06/03/07
Astroturfing, the income of crowds, and other fake stories
I’m about to be quoted in The Bookseller, I think, on how publishers run the risk of screwing their brands and authors long term - and devaluing their relationships with readers - by making the mistake of short-term astroturfing to appear as if they are popular with the kidz.
The idea of astroturfing goes hand in hand with the commercial wing of web 2.0 / social networking / user generated content / blah-culture, where on immediate appearances, success is based on a quantity rather than quality metric. How many friends do you have? How many comments on your blog? How many photos in your flickr, links to your site, entries on your frappr, etc?
Companies, including publishers, want to use MySpace, or Flickr, or Second Life, cos everyone is talking about it and it made the Arctic Monkeys big, so it must be cool. The problem is, that if you manage to set up a MySpace page, you expect to be inundated with friends. But somehow you only have one friend, and his name is Tom… Maybe you can get the kids you have employed as editorial / publicity / marketing assistants to make friends with your page? But hang on, if their profiles are up to date then maybe they mention that they work at your publisher. And that looks a bit suspect.
So what do you do? Well, you pay companies to make friends for you. There are lots of them. And the next time people come to your MySpace then you’ll have 10,000 friends. Problem solved? Wrong.
Ditto user generated content. Got a great idea for a user-generated content / flickr mashup? Go for it! But make sure you get lots of colleagues to fake you enough content to get the ball rolling in case it doesn’t quite take off.
We’ve all copied things that other people have done before us. Hopefully we’ve all experimented, and some experiments have worked and some have failed. Despite my link to the Penguin Flickr stream above, I don’t think there is any dishonour in doing what they have done - they tried, and it worked a bit, and not a bit as well. It’s not a failure. In fact, respect to them. Ditto with the Penguin Wiki project - had it been anything other than a mess you would have been amazed, but at least someone did it and you have to respect Penguin for being agile enough to try, and to have the ability to get an idea off the ground, quickly, rather than sitting in meetings about it for 3 years and having nothing to show at the end of it.
But, it would be different if they’d had to resort to soliciting or faking contributions just to make the site look busy. They’d really have sullied the Penguin brand and got a lot of stick in the process. Just because other publishers don’t have such a mighty brand to run the risk of damaging, doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be very careful when it comes to faking popularity.
Before “web 2.0″ when clients wanted forums on their sites, we had to explain that a buzzing forum was great (so long as it wasn’t buzzing with paedophiles trying to groom the kidzzz hanging out on a teen-literature web forum). But when did you last see a buzzing forum - before the Guardian launched Comment Is Free and suddenly everyone understood what a blog was (and the online disinhibition effect for that matter)?
Forums (or, as Alex would tell me, Fora) more likely than not, languish in gruesome loneliness, evidence to the distinctly un-buzzy nature of social activity around the site. For all its great news aggregation, Book2Book’s forums have been (oh, until today!) really quite dead.
As a result you have to consider the brand impact of not having a forum, or any kind of ‘forum’ for consumers/visitors to post comments. A site without a forum still has the wieght of its content to support it. But weigh that type of site up against the brand impact of having a ‘forum’,but one to no one comments, and to which no one comes. It says - our brand is not worth talking about. The risk, and benefits, just aren’t worth it most of the time.
There was a great piece in the Guardian a fair few weeks ago by Leo Benedictus on astroturfing - online and off - is infiltrating our daily lives. The general thrust of this article is twofold, firstly that traditional advertising is broken,
But far more destructive to the health of traditional advertising has been the accumulation of evidence that it no longer works. Remember Budweiser’s classic “Whassup!” campaign from 2000? It was funny, likeable (at least at first), and caught on so widely that for six months or so it seemed as if every twentysomething in the western world was saying “Whassup!” about twice a day. It was, in short, the epitome of successful, creative advertising. During this campaign, Budweiser’s US market share fell by between 1.5 and 2.5 percentage points, and its sales in barrels dropped 8.3%. It was, in short, a brilliant ad that either caused, or did little to prevent, a commercial disaster.
In fact, a 2004 study by Deutsche Bank found that, in the short term, just 18% of television campaigns in the US actually generated a positive return on investment. In the long term this figure rose, but only to 45%, suggesting that most TV advertising is little more than a fun way for a company to waste its money.
and secondly that ’stealth’ marketing - “the new frontier of 21st centruty selling” - is the response, “Opportunistic advertising …overcomes the problem of dwindling public interest by leaping out at consumers unannounced and grabbing their attention by force… Advertisers increasingly succeed because they do the new intrusive thing that gets attention. So the client benefits, but the backlash gets broader and stronger. That will naturally lead to a greater and greater backlash that the industry will not be able to stop politically.”
In other words, adopting risky new advertising tactics may deliver some short term gains, but - boy - will it damage you in the long term if you are (as you will be) caught out doing it badly.
A new code of practice has emerged via the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (Womma - thanks Alex) the primary rule of which is disclosure. So says their outgoing CEO, “”It would be idiotic for any brand to dare do stealth marketing,” he says. “When you deceive consumers, when they find a recommendation that’s supposed to be from a trusted source, a real person, but that ends up being from a marketer or a paid shill, they will hate your brand.”
And that’s the point, in a nutshell. Don’t astroturf! Only do online “engagement” marketing - where you encourage people to interact with your content via comments, UGC, recommendations, whatever - with products that are clearly identified as such, and which you are certain are of a high enough quality to make the commentary about them either thought-provoking, inspiring, or emphatic - rather than insipid.
In related news, I have also just seen an expose of How to buy popularity on digg. “I can tell you exactly how a pointless blog full of poorly written, incoherent commentary made it to the front page on Digg. I paid people to do it. What’s more, my bought votes lured honest Diggers to vote for it too. All told, I wound up with a “popular” story that earned 124 diggs — more than half of them unpaid. I also had 29 (unpaid) comments, 12 of which were positive” - all of which is worth a read.”
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