Lying is Bad, Posing is Criminal
Self-proclaimed “viral marketing agencies” be warned: the days of anonymously trolling blogs, seeding message boards and otherwise posing within the community of social media is coming to an end. That is, at least in the UK, which later this month will enact legislation under the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations aimed at regulating the use of such clandestine, faux word-of-mouse tactics.
Specifically, the following will now constitute a criminal offense:
Seeding positive messages about a brand in a blog without making it clear that the message has been created by, or on behalf of, the brand.
Using “buzz marketing” specialists to communicate with potential consumers in social situations without disclosing that they are acting as brand ambassadors.
Seeding viral ads on the internet in a manner that implies you are a simple member of the public.
Does this sound familiar? While I highly doubt the efficacy of government regulation to cure the problem, it is interesting that such measures have become necessary. According to Nielsen’s Online Global Consumer Survey (April 2007), 78% of internet users viewed word-of-mouth recommendation as the most trustworthy form of “advertising” (61% also cited online opinions, recommendations and reviews: effectively a genre of the former). Backed by the relative anonymity of the internet, it’s little little wonder then that some marketers (and/or their agencies) have overstepped common sense and good practice in their desire to influence the conversation around their brand while deluding themselves into the belief that such tactics can actually achieve real results.
In reality, clandestine and intentionally misleading tactics are not just bad practice… it’s poor and shallow strategy. In the worst of cases — the ones which likely and often motivate such thoughtless emergency intervention — anonymous rebuttals are as futile as spitting on an inferno. And in favorable cases it’s a missed opportunity. I’m not quite sure which is worse.
The rise of YouTube has been a particularly detrimental catalyst due to the site’s ambiguous URLs (which coincidentally was the enabling force behind the passé Rickrolling craze) and tantalizing, but prematurely counted, “views” metric. Armed with these two inherent devices, so-called “viral marketers” can deliver tens/hundreds of thousands of views for their client’s half-baked concepts simply by “pounding the pavement” and increasing the link base across the web. But there is a vast difference in the resulting growth curve — evidenced by an expanding spiderweb of connections — of truly viral content (the kind that actually merits, and is driven by, the desire to share) versus fooling 100,000 clicks that are effectively dead on arrival. Companies that intentionally mislead to spike the numbers, or hire unscrupulous henchmen to do it on their behalf, do not understand this essential distinction… and YouTube is really just one of many outlets for this behavior, fueled by baseless hopes for instant viral success.
It seems to me that the problem requires marketer education much more than market regulation — the market will eventually root out the bad and ineffective peddlers, assuming marketers care enough to properly screen the standards and practices of their brand ambassadors as they should. They need to better understand the data and community, define more useful benchmarks for success (in advance) and realize that there is tremendous value in openly listening to, participating in — and in some cases facilitating — the collective conversation.
[via WebInkNow]
