Consider: if you have alternate accounts under your control, rather than the signature campaign participants merely indirectly promoting your product, you can start posting en masse in certain threads and boards to advertise even when the ANN thread is locked away.

People who don't know about the situation can easily ignore one shill but if you have a large number of them, that sentiment is hard to unstick from your biases - I'm certain that when the main thread was buzzing with activity, the handful of posts distracting from the accusations helped to swayed opinion to some degree.