's ok for people to promote themselves, their company, their products, their services. I do it myself occasionally.

What is dumb is pushing messages out that look like they were cut & pasted from a Press Release. You know when someone's not using their own voice and when you see messages from multiple people in the same company with the same dumb messages, the effect is even greater. I'm also worried that the company may be hijacking personal accounts/personas - do they know?

So, no problem with people doing promotion, but it has to be genuine - people making their own posts in their own voice.

Ok, rant (somewhat toned down) over. "I could crush a grape!"