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Author Jackie Huba on Citizen Marketers

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Citizen marketers: respect them, engage with them and make them your fans because they’re defining the message about your company and your products.

That was the message from Jackie Huba, co-author of Citizen Marketers and Church of the Customer Blog, who addressed the Social Media Cluster of the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council this morning.

Jackie offered lots of examples of how individuals are influencing markets through blogs and online video. Here are my lightly edited notes from the meeting.

Who are citizen marketers? The content they create is actually branding for the companies they talk about. One reason we use this term “citizen” is that we see a link between this new media and the Bill of Rights. There’s a freedom to speak and a freedom to assemble.

Fernando Sosa and Thomas Hilditch of Chicago met at Second City because they were aspiring comedians. Their funky McNuggets video. “McDonald’s Nuggets by Fernando and Thomas” has been a viral hit. The funny thing about this was this was almost an accidental citizen marketer thing. They were going to perform one night and came up with this rap. The friends thought it was so funny that they recorded it, uploaded it and it got over 100,000 views. If you’re McDonald’s, that’s fabulous publicity.

Cell Block Tango is a homebrew video that’s had over four million views.

The MyBarackObama.com blog came out when Obama announced his presidential candidacy and 70,000 people signed up in a week. There are 2,400 self-selected groups but it was created by people, not the campaign.

Podcasting is another phenomenon that not taking off as quickly, but research is finding that heavy radio listeners are listening to traditional radio less. NPR gets over 2 million downloads a week. With podcasts, there can be comment around the content. Now people can collaborate around the content and have a discussion. You can’t do that with radio.

George Masters – in November, 2004 he was a vocational school teacher in Southern California but very interested in graphic animation tools. He created an animation about his iPod. Wired magazine picked it up and starting writing about a home-brewed iPod ad, saying it looked professional. The New York Times picked it up from there and then CNBC. It changed George’s life: he got an offer from a graphics animation firm and that’s what he does today.

Brian Finkelstein posted a video of a sleeping Comcast tech on YouTube and six days later, the Times picked it up. The Comcast tech was fired, but the big question for Comcast is why was the guy on hold for 90 minutes in the first place?. Go to Google today and type “Comcast technician” and the entire first results page is about the video.

Let the seller beware. If you have a bad product or service, the consumer has the microphone.

Mike Kaltschnee of HackingNetflix.com tried to get on Netflix’s press list and received a brush-off response, which he posted on his blog. When Netflix realized how influential he was, the company did a 180 and how treats him as it would a member of the mainstream media.

Jim Romanesco runs StarbucksGossip.com (subtitle: Monitoring American’s favorite drug dealer). He’s a Poynter institute journalist who does a lot of work at Starbucks. He’s actually scooping the media on some things. When Starbucks recently had some bad earnings, the company blamed it on new products that were increasing wait times. He posted about this and store managers began to contact him to say they had told the company eight months ago that this was going to happen.

Jackie spoke about a category of publishers she calls “the fanatics:”

SlaveToTarget.com is a blog by a 28-year-old mother all about Target. She writes about great new products and generates sales. People actually go out and buy the products that she recommends. Target ignores her. Why?

Rabid fans of the soft drink Surge launched a website called SaveSurge.org to try to rally support for a campaign to bring back Surge. They called themselves soda activists. They weren’t successful, but Coke did start to test a product called Vault. People were contacting the authors saying that Vault was a lot like Surge, so the group started VaultKicks.com to encourage Coke to go national. Coke eventually complied. Today, if you type “vault soda” in Google, nearly all of the links are to SaveSurge and VaultKicks fan sites.

There’s another category she calls “the facilitators:”

Paul Mullett runs mini2.com, a site for Cooper Mini enthusiasts. Last July, a mystery ad started running, inviting people to visit the site at midnight on a certain date. It turned out that BMW had given the site operators and a few other journalists a preview of the 2007 minis. At midnight, the site posted photos of the new mini to an enthusiastic crowd.

So who are these people?

We found that these people perceive these activities as “productive leisure.” For them, it’s a fun outlet to communicate with other people who love what they love. It’s a bridge from what they do in real life to their passion.

You might think that this is a lot of content. But there’s something we call the 1% rule: most of the content is created by only 1% of the visitors.

Microsoft’s Channel 9 is mostly created by people within Microsoft. They have 4.5 million visitors a month and only 11,000 contributors.

QuickBooks community has 100,000 monthly visitors but only 900 people who create any content.

It may be only 1%, but that 1% is very powerful.

How do you take advantage of this trend?

Reach out to your fans. Last week, TurboTax partnered with Vanilla Ice to get people to create raps about taxes. People are actually doing it!

Another successful example is Converse, which asked people to create videos about their Chucks sneakers and upload them to

conversegallery.com. They got 1,800 submissions and Web traffic rose 66%. Sales doubled in the months after the videos ran.

She cites the Chevy Apprentice campaign as an example of a viral campaign that didn’t work. Environmentalists hijacked the campaign and it spread into mainstream media. GM’s problem was that they didn’t reach out to people who loved the product. They just enabled people to be nasty. Reach out to your evangelists, the people who love what you do. Try the contest.

Invite co-creation. When Shakira’s latest album didn’t sell well, her record company took one of the songs – Hips Don’t Lie – and asked people on her fan site to contribute videos of themselves dancing to the song. They got thousands of submissions and the song became a hit. Was the video the reason? Probably not, but it was a great marketing campaign to use fans to be part of what was going on.

Create communities. Discovery Channel has a little-known division called Discovery Education that targets professional educators. You can download images and video to bring a PowerPoint to life. Teachers love it and Discovery Education has 70% market penetration in schools. But awareness among teachers was low. So Discovery Channel decided to invite educators to join a program – the Discovery Education Network – that gave teachers the opportunity to come to a program to learn more about how to educate with these tools.

Discovery also launched the Discovery Educator Network where anyone could register, get a blog, join a discussion group, exchange presentations and materials. They’re attracting people who love what they’re doing.

Q&A

Any comment on Viacom’s decision to sue YouTube/Google?

These clips are the new 30-second ads. CBS is one of the top channels on YouTube. Some big media companies get it and others don’t. CBS gets it.

There seems to be a total breakdown in use and abuse of a brand. What are the implications?

There are some rules that protect consumers from using brands, such as parodies. iPodMyBaby had to change their name to iPopMyBaby. If you go to my blog, you’ll find some brands who are sending cease-and-desist letters to fans. One movie company got the bloggers to actually take down a blog. It’s a confusing time right now.

How did you write a book with your significant other?

Ben has a journalism background and I have a marketing background, so it worked great. He did a lot of the background and I interviewed a lot of the citizen marketers.

What do you do if you’re a regulated company?

A lot of this hasn’t been sorted out. I was talking to a company last week whose lawyers were very concerned about starting a blog. One side argued that the blog was a personal opinion but others were saying it was company communications. There are a lot of CEO bloggers but can’t think of any in regulated industries.

How about ROI?

A lot of it has to do with word of mouth. Fred Reichheld has done a lot of work to say what percentage of a customer base would recommend the product to others. He comes up with a score he calls the net promoter score that measures the value of loyal customers. A lot of people are doing this just because they need to learn about it. I would measure subscribers to your content, people who want to hear about you every day.

How do you get the budget?

We’re seeing a lot of companies not budgeting for this. That’s one reason we see so much interest in contests; the money comes from the promotions budget. A lot of companies are discovering that the value of the campaigns is traffic to their websites.

What’s the next big thing?

I have no idea! How do you predict the next YouTube? All I can say is that the next big thing will relate to participation.

Why most viral video is stupid

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Bulldog Reporter‘s Daily Dog has an exceptionally thoughtful and well-informed article on the viral video craze that lambastes marketers for trying to add in viral buzz after a campaign has already been created. Author Andrew Foote’s point is that anything that doesn’t look genuine will be savaged by the community – and rightly so. He cites some excellent examples. If you’re a marketer trying to get a handle on the viral phenomenon, read it.

Dan Rather underwhelms

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I didn’t expect much out of Dan Rather’s appearance at South by Southwest and so wasn’t very disappointed that it didn’t deliver. It was a missed opportunity, though. There was the chance to question Rather about all sorts of things that the audience cared about, including the relevance of mainstream media in market with millions of voices, the low public perception of the media in general, the future of citizen journalism and the relationship between social and new media.

Instead, the moderator, Jane Hamsher of FireDogLake, opened the one-hour session with a question about Rather’s confrontation with Richard Nixon more than 30 years ago. That was an event that I suspect scarcely 10% of the audience even remembers, much less cares about, and it got the session off to a bad start. The rest of the hour proceeded through a short series of relatively tame questions about the state of journalism, along with rambling answers by the newsman (this may not be the moderator’s fault; sometimes interview subjects put restrictions on topics they’ll address). Rather had some good messages for journalists, but they weren’t his audience. The issues that I believe the audience really cares about weren’t even raised until a brief Q&A.

The highlight was Rather’s pointed criticism of what he called “access journalism,” or a style of reporting that trades off aggressive reporting for access to inside sources. Journalists too often protect their sources in order to become part of the inner circle, he said, and political and business figures willingly exploit this weakness. He blamed this trend, in part, on the decline of media competition as media ownership consolidates and the increasing distance between news operations and their parent companies.

“Very often the source is using the reporter and the reporter is using the source, but when the source begins to believe that the reporter can be part of the team, that’s when things get dangerous,” he said.

Rather said that journalism needs a “spine transplant,” a return to its role as an independent advocacy for truth and disclosure. The role of the journalist is as a watchdog, he said. A watchdog barks when it suspects danger but doesn’t lie down or attack. It’s a warning system that keeps those in power on their toes.

“Do we still believe that the documents of government belong to the people and not the people in power?” he asked. “The president is not a descendant of the Sun God. This person is elected by the people and part of what [journalists are] expected to do is check on them.”

Rather’s message was a welcome call for a return to the values of Edward R. Murrow, whose name he invoked twice. But I think the audience was interested in hearing more about social media. Rather’s own knowledge deficit in that area – he didn’t mention YouTube or podcasts once and appeared awkward using “Google” as a verb – was painfully evident. As someone whose CBS career was arguably brought down by bloggers in the Rathergate incident, you’d think he would have more to say. But the question about Rathergate, like so many others, never came up.

Las Vegas as a standard for user design

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The best session I’ve attended so far at South by Southwest was also the shortest: a 25-minute presentation by interaction designer Dan Saffer called “Learning Interaction Design From Las Vegas.” Perhaps it’s because I just came from a visit to Las Vegas, but I found the analogy to America’s Sin City to be a strikingly appropriate as guidance for good design.

Citing Vegas’ remarkable success at appealing to its target audience, Saffer pointed to the Strip’s excellence at human factors design. “Vegas understands user experience,” he said, noting examples like carpet patterns that are designed to keep people within a building and ceiling painted like daytime sky in order to rob the visitor of a sense of time. He displayed a quotation – “Withholding judgment may be used as a tool to make later judgment more sensitive” – to illustrate the need for designers to suspend the urge to create designs that meet their own standards of beauty in order to build products that people want to use.

Examples: the extravagant buffet lines in Vegas casinos like Champion League agen judi bola terpercaya appeal perfectly to the overweight middle-American tourists that are their best customers. Wedding chapels that announce themselves in bright incandescent lights may offend many people, but they do a great job of appealing to their target audience. And hotel complexes like Paris allow customers to experience France without the inconvenience of dealing with the French.

In particular, he dwelt on slot machines as examples of a near-perfect user interface. From type so large that it’s readable by the legally blind to the more than 400 sounds that some machines emit to the tactile feedback they provide, slot machines are finely tuned to give users a satisfying experience, on average, every six seconds. Which is why, he said, they’re a bigger business that the four largest fast-food chains combined.

Saffer’s playful jab at designers was to discard their upper-middle-class tastes and just design for their users. He said one reason MySpace is so popular is that it provides a Vegas-like experience for its customers. In aggregating so many functions in one place, it’s the online equivalent of a Vegas casino complex.

If you’ve worked with many designers – and I’ve known some very good ones – you know that their Achille’s heel is a tendency to design what’s elegant rather than what’s useful. Saffer’s message is something more designers should consider. I couldn’t agree with him more.

 

Why there'll be no social media bubble

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South by Southwest is my seventh social media conference in about a year (the others were Syndicate, Gnomedex, BlogHer, Podcast Academy and New Communications Forums in Boston and Las Vegas) and I’m again impressed with one thing: the lack of interest in financial rewards or profit motives on the part of the participants.

That fact was driven home to me again this evening, in a panel session called “Production Companies 2.0: Taking Online Video to the Next Level,” which featured some of the early winners in video blogging. In contrast to the industry panels of a decade ago, which were all about creating huge new brands and reaping rich rewards for the founders, this session focused on issues of artistic control, voice, independence and freedom from the pressure of commercial interests.

Ryanne Hodson of RyanIsHungry.com spoke about the importance of not signing away control over content to investors, while Andrew Baron of Rocketboom boasted about new features on his site that enhance social networking features and make it more useful to viewers. “The vast majority of our discussions about Rocketboom are about how to make it better for the audience,” he said.

Where money was discussed, it was always in the context of how video bloggers could manage to make a living from their craft. Rock-star blogger Robert Scoble actually drew oohs and ahs from the audience for mentioning that he had signed a sponsorship deal for his video blog totaling $300,000. A decade ago, such a small amount would have prompted snickers.

As a veteran of forward-looking industry conferences going back more than 20 years, I find this spirit remarkable – and refreshing. Ten years ago, the tony Internet industry confabs attracted swarms of bankers and venture capitalists looking for the next billion-dollar company. Entrepreneurs who played the game successfully at the time were rewarded with billion-dollar payouts. In contrast, Jason Calacanis, arguably the most successful social media entrepreneur to date, sold out to AOL for $25 million. That’s nothing to sniff at, but it’s a far cry from the payouts awarded to the founders of Yahoo, Lycos and Broadcast.com.

Last September, I wrote a column in BtoB magazine (the original doesn’t appear t be online since BtoB revamped its website) arguing against the probability of a social media bubble. “Bubbles need air supply in the form of venture capital and inflated expectations for investors. They also need a payoff. Almost none exists in this market,” I wrote at the time. I still hold firm to that position. Perhaps the big money is still waiting on the sidelines for a viable business model to emerge, but I think they’ll be waiting a very long time. The Internet bubble of the late 90s was driven by investors’ misguided assumptions that the Internet was a channel for big media and big brands to emerge.

In fact, the opposite is true. Social media is fulfilling the Internet’s promise to make it possible for millions of small communities to form around very specific areas of interest. People now have the tools to share and comment upon information that’s compelling to very small groups – and to do it at almost no cost. Political super-blogger Glenn Reynolds calls this phenomenon An Army of Davids and the terminology is apt. The Internet is all about specificity, not generality. It just took us a decade to realize that.

More Tagging Insights

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An interesting panel on tagging explored some of the applications and the social and commercial implications of tagging as these tools mature.

One angle that interested me is that groups develop their own syntax for tags and the characteristics of those tag lists are different as a result. One panelist pointed out that “social.network,” “social_network” and “socialnetwork” have different meanings on different sites and in different communities because the groups who agree on these syntaxes are using them to tag different kinds of content. On del.icio.us, people tagging “design” are referring to visual design while on Magnolia they’re referring to software design. Same tag, different groups, different meanings.

I was also interested in some interesting applications of tagging to more traditional collecting. Some libraries are making it possible for their visitor to tag books in their collections. This makes it possible for libraries to build super-catalogs that are much richer than traditional card catalogs. Some museum curators are finding that visitors to their collections have very different descriptions of what’s in them than the curators themselves. Tagging enables them to unlock that consensus of critical opinion.

One panelist pointed out that tagging serves a hierarchy of needs and as you advance in the hierarchy, it becomes more important to tune in to the syntax that others are using. At its most basic level, tagging is a way to save information. As you move into community applications, it’s important to understand and adapt to standards used by others. It’s also important to become more thorough in tag selection so that you help refine content descriptions for others.

Tags can affect traffic to your own content. One panelist noted that his sister’s photos tagged “voyeur” get more traffic than any other photos, clearly because they appeal to a base human instinct.

They’re also a way to find out what groups are thinking. Look at these tags for an album by Kevin Federline. Does this tell you something about this artist? Incidentally, Amazon has moved into tagging in a big way as a means to help customers find products that interest them. In this application, Amazon is relying on other customers to recommend products through their tags, without the intervention of professional editors or retail professionals.