Buzz Control
Social media is a powerful marketing tool. But how do you control your message once it goes viral and is in the hands of the public?
In March, Greenpeace posted a video on YouTube of an office worker munching away on a bleeding orangutan finger he found in his Kit Kat candy bar. When Nestlé asked YouTube to take it down, citing copyright infringement, a social media revolt ensued—viral video, Twitter chatter, Facebook hijinks. By May, Greenpeace had extracted a promise from Nestlé to stop buying habitat-destroying palm oil for its products.
Social media can be a powerful tool in marketing. “The big story now is that you don’t need a lot of money to get a lot of attention,” says Robert Kozinets, chair of the marketing department at York University’s Schulich School of Business. But it’s not one that is easy to control. “You enter into a game with a different set of rules from the ones you have traditionally been playing with.” When you try to influence people’s communications, Kozinets says, “the message gets changed by the cultural environment.”
To understand how word-ofmouth marketing works in online communities, Kozinets and his coauthors closely followed one of the first “seeding” campaigns. In 2006, a marketing firm seeded, or gave away, new mobile phones with a usage tutorial to influential bloggers. “The assumption,” says Kozinets, “was that you’d get a somewhat uniform output, that bloggers would stay with the script and recommend the phone to other people. What we found was that they had a lot of need to explain the campaign itself. Rather than drawing attention to the product, they drew attention to the marketing.”
Introducing a marketing campaign into an online community based on trust and relationships creates a certain tension, Kozinets explains. “We haven’t got the social rules yet for how we blend the social and the economic in ways that are comfortable for everybody.” Partly in response to that tension, “the community is going to go out of their way to truth-check.”
And that’s a good thing, says Patrick Thoburn, cofounder of Matchstick Inc., the word-of-mouth marketing company Kozinets studied. “Having coverage that looks credible, that wasn’t scripted, is actually really important,” says Thoburn. “People don’t believe companies tell the truth in advertising. The most powerful selling of an idea or a service or a product takes place among consumers.”
Still, when you let your message loose on the Internet, you can’t control it. The best you can do is contribute to it. Thoburn recommends listening. “There are conversations happening out there about your brand or product, and there are simple, free tools that you can use to listen to those conversations,” he says. “A really good first step is identifying influential voices and building a relationship with them.”
“The audience doesn’t want just words anymore; the audience wants action, and interactions. The strongest social marketing that you can do is the stuff that invites people to get involved,” Kozinets says. “It’s not a guy on a stage broadcasting to a quiet audience anymore; it’s a person on a dance floor engaging in multiple dances with multiple people. He’s gonna have to learn how to dance.”
Robert V. Kozinets, Kristine de Valck, Andrea C. Wojnicki, et al., “Networked Narratives: Understanding Word-of-Mouth Marketing in Online Communities,” Journal of Marketing, 74, 2010.
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COMMENTS
BY Ellie Kesselman
ON December 11, 2010 09:38 PM
’ “When you try to influence people’s communications, Kozinets says, “the message gets changed by the cultural environment.” ’
So very true. This article is eerily prescient, as it describes in complete, but non-sensationalized terms, the events of the past fortnight or so: WikiLeaks, Twitter as a medium for communication, the consequences of individuals’ reactions to WikiLeaks around the world etc. Whether one wants to view it as “grass-roots activism” or “mob rule/ cyber-reign of terror”, the same events could occur in a world without word-of-mouth social media. However, the speed with which information can propagate accelerates the activity.
Your second very finely phrased comment was:
“Still, when you let your message loose on the Internet, you can’t control it. The best you can do is contribute to it…”
It is ironic that in a time when access to complete information, by video, audio and electronic print is facilitated, our human propensity to only hear or digest part of a situation, and act on those half-truths, remains unchanged. Some of the issues are very complicated, so that the increased access to an attached video, or hyper links to news articles in a communique, whether by Twitter, email, text etc. doesn’t help that much. And there is my concern: that we have an illusory feeling of greater knowledge and thus certainty about our actions, rather than hesitating to act because of the realization that we lack complete (or sufficient) information.
On a lighter note, regarding that quotation, there is little that reflects so poorly on the online perception of an historically well-regarded corporate or governmental entity, than a social media page that has been left unattended e.g. cluttered with spam comments, last updated in 2007, broken links. Ironically, some of the most traditional organizations, the first that comes to my mind is the BBC UK, have some of the best policies in place to avoid such online faux pas. Furthermore, they seem to implement their policies, rather than merely drafting them!
There isn’t much rhyme or reason as to which companies are alert and aware of the potential for “social media risk exposure”. Yet if establishing a social media presence, one must treat it with the same level of attention and resources as any other form of customer contact or community outreach. It is a delight for me to observe individuals, and organizations, that I’d never thought of in a “social networking” context, defining a place for themselves that is up-to-date in terms of best practices, yet remaining consistent with their particular style.