The New Influencers

A Marketer's Guide to the New Social Media

Paul Gillin

• Publisher: Quill Driver Books
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781610351102
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Marketing numérique

Exploring how and why online forums such as Facebook, Twitter, and blogs have gained such popularity--and credibility--with consumers, this practical guide offers proven strategies for organizations to leverage these new internet-based social media outlets. The differences between traditional and new media are explored, as are simple ways business owners and marketers can use these new resources to communicate with their customers. Practical tips on gaining the attention of and interacting with influential bloggers, the pros and cons of creating a company blog, guerilla marketing on the internet, and restructuring marketing expectations are also discussed.

CHAPTER 1

Origins of Social Media

On June 13, 2006, Vincent Ferrari decided to cancel his America Online account. Ferrari, an active blogger, had heard complaints about AOL’s customer service. The company’s high-pressure tactics were legendary; sales reps were trained to make it uncomfortable for a customer to leave.

Ferrari thought it would be an interesting experiment to record his phone call with the AOL representative. If there was something funny there, he’d share it with a few friends and everyone would have a laugh. “I didn’t expect much,” he says.

The call was cosmic. After spending fifteen minutes on hold, Ferrari was connected to a rep named John, who spent the next five minutes trying to convince Ferrari that it would be a terrible idea to disconnect the service. Even though Ferrari demanded fifteen times to “cancel the account” during one three-minute stretch, John persisted. The height of absurdity was reached when the rep asked to speak to Ferrari’s father. Ferrari was 30 at the time.

Vincent Ferrari’s been blogging for four years. His Insignificant Thoughts blog gets good traffic: about 350,000 page views a month, enough to make the top 3,000 on the Technorati blog search engine. But he’s hardly an A-list blogger.¹ Ferrari didn’t think much about the recording and sat on it for a week. On June 20, he posted the audio file on his blog. “Anyone else have an interesting ‘cancellation’ story from AOL or some other company?” he asked. Ferrari also sent an e-mail notification to Consumerist.com, a consumer advocacy site that specializes in telling nightmare stories, and to digg.com, a social media site where readers vote for their favorite articles.

What happened next was indeed a nightmare—for AOL. Consumerist published a link to Ferrari’s blog post, calling the recording “The Best Thing We Have Ever Posted.” An hour later, Ferrari’s Internet server crashed under the crushing load of an estimated 300,000 requests for downloads of the audio file.

Within forty-five minutes, the server had crashed again, as it would a couple of more times before the saga ended. In fact, Ferrari’s server logged fifteen times its usual network bandwidth in June, almost all of it in the last ten days of the month.

By June 24, the state of the servers didn’t matter any more. The story had a life of its own. Copies of the phone call were turning up all over the Internet. On Saturday, a friend called to tell Ferrari that the story had been covered in the New York Post. On Sunday, a squib ran in the New York Times. The servers crashed again.

On Monday, CNBC called for a phone interview. Then NBC. On Tuesday, June 30, just six days after he had posted the recording, Vincent Ferrari was interviewed by Matt Lauer on the Today show, which played a full three-minute clip of the phone call. “How did you remain calm?” an incredulous Lauer asked. Another twenty-five to thirty media calls followed; Ferrari lost count. On July 14, he was on Nightline.

And that was just mainstream media. Thousands of blogs and websites picked up the story, including A-list blogs like BoingBoing.net, Metafilter.com and Fark.com. On July 19, Consumerist posted what it said was an AOL retention manual, an eighty-nine-page document with detailed flowcharts showing how to head off a customer cancellation. The site ran a photo of a smoking cigarette protruding from the barrel of a gun. By August 1, a Google search on “Vincent Ferrari” and “AOL” returned more than 150,000 results.

Through it all, AOL remained grimly stoic. The company issued an apology, said it fired the rep (who was probably guilty only of overzealousness) and declared the incident “inexcusable.” But it couldn’t ignore the comments that were accumulating on Insignificant Thoughts; more than a thousand of them, most of them outraged at AOL, some by AOL employees. “I’m so glad someone recorded this,” read one. “I work at AOL so I know what a shit company it is.” Added another self-described AOL employee, simply, “I finally feel like I have my soul back.” Thousands of similar comments were logged on other sites that played the sound clip.

On August 2, AOL announced that it would stop charging certain customers for access to its service. The process of dismantling its customer retention organization had begun. A spokeswoman said the decision was reached after months of analysis and had nothing to do with the Ferrari incident.

And she was probably right. At least to a point. Vincent Ferrari may not have caused AOL to change it business model, but he must have influenced it. He lit a match that set off a conflagration of customer complaint. AOL probably knew that its hard-sell tactics were unpopular, but it probably didn’t know the degree to which those tactics inspired rage among its customers.

Try this yourself: Type “aol customer service” into Google and look at the first page of results. This company had a problem. Vincent Ferrari wasn’t AOL’s enemy. He was merely a catalyst for the enemies to make themselves known.

Blog swarms

What happened to AOL is sometimes called a “blog swarm” and it is one of the most awesome meteorological phenomena of the social media atmosphere. Blog swarms of AOL proportion don’t happen very often, but smaller cloudbursts occur every day in different corners of the blogosphere. And outright swarms are becoming more common.

Understanding how these clouds of dissension form turns out to be about as difficult as modeling the real weather. No one really has the answers. But some patterns are beginning to emerge as experts try to model the complex patterns of influence in this vast peer network.²

The disruptive³ power of social media is made starkly real in crises like the AOL swarm and it’s something businesses will have to learn to adjust to. “Just about every company will have a problem with a product or service, resulting in unhappy customers,” wrote Marqui, a developer of Web-based marketing automation software, in a 2006 white paper. “What has changed…is that disgruntled customers now have a greater reach, a louder voice, than they ever did in the past. News travels very, very fast in the Web 2.0 world—and bad news can spread through the blogvines like wild fire.”

Conventional marketing wisdom has long held that a dissatisfied customer tells ten people. But that’s out of date. In the new age of social media, he or she has the tools to tell 10 million. How did this all happen so quickly?

Online economics enabled new businesses to germinate and rewrite the rules of media.

It’s now possible to address small audiences cost-efficiently, audiences that could never have been served in print. In the first decade of the Web, new-media publishers like CNet, MarketWatch, TechTarget,⁴ Motley Fool, Slate and many others grew and prospered by building affinity groups that hadn’t existed before and by delivering information at a velocity that was impossible in print. eBay offered the first glimpse of what would come to be called the “long tail.”⁵

What’s a Technorati?

Throughout this book, you’ll find many references to Technorati or BlogPulse rankings. These are two popular blog search engines that, in addition to indexing the blogosphere, attempt to identify the most popular bloggers. Their formulas for doing this are imperfect and a bit controversial, but the rankings are closely monitored by many bloggers. For more detail, see Chapter 9.

But the first decade of the Web wasn’t about publishing so much as it was about reading. Early browsers had a forms capability that enabled the user to input information to a website. But the tools to actually publish that information were rudimentary. Yes, you could build a personal website but updating was a chore. Most people who built personal websites pretty much left them alone once they were running. Even if you did update your website, there was no way to tell anyone about it other than by e-mail.

Some students of social media like Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig have called that first decade the “read-only” Internet. While it was possible to create websites, it wasn’t easy. So the people who created them were mostly organizations, who saw the Web as a billboard or a way to take orders from customers. The “read/write” Internet wouldn’t emerge until a few years ago.

The interactive Web

Blogs give individuals a way to express their voices in a way that is highly personal and controllable. Blogs are revolutionary because they make it possible for people to publish quickly and easily under their own names. And whether for reasons of ego or control, that characteristic has struck a mighty chord with Internet users.

A survey of 7,012 people by the Pew Internet & American Life Project in mid-2006 found that 39 percent of U.S. Internet users read blogs while 8 percent write them. More than half of bloggers are under the age of thirty and more than half also said they had never published before they started blogging, podcasting or videocasting. Women represent 46 percent of the blogosphere and men 54 percent.

The dynamics of social media today are rooted in the competition between bloggers to achieve greater influence for their personal points of view, attached to their names and their identities. They’re an evolution of discussion groups, the early online conversational tools that were a hit with a small group of computer enthusiasts. Blogs are different from discussion groups, though, because they put the author in control. They do have their shortcomings; for example, their reverse-chronological format limits flexibility. But the value of personal expression is compelling for so many frustrated writers that newly empowered Internet diarists have seized blogs—and their companion, podcasts—with a passion previously unseen in the media world.

“Thousands of new Web communities have popped up offering twists on MySpace and YouTube,” wrote Washington Post technology columnist Leslie Walker in a retrospective article in August 2006. “Partly, these start-ups are the result of something I didn’t anticipate—Internet publishing costs falling through the floor, at a time when Web software grew more powerful…Falling costs will turbo-charge personal publishing even more by letting the good ones reach the Web quickly.” Walker is actually wrong about the cost. If you have a computer, and an Internet connection, there are at least a dozen websites that will give you a blog for free.⁶

Understanding blogs

The online encyclopedia Wikipedia.org defines “blog” as:

…a website where regular entries are made (such as in a journal or diary) and presented in reverse chronological order. Blogs often offer commentary or news on a particular subject, such as food, politics, or local news; some function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic. Most blogs are primarily textual although many focus on photographs, videos or audio.

Wikipedia makes some distinctions that are important for marketers to understand. While the popular image of a blog is as a personal diary, the reality is that the most popular—and commercially influential—blogs on the Internet are topical. They offer a personal voice, but usually on an issue that’s compelling to a number of people. They’re a new style of publishing that emphasizes timeliness and opinion over comprehensiveness.

Types of blogs

Among the fifteen varieties of blogs listed by Wikipedia.org are business blogs, cultural blogs, gossip blogs, link blogs, online diaries, photo blogs, political blogs, video blogs (vlogs) and travel blogs. For practical purposes, though, most blogs fall into one of four categories: online diaries, topical blogs, advocacy blogs and link blogs.

The Search Phenomenon

Blogs have a few distinctive features that standard web sites don’t. A permalink is a unique blog entry—or article—with its own URL. Every blog entry has a corresponding permalink. A blog is actually a series of permalinks strung together. Most blogs simply list permalinks in reverse chronological order by default. But using “categories” or “tags,” permalinks can be combined in many different ways. This gives blogs flexibility that conventional websites typically don’t have. A blogger may choose to assign an article post to one or more categories or add tags that are a more flexible equivalent of categories. A reader can then view all blog posting in a particular category or by date, with the corresponding permalinks organized according to that selection.

Permalinks have another very powerful feature. They do very well on search engines. This is because permalink file names usually correspond to the headline on the entry. Google pays a lot of attention to file names in its Page Rank algorithm, the result being that a blogger who posts extensively on a particular topic or company name can swiftly rise up the stack in Google search results. For example, HackingNetflix, a popular blog about the mail-order DVD service, was the number two result in a Google search on “Netflix” just a few months after it was launched.

This can be a problem for marketers because critics can quickly become as prominent in search results as their own brands. In a 2005 incident that came to be known as “Dell Hell,” popular blogger Jeff Jarvis posted a rant on his Buzzmachine.com blog about a negative experience he had with Dell Computer’s customer support operation. Thousands of readers added their comments and linked to the Jarvis page from their own blogs. The story was picked up by the New York Times, the Washington Post, BusinessWeek and other mainstream media, many of which linked to Jarvis’ blog. The result: by the end of 2005, Dell Hell postings were showing up in the first page of Google search results on the keyword “Dell.”¹

Many blogging software packages also support TrackBack, which is a mechanism for bloggers to automatically notify other bloggers when their work has been cited. The original entry can automatically display the URL from a later commenting entry, which can help both rise in search ranks. Even casual bloggers are sometimes amazed to type search queries into Google and find their own entr...