2006.12.28
The Marketosphere
Suppose you’re out to buy a new car. You’re kinda partial to Japanese cars, and you’ve done a bit of research, and you’ve narrowed it down to two options:
- A Honda Civic
- A Toyota Corolla
Both cars fit your criteria. You just have to pick one. Here’s the $1,000,000 question: which of the following would pull more weight with you?
- A paid television advertisement for the Honda Civic, which highlights the excellence of its engineering and how fun it is to drive.
- A trusted friend’s informal, unsolicited review of her Toyota Corolla, which she absolutely adores and can’t stop gushing about.
If you picked B, you’re a winner. Or rather, Toyota is the winner, since you’re busy driving your brand new Corolla.
Here’s the catch. Everybody knows this. Even slow, lumbering multinational corporations have figured this out by now. And so the marketing departments now have some new pages in their playbooks.
Recently, there have been a couple of news items that illustrate the emerging trend of using weblogs as marketing tools:
- Sony has admitted that the website http://alliwantforxmasisapsp.com/ (seemingly now offline) was a fraud, created by a marketing firm that Sony hired.
- More recently, Microsoft gave brand new laptops loaded with Windows Vista to prominent bloggers as gifts. This action has caused at least one blogger to reconsider the ethics of accepting gifts from vendors.
Going back to the original question, there are two key phrases in option B that are the focal points of the new marketing plays: trusted friend and unsolicited review. By creating alliwantforxmasisapsp.com, Sony was looking to trade on the unsolicited review bit. Rather than having a slick, professional, corporate marketing website that just oozed Sony, they tried to create the illusion of an average Joe who was in love with the portable gaming device. On the internet, people sometimes pay more attention to weblogs that appear to be impartial than they do to the manufacturer’s own site. They’re looking for the real dirt, not the corporate line.
Microsoft was trying for a double-whammy – trusted friends giving unsolicited reviews. There are many bloggers who are rather influential with the tech set, and by giving them free review laptops with no obligations whatsoever, Microsoft was hoping that the bloggers would nonetheless feel obligated to write some sort of positive review of Windows Vista. These influential bloggers could easily have a significant impact on the general internet buzz surrounding the launch of Vista.
This whole mess has caused me a moment’s reflection about things I’ve blogged about. Just the other day I was raving about Solio. In my case, I didn’t buy a Solio, but it was a Christmas gift. Furthermore, and I’m sure nobody at Better Energy Systems Ltd. has even noticed that my weblog even exists, let alone has a positive review of their product. I don’t feel any ethical qualms since I’m fairly sure that the person who gave me the gift had no idea I would even want to write about it on my weblog. And as a personal thing, that’s the way I intend to keep things – all of the stuff I write is my own opinion. It hasn’t been bought via bribes yet.
Though I’m not sure I agree with the position Joel Spolsky has taken on the issue. Even without him disclosing the fact that by reading his weblog I’m indirectly contributing to the “Joel gets a Hot Tub fund”, I already knew that. I don’t trust him any less (or any more) for disclosing that, and I still take everything he writes with a grain of salt (as I do with information source).
I suspect that if people generally had better critical reading skills, this whole new frontier of weblog marketing would be less of an issue; the issue would still exist, though, since many weblogs are being written more or less anonymously, and it can be tough to even discover who the source is, let alone evaluate their trustworthiness or authoritativeness. Surrogates like Google Pagerank are helpful as a guide for assigning trustworthiness, but as with everything, the hard work is still up to us humans. And luckily for the marketing companies, that probably won’t change anytime soon.
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