ARGs and the Changing Face of Fiction Online

A fascinating pair of posts ran recently on two separate websites about the ARG (alternate reality game) marketing techniques around The Dark Knight (which, as it just came out in the UK, I have not yet seen.) The first post on Movie Marketing Madness describes in excruciating detail every piece of 'alternate reality' created by the Dark Knight’s agency. It is an amazing and exhaustive list: I don't think it's hyperbolic to state that this is probably the most complex and involved ARG to date.

The second was a post labelled [RANT] on sci-fi blog io9 called The Argument Against ARGs. I wouldn't even call it a rant: the author does a good job summarizing the basic history of ARGs (although the excellent ARG for Nine Inch Nails' Year Zero album isn't included, and it beats the socks off iheatbees) but outlines a very real problem with ARGs. Money quote(s):

I see nothing wrong with making advertising more fun, and there's no doubt that a lot of people enjoy playing ARGs. What I do have a problem with is the way ARGs seem to have no lives of their own – they feel like they exist solely to advertise another story. At least videogame tie-ins to movies are marketed as their own, standalone items.

With a few notable exceptions, ARGs are basically treated like walk-in commercials a lot of the time. But commercials can't really masquerade as games: It's foolish for entertainment companies to assume that they can get audiences to forget that they're being virally marketed to. And yet I think ARGs are temping as advertising campaigns because their structures inspire so many of the fan behaviors that media companies translate into instant dollar signs. But getting people to run around and do things is not the same as inviting an audience to enjoy a compelling narrative with a bunch of pals. So with an ARG I get a crappy cell phone instead of a cool fan community? ...

… [w]hat I'd like to see are ARGs for their own sakes — ARGs that involve fans not because they give away posters or free showings, but because they are genuinely compelling tales that you actually want to interact with. A best-case scenario for ARGs might be that they ditch parent stories altogether, becoming their own entities.

Emphasis mine.

This is exactly my problem with ARGs and why they may very well be the next great form of entertainment.

Allow me a digression for a moment. One of the best books I've read in the last five years is Mark Z. Danielewski's stunning House of Leaves, which is many things to many people: a very unique horror novel, a satire of literary criticism, and potentially 'just plain fucking weird.' The book itself is a labyrinth of footnotes that lead to more footnotes, different colors of text that may or may not have meaning, size and positioning of text, stories within stories and stories within footnotes. There's even a 'soundtrack' of sorts – the author's sister is indie music artist Poe whose album 'Haunted' is essentially a soundtrack for the book. Many of the track names mirror chapter titles in House and the title track specifically mentions 'this house of leaves' in the lyrics, and has other references to the book as well.

As I read House I began to wonder: how would this book work as a movie? Is there any way to translate these disparate elements, many of which are intended to be clues to discover the underlying plot, to an entertainment medium? My answer at the time (keep in mind, this was 2002 or so) was to release it as a DVD and include the footnotes / secondary stories as extra features accessible during the movie, or as a commentary track.

Which really isn't a bad idea, but doesn't really account for the full breadth of the book's rich puzzle and mystery. House of Leaves is essentially a mini-ARG in that it combines several elements to form a mystery with various clues. It follows a tradition of literary 'puzzles,' most notably modernist works like Ulysses and T.S. Eliot's poems, and takes it a step further by introducing a different world of magical realism and strange happenings, where houses can be bigger on the inside than the outside. A mini-ARG.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Cathy’s Book, an actual ARG and bestselling book by Jordan Weisman and others (full disclosure: I worked for Jordan's old game company, WizKids, and many of my friends for his new company, Smith and Tinker.) In fact Cathy's Book is exactly what the io9 writer was talking about: an ARG for its own sake, not selling a product. But even Cathy's Book just scratches the surface of what's possible with the myriad variety of content deployment mechanisms the Internet provides.

My job forces me to think about how to bring those mechanisms together to 'tell a client's story.' Storytelling is what PR really is, when you get down to it. Except online those stories are less about shouting at people or performing a play for them and more about involving them in writing the story yourself. Kind of like (nerd alert) running a roleplaying game. Although you have a goal in mind, the way in which you get there is based as much on player input (community input) as it is your own 'story.' The nonflexible gamemaster sucks, as does the nonflexible PR storyteller.

But it also affords massive opportunities to do exactly what Jordan did and what the io9 writer proposes to do. If 'all media is multimedia,' surely we gamemasters and storytellers should discover new ways to tell our tales online? And surely, purely from a storytelling standpoint, we can do that with ARGs for their own sake?

I pose this not as a marketer but as a writer: if literature is already becoming more gamelike and games are becoming more literary, doesn't it make sense for us to be thinking of this space not as a way to sell tickets to movies or things only tangentially-related to the ARGs that marketers create but as a new and unlimited canvas for us to start telling engaging tales to audiences who clearly want this sort of thing?

The ARG's future and its literary possibilites and implications are something to watch indeed.

Photo "Art Is Resistance - London" (from the Year Zero ARG) from Jennaphoenix' Flickr stream.

Those Who Get It (And Those Who Don't)

Last night was my first real introduction to my London office, where we all gathered for the 40th birthday of Edelman in the UK. Richard Edelman, whom I'd never met, gave a great presentation about the future of PR, which he referred to not necessarily as 'public relations' but as 'public relationships' - as good as way as any to codify where our industry is headed as online and new media begins to achieve greater and greater footholds, like it or not. It's refreshing to see the upper management at my company 'get it.' I also got to meet some people I've only known by name thusfar like David Brain, our European CEO (who also blogs.)

It was timely that on the heels of that presentation the Beautiful Competition sent me this article that made the rounds a few days ago while I was in transit, about a Quorum of Twelve (nerd alert) 'Corporate Bloggers' who got together to, in their words:

"Deliver a responsible and effective corporate message, but we need to do it in the complicated environment of the blogosphere. We have to speak for a corporation, but never sound 'corporate.' And we have to learn to do it live, and in real-time."

I don't take quite as dim (or to poach a term from the Beautiful Competition, obvious) view as Mashable did of the whole thing, but suffice to say my proverbial monocle fell out of my eye when I saw one of my former clients listed on the Quorum roll-call (ain't sayin' who.)

The optimist in me wants to think that the 'Blog Council' is what it appears on the surface - an effort to become responsible in the new marketing age. But the pessimist realist in me thinks it's more along the lines of what Mashable thinks it is: an attempt to try to control the so-called signal.

Not that there isn't a place for a unified corporate blogging code of ethics; far from it. In fact, an open declaration of transparency would give corporate bloggers a degree of accountability that they currently lack, except through the efforts of attentive online watchdogs.

But I suspect greatly that some of the other aspects of the council relate to some of the things I heard about last night - namely a token effort to participate in online 'conversation' that turns into something more one way. I'm willing to shelve my early opinions, as always, but I'm very curious to see where this is all headed.

Who Watches the Gurus?

I read on Mashable the other day about Gooruze, a "Digg for Marketers." Intrigued, I checked out the site which isn't so much Digg for Marketers as it is a specific Linked In / Facebook combination for New Marketers. I'm a little wary of new social networks - I'm on MySpace and Facebook and that's it - but I thought I'd give this one a try and I'm not sorry I did.

Gooruze has a lot of good things going for it. Pretty standard fare like your own blog and the ability to comment and rate other people's content, but you can contribute in three main different ways: asking a brief question to the community, writing an article for the community, and sharing news with the community. All of these can be commented on, and there's an entire Groups feature I haven't even begun to delve into yet. The interface is still a little wonky, but considering the site just launched on Wednesday the 17th I'm not surprised it's still in a 1.0 UI phase.

The value I'm taking away for Gooruze is threefold. On the most selfish level, participating in conversations there has affirmed a lot of my thoughts and feelings on blogger engagement and "PR 2.0." It has also lead me to a lot of blogs I probably wouldn't have discovered before and given me a lot more reading material and food for thought. And third, it's the closest to any kind of professional organization and network I've joined, and seems far more valuable than any "association" you join and pay monthly dues to so you can sit around and sip cocktails in some hotel ballroom every sixty days. Which is to say, it's the kind of networking and collegiate atmosphere I'm looking for.

I predict use of the site is going to explode and then level off with the good content starting to simmer to the top. I've encouraged my coworkers to give it a try, it certainly seems like a good thing to get into, even more so if you can get in on or near the ground floor.

How Not To Do Blogger Outreach, With Translation of PR Nonsense

I have never been contacted by a PR firm to get me to cover something on this blog, but some of my blogging coworkers have. One of my coworkers was recently contacted, although we're a little unclear as to why - he basically blogs about marketing and PR like I do, so the closest we can figure is these guys created a list of "communications/marketing blogs" and spammed them with the same form email, inserting their names and nothing else. Remember when I talked about individual communication? This is the opposite of that. The exchange that follows is priceless. Note that all names have been removed, as have all references to the company and product to protect the innocent.

Hey there [blogging coworker],

I have been bursting to tell you about [product] but I have been under embargo until the big press conference in New York this morning. Well, since the embargo has been lifted, both you and I are free to talk or write about [product] until we’re blue in the face, so here’s what [product] is …
[IRRELEVANT PRODUCT INFORMATION
If you’re as excited about [product] as I am and think it will appeal to the [coworker's blog] community [note: my coworker's blog does not have a "community"], I hope you’ll take a few minutes to let your audience know all about it.
Either way, we’re also letting bloggers into our private preview in a few weeks, so that you can have a sneak peek right before [product] opens to the public – but you’ll need to reserve your spot.
So let me know if you’d like to be added to our private preview list, and feel free to ping me if you have any questions.

Cheers,

[PR guy]

[PR guy's contact information]
P.S. If you want to learn more before checking out the social media release, here’s the official Press Release.

[press release pasted]

Um, yeah. So my coworker really doesn't have a "community" (as much as I love you Puppeteers, you're not a community either - not by the new marketing definition of the term anyway). And until he received this, he'd never heard of the product and "bursting at the seams" comes off as so disingenuous and fake it's not even funny (or rather, it is!) My coworker also figured out that the PR guy who sent this added him as a "friend" on Facebook about a half-hour before this email was sent, and did a little detective work to trace this back to an interactive PR company. So my coworker responds with:

Hey [PR guy] -- sure, would love to check out the preview, thanks for the invite. Not sure if I'll blog about this soon but I am interested in what you are doing.

FYI, I don't mind the e-mail, but might be better next time to send a private message via Facebook, since that is where you found me, instead of pinging my public e-mail address. If I didn't figure out who you were and who you work for, I might have felt "spammed" :-)

Best,

[Coworker]

Now here's where things take a turn for the strange. PR guy comes back with:

I see where you're coming from. I must admit that that is an issue I deal with because I try to maintain a "list" two which I send "pitches" and I am trying figure out the best way to make this happen so that folks like [NAMEDROP OF FAMOUS NEW MARKETING GUY THIS GUY ACTUALLY WORKS FOR] and you don't feel SPAMMED, but message you indeed were! I cannot deny that -- my only defense is that I only "spam" bloggers, who are public folks, anyway, and I try to be a little bit neighborly about it :)

Thanks for getting back to me, however!

[PR guy]

Well intentioned, but I'm guessing this fellow didn't ace writing class. My coworker sends me:

Okay, help me out -- what the fuck is he saying, that spamming bloggers is cool?

So I have a little fun with this. Here's my translation:

I see where you're coming from.

[Oops, you caught me.]

I must admit that that is an issue I deal with because I try to maintain a "list" two which

[Twin Acres Community College Education ahoy!]

I send "pitches" and I am trying figure out the best way to make this happen so that folks like [GUY] and you don't feel SPAMMED,

[I also spend a lot of time on 4chan, and I have no real clue what I’m doing as far as blogger engagement goes.]

but message you indeed were!

[This just doesn’t make sense. “Message” is not a verb as used here, and even if it was this still isn’t grammatically correct.]

I cannot deny that -- my only defense is that I only "spam" bloggers, who are public folks, anyway, and I try to be a little bit neighborly about it :)
[Fuck off, spamming a big old list of people I made up is easier than writing them all, but it’s OK because your email is out there publicly so I’m really little more than a spambot farming email addresses, but that’s OK too because I at least personalized the email with your name and created some folksy language that the Bush administration wouldn’t even use.]

Thanks for getting back to me, however!
[Eat it.]

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how not to do blogger engagement. I hope you had a good chuckle at least - we did.

The Life Toxic

After my last series of posts, I had a reader ask me a very good question: how do you deal with a toxic community? A community so entrenched in its negativity that anything you say or do with them will be turned around, thrown in your face or used against you?

Do such places exist? Are there really people out there who devote a good deal of their time online to complaining, albeit passionately, about something? Yes, there are. I've seen several varieties of these kinds of communities in my time. Here are a few off the top of my head. I've kept things general and intentionally not linked to anything, and none of these examples represent any of my current clients:

• A blog by an ex-employee of a company that claims insider information of wrongdoing, but offers no hard evidence. Any press release made by the company is dissected and twisted by the blogger, who claims to want "open discussion" - but blocks the company's IP addresses from viewing the blog, thus shutting out the institution they claim to want to change.
  
• A forum devoted entirely to how biased and unfair the moderators on another, much larger forum are, populated largely by people kicked off the larger forum for breaking rules.
  
• A blog devoted entirely to how biased one particular moderator on a forum is - with daily updates of the moderator's posts and moderating decisions, often deriding the moderator for his "stupidity" and bias.
  
• A forum created by a "clan" or group of gamers who were annoyed enough at the game company's decisions to change their game that they created their own forum where they could openly criticize nearly every decision the company made.
  
• A blog whose writers posts news neutrally, but then offer consistently negative commentary which is echoed by the community members, with comments often numbering in the dozens to the hundreds on each post.

Also, since I'm getting a lot of traffic from Fallout communities following my use of Fallout as an example, I need to clarify that none of those examples are a Fallout community.

So to my reader's question - how do you engage with a community like this? The short answer is, you don't. Period. Sometimes, there is no strategic advantage to engaging with a community so toxic and hostile that they have the time, effort and inclination to do nothing but be negative on the Internet, especially towards a company or a product. While it's true that there are companies out there that certainly deserve ire, consider the kind of person who would make a blog only to post about how awful a game company (rather than, say, a political figure) is and then update it constantly, regardless of whether anyone aside from a small number of like-minded individuals actually read it. That's the kind of mindset you're dealing with.

But rarely do communities get this bad, and a little research will typically be more than enough warning to avoid a truly toxic community. Note to fellow PR stooges: this is why you can't just do "parachute bloggerism" and expect results. You send your email to the wrong community, and they're really going to make you regret it. So step one is avoiding communities like this.

Step two is realizing that not all community members out there are this way. Nine times out of ten, there are other outlets for discussing a passion, be they blogs, Facebook groups, forums, Listserves or something else. Find those communities instead, and engage there. The toxic community members will either close themselves off further - in which case you lose nothing - or take an interest in engaging you outside of their comfort zone, on another site, where you have at least gained their attention. That's progress.

Step two and a half is what happens if there isn't another place to engage. This is not an either-or situation, and the image above comes from one of my favorite Star Trek references: the Kobayashi Maru, or the "unwinnable scenario." In Star Trek, a Starfleet cadet is introduced to a simulation where they are forced to choose between rescuing a ship in the Klingon Neutral Zone and destroying their own ship and killing their crew, or ignoring the ship's distress call and abandoning the people aboard to certain death. Kirk was the only cadet to ever pass the test (as of Star Trek II anyway) by coming up with a unique solution: he reprogrammed the simulator to let him win. The lesson of the Kobayashi Maru is that there's typically another solution to any seemingly dualistic problem - and in this instance, you have to fiddle with the community a bit to win.

I don't mean hacking into the toxic forums. Rather, create your own community. Not for the control over its members, but for the initial control over its content. This can be as simple as starting a blog where you have well-defined rules about low-content, hostile comments and delete such as necessary. Or it can be the creation of a forum where you start driving conversation, and let things evolve naturally on their own. Or - and I don't mean to bandwagon here - a Facebook or Gather discussion group was made for this sort of thing, and they're not that hard to create.

The best way to deal with a toxic community is to simply remove it from the equation. I don't mean ignore it, because often times a company's harshest critics can provide it with some of the best feedback. But there's also no reason to set yourself up for failure when engaging with a community that tends to be toxic. The fact of the matter is, it's just not worth it. Sure, there may be more of them than there are of your positive community when you first begin engaging - but that demographic will change over time. And the payoff is worth it.

Note: Thanks to Mike Reed's famous Flame Warriors for the picture above. Support his work, it's seriously awesome.

The Value of Engagement: Appendix

Brother None made a really good comment challenging something I said in my third post (and the Fallout 3 blog gave me a nice shout out too.) He raises an exceptionally good point, one I'd like to talk about here. Money quote:

The example of how to do modern community management and PR "right" is BioShock, and going strong at 1.5 million sales, it's shown to have worked...

And there's there real puzzling bit. How is Bethesda doing it "right"? They're doing exactly, and I do mean exactly, what you advice PR people not to do in your first posts. They made their press packets, they sent them out, and they're getting their hyped-up posts, on over a 100 sites and magazines that I've seen.

It's all cut and jib stuff. In the meantime, the community FAQ is the only bit of real interaction given, and it was indirect and slowed down, and failed to create any significant buzz anywhere (it had only about 400 posts on their forum, compared to, say, the 800+ posts on NMA's preview).

The bolded bit is the important one, and upon further reflection I think he's right, or very nearly so.

2K did do some of same kinds of things with BioShock, at least in the very beginning. It had a showing at E32006, which kind of kickstarted the campaign, and there were articles in magazines. But otherwise, I think Brother None's point stands. Through a function of writing a post at three separate times and trying to reign in thoughts that are evolving, I didn't articulate exactly what I wanted to say in the third post, so let me make an addendum.

Bethesda is doing some things right. They still have a year or more develop their program, and the "20 community questions" is a step in the right direction, but thusfar their interest has been in engaging traditional media rather than engaging the community on an individual level. And, as BN notes, that could end up being an Achilles' heel as the chatter in the community becomes more negative.

I'd rather not dwell on what they're doing wrong, but instead make some (free - my agency might kill me for this) suggestions about what they can do to improve.

• Engage transparently on their forums. A lot. A community manager should spend 60% - 80% of his time engaging with the community. Even if he isn't answering questions about Fallout 3, he can be talking to fans about things. Post-nuke books and movies. Wasteland. Shared experiences. Favorite beers. These are the kinds of things that show you're not a PR stooge, you're a person.
  
• Engage on other sites. Yes this is hard because you won't be in your own playground anymore, but make accounts on Duck and Cover and NMA. Roll up your sleeves and get into the discussion. Be ready to be called names - this takes a thick skin - but get in there and do eet.
  
• Here's a novel one and Brother None will no doubt enjoy this. Offer to do some guest posts on the Fallout 3 blog. It can't hurt.
  
• Set up a Fallout 3 Twitter. Twitter is now so popular that the White House has a Twitter you can follow. Whether you'd want to is up to you, but you can do it. It's easy, and it's a good way to stay in touch.

That's not a comprehensive list, but this isn't a new business pitch either so I can't give away too much for free.

It's going to be very interesting to see how this develops over the next few months. I'm definitely going to revisit it from time to time, not only because it's a topic of personal interest but it's a very interesting test case.

The Value of Engagement, Part Three: Taking It To the Community

For context, see my first post about the value of both listening and talking to the community and how it differs from traditional PR, and my second on how engaging with blogs is only the first step in online marketing. I concluded with this:

I have said before we need to figure out "how" to do this - frankly, we know how. It's a challenge dealing with individuals, but that's how you have to do it. It really is throwing out the old rules of engagement (to use CC Chapman's description) and not so much writing a new process as dealing with things on an individual level. You can no longer spam a press release to 500 people, get 100 hits and call it a success. But one good post on a forum related to your target audience, where 500 interested and passionate individuals might see it - now you're cooking with gas.

Engagement of individuals is where this industry is heading, and this is especially important to agencies. I've thought more about what I was asked that initially sparked this entire train of thought. While engaging with blogs is within our area of expertise, engaging with so-called "top tier" blogs isn't much different than engaging with a magazine. By "top tier," I mean the blogs that have grown to begin replacing print media - the Engadgets of the online world. I do not mean this in a negative way; it's the natural progression of things, and a PR professional would be a fool to ignore them. In fact, I've seen people in my agency on the traditional PR side begin taking ownership of outreach to these blogs and relationships with the bloggers/reporters there - which makes perfect sense as well, because talking to these bloggers is a lot more like talking to traditional media, except things happen in "Internet time," something that really requires an entire post of its own to explain.

But going back to the main thrust of the two previous posts, the underlying "thesis" here if you will, its actual individual engagement with community members that offers the potential for the most value. When a blog like Engadget covers something, dozens if not hundreds of other blogs pick it up - and the news often gets posted to specific forums dedicated to whatever the item is. For example, if Engadget covers a new cellphone it's a shoe-in that cellphone enthusiast forums are going to pick up on the post.

So why go on those forums to talk to the community members there, if they're already getting their news (or if you've got an online agency sending them news?) What's the value in that? The answer to that question is what I've been trying to set up - that the value, although somewhat immeasurable by "traditional" means (hits, key message playback, and so forth) lies in the emotional attachment to the brand and the feeling of investment created in the community by such interaction.

What ho! says the traditional marketer? Isn't this also an opportunity to control our message, to disseminate and throttle and control information as well?

Well sure, I suppose. But there's an underlying disparity in how the traditional marketer views information flow and how the new marketers (should) view information flow.

• Traditional Marketing Wisdom: Engagement is how we control information, revealing only what we want and when we want and not worrying about transparency.
  
• New Marketing Wisdom: Engagement is about transparently providing context to information, whether that information has been released by "us" or not.

Transparency has been a major point of discussion in the marketing blogosphere in the past, and something I've weighed in on myself. But "context" is word I've been thinking more about recently. Context implies framing information in a certain way, but in a transparent world context is the next logical step in the sharing process (the "opinion" of the Opinions section, to steal from my first post.) I realize "context" comes close to "influencing information," but that's not the way in which I'm using it. Context should be providing more information to make the information that's out there make sense.

So how does this work exactly? From my own personal experience at WizKids, it involves someone (me) watching forums, answering questions, recognizing when the community may have missed something or simply doesn't understand what you've said for whatever reason, and then trying to address it. But from a professional standpoint I'd like to look at what was originally going to be a couple of examples from the video game world, but has since kind of melded into one big example. Transparency declaration: the examples involve a game that is due to be released on the Xbox 360. I have not worked on the Xbox 360 account officially since the end of June, and the last billable work I did on the account was long before that, but I needed to say it anyway just so there's no confusion.

The game is Fallout 3, and (transparency again) it is a franchise I have been involved with for 10+ years if you count chatting on the Wasteland forums on Prodigy. I wrote the original Fallout PnP back in college, I worked on the d20 Modern translation that will never see the light of day, and I've been involved with the community from a fan's perspective since 1999 at least. And I've posted before about Fallout and the various things Bethesda was and wasn't doing to engage with the community, including the "Community 20 Questions" in that last post.

Engagement. Engagement never changes. Bethesda runs a pretty tight ship on their own site, and they have been focusing the lion's share of their engagement efforts thusfar on both traditional gaming media like Game Informer magazine and gaming-related websites like IGN, Kotaku and so forth. Fallout has a really active fan community - No Mutants Allowed and Duck and Cover being the two largest and most active - that even before Fallout 3 were announced, some eight years after the last Fallout game shipped, were still receiving dozens of posts a day on their forums. Let that sink in: eight years since the last product shipped, and the community was still more active than a good deal of communities dedicated to current games / products. How's that for a dedicated and invested fanbase?

Bethesda's engagement efforts, though, did not include that fanbase - at least initially. The reason they gave, and this is not a bad reason, is that they wanted to focus more on gaming sites and magazines. A company with limited resources needs to choose its battles, and the gaming press can have a major impact on how well your game sells, especially when you're investing a "metric shitton" (official measurement) of money into producing a game. You need to make a profit, so your game needs to sell to a wide audience.

OK, cool, and Bethesda has said they plan to engage with the community at a later date. The "20 Community Questions" were asked and answered. And Bethesda asked the fans themselves "what do you want to see us do to interact with the community moving forward?" But in the midst of all this, some community members decided that the promised future outreach wasn't enough and secured an interview with Pete Hines of Bethesda at the games convention in Leipzig. They did this by "becoming" members of two European gaming sites, and then publishing their interview / demo impressions on No Mutants Allowed, which the Fallout 3 blog reported on as well (along with many other outlets too numerous to link to here.)

The language used in the post on the Fallout 3 blog is telling: the two reporters / community members were "intrepid ninjas," and their operation was, in the words of Fallout community manager Matt "Gstaff" Grandstaff, "Very sneaky indeed." It's important to note that Brother None, in announcing the interview, doesn't use language to denote that he was being sneaky at all - but he does note (quite importantly) that while he and the other community member were allowed into a demo, a NMA member who registered as a member of NMA was not.

There's a lot of things to learn here, not the least of which is: in an information vacuum, community members can go to great lengths to get information being kept from them - and to actively seek out engagement with company representatives. Brother None and the NMA crew were certainly within their rights to do this, just as Bethesda is within their rights to react to it in any way they choose (and it seems that the interview kind of forced Bethesda's hand on community interaction, which in my opinion is not a bad thing - see an interview with Pete Hines about community for more information.) Another thing that one must keep in mind is that even members of the most traditional media can be bloggers, and what appears on a personal blog is not subject to the same standards as a press site, let alone a traditional media publication. Rather than rattle off a list, I will simply mention that to my knowledge no blogger or community member has been successfully sued for libel or slander over something written on the Internet (feel free to correct me in the comments if I'm wrong, and I'll update.) Even though a community member may be a reporter (or in my case, a marketing stooge) they're still community members with opinions, passions and a love for the product.

It's clear that Bethesda is doing a lot of things right insofar as community interaction. Proof positive of this is their dedicated Fallout Community Manager, Matt "Gstaff" Grandstaff. One of the most impressive online gaming-related campaigns I've seen recently was the frenzy whipped up by 2K for BioShock, and I'm not the only one: the Hollywood Reporter did a great article on it. Money quote, as quoted on the Fallout 3 blog:

“As with, say, science fiction movies or other genres that are considered ‘cool,’ fans tend to look at marketers as ‘clueless suits’ who hype everything,” says Bass. “We knew we needed to be careful to do things in a way that was cool … not to build hype but to build buzz. Especially when we started marketing the game two years before it was finished. I mean, how do you go out on the E3 floor and say you’ve got one of the greatest games ever made when there’s nothing for anyone to see or play?”

Rather than label “BioShock” as “the next big thing,” Bass decided to create a Web site into which he could keep releasing assets to show — not to tell — how good the game would be.

Bass makes a very important distinction between hype and buzz, and one that will probably be the subject of a future post. Hype is something that builds expectations. Buzz is something that builds awareness. And the tricky thing about expectations, especially in the gaming space, is that they're very easy to create and very hard to live up to. When you create buzz, you accomplish your goal (selling more units) while still keeping the trust of the community because expectations aren't out of control. By all counts, BioShock was a great success and even though there were some hiccups around launch time they seem to have been ironed out and the community is that much stronger for it.

Neither Fallout 3 nor BioShock would be driving the kind of buzz they're driving (and drove) simply by engaging with blogs. Both stores - one evolving, one almost over - are examples of interacting with the community as individuals, and the "value" is clear. You can begin to win over a negative community, and you can create the kind of buzz that turns a hard-to-sell game into a success.

I will be the first to admit that this strategy won't work in all cases. If you're selling dishwasher soap, chances are there isn't an invested community out there interested in discussing dishwasher soap. But there very likely is a community out there that's passionate about some aspect of your product (maybe your soap is good for the environment, or fights germs better than other soaps), and finding those communities is the key.

Which brings me to the end of this series of posts. I've thought of some other things I want to talk about, but they will be more appropriate in other places.

And if you read this far, I'll give you a cookie.

The Value of Engagement, Part Two

For context, catch up with The Value of Engagement Part One.

So in the last post, I alluded to engaging with blogs as not the destination, but the first step in online marketing. So where does it go from there? What's at the end of the river, and where does the rabbit hole lead? More literary references and mixed metaphors?

This isn't comprehensive by any means, but if the Internet is the next evolution of media then the Opinions page really is the precursor to online conversation, whether that conversation is taking place on a forum, in a newsgroup or in a blog post's comments section. The analogy isn't perfect; you could make the case that the Talmud is an extremely long community dialog between Torah scholars, for example. And it's true that newsgroups predated actual news websites by several years. But even in those mediums discussion had a logical starting point, whether it was an interpretation of the book of Genesis or early discussions (with spoilers!) of Return of the Jedi.

Of course, I was a little late to the party by Usenet standards, rolling into the party at 1990 or so when I first dialed into Prodigy (my 2400-baud modem was too fast for the phone lines in the area, so we had to dial it at 1200 baud.) It's also worth noting that I beat the Long September by almost three years, but more and more that's no longer a point of pride as a point of "oh Christ, I'm old!"

BBSes followed soon after, but Prodigy was my first real taste in real-time online conversations, and not coincidentally I was discussing games online with other gamers. My game of choice was Wasteland, still one of my favorite RPGs, and what made discussion on Prodigy awesome was that a representative from Interplay occasionally signed on to discuss the game with us. I still remember that first taste of online marketing - if you can call talking with fans of a 2-year-old game marketing - and how inclusive it feels when a company representative is talking to you directly.

That's the taste I tried to bring to WizKids when I engaged fans on the forums there. Sure I was the guy who dropped hints about new characters in coming sets to "chum the waters" and get them excited about what was next, but there's also a certain value to being able to interact directly with a company representative. One of WizKids more mercenary brand managers rightly called it an "added value," and I absolutely believe this is true when broken down into its simplest (IE, Business 1.0) form - online interaction is adding value to the end user experience.

OK, online interaction? What the hell is that? Let's do a step-by-step:

1. Get on the Internet and find sites related to what you're talking about / selling / marketing / whatever. This is also the time to figure out things like how often people on those sites are talking. You want to make sure, at least at first, that you're hitting the most active sites. Ideally these should be sites created by the company, but we all know it's not a perfect world.
2. Create an account if necessary, then start interacting.

Easy peasy. Maybe what I didn't say is more important. Note these not-steps:

-1: Email the blogger without an introduction sending a press release.
-2. Spam a forum with a press release or announcement with a zero-post-count account (one you just created just for that purpose, and you'll never use again.)

These seem really really obvious to me, but for the 99% of traditional marketers out there, they want to wring their hands and go [DRAMATIZATION] "why? Why must I do this? If I have to spend all this time actually interacting with my customers, when will I have the time to create workback schedules and smarm up with reporters? When will I have the time to flood my coworkers inboxes with step by step accounts of the useless old marketing strategies we used today?"

I kid, but there is actually a massive debate occurring in new marketing circles about this very topic right now. A few weeks ago, a popular and "influential" blogger in England named Tom Coates, who runs PlasticBag.org, was outreached to by a PR rep to sell something even though Coates didn't want to be solicited for anything. Coates himself blogs about social media, and attacked the problem from a social media angle - by creating a post and a now-famous Flickr image to make it very clear what happened and his stance on further solicitation. This was really the opening salvo of the debate.

Edel-colleague Simon Collister in our London office made an excellent post about this topic the other day, and weighed in with the following opinion - one I agree with 110%:

So... [two penneth alert] for me the issue is two-fold: it's retrospectively about how the PR industry is missing the point about the social web and going forward how PR can engage with the online environment properly.

Firstly, the PR industry misses the point with the social web/live web/blogosphere/whatever because it is far too process driven. PR people are ever used to writing a release, creating a media list and blanket mailing it out. This is partly the problem at the heart of Tom's predicament... [snip]

However, working in an online social environment the PR industry needs to abandon process and adapt to working in a networked world of individuals. This invokes real effort, spontaneity, trust, genuine dialogue with real people. It's the stuff PR should have been about from day One but which got lost in the world of mass communications.

It would mean that PR people would know who Tom is and know not to appraoch him. Tom is vociferous about not receiving press releases from people/companies/etc but other bloggers aren't.

But it also means more than just pitching bloggers which is really a glorified version of media relations, but media relations done properly.

PR done in the real way of the social web will - and I say 'will' because we haven't got there yet - mean companies (both PR and clients) being social. That way there will be no crow-barring of bloggers and social networks into horrible mass marketing campaigns. The social worth of an organisation will be there for people to choose to engage with from the outset.

The problem is, of course, that this requires giving over control of the campaign to the 'crowd' and that is a huge wrench for most marketing and PR types. This means that their beloved 'process' is taken over by other people - YIKES!

Simon hit it out of the park with this by articulating something I've felt and attempted to implement for a long time. It's an uphill battle, because we're literally fighting decades of tradition - lazy tradition, the worst kind. The kind of tradition that doesn't want to change. The kind that says "this is the way it's always worked for us in the past, why should we do anything differently? Or my favorite label for it, dinosaur tradition.

Frankly Coates' case was just the beginning. This July at the BlogHer conference (a conclave of women bloggers, mostly but not exclusively mothers) the women there voiced this opinion, and last week as I was composing this post professional colleague Kaitlin Wilkins posted the "Blogger Outreach Code of Ethics" at Ogilvy PR's blog (source: link from a coworker on Friday.) They label the below as "take one," and I agree there needs to be some refinements (but I work for the competition, so others' mileage may vary!) but the code as it stands is:

• We reach out to bloggers because we respect your influence and feel that we might have something that is “remarkable” which could be of interest to you and/or your audience.
  
• We will only propose blogger outreach as a tactic if it complements our overall strategy. We will not recommend it as a panacea for every social media campaign.
  
• We will always be transparent and clearly disclose who we are and who we work for in our outreach email.
  
• Before we email you, we will check out your blog’s About, Contact and Advertising page in an effort to see if you have blatantly said you would not like to be contacted by PR/Marketing companies. If so, we’ll leave you alone.
  
• If you tell us there is a specific way you want to be reached, we’ll adhere to those guidelines.
  
• We won’t pretend to have read your blog if we haven’t.
  
• In our email we will convey why we think you, in particular, might be interested in our client’s product, issue, event or message.
  
• We won’t leave you hanging. If your contact at Ogilvy PR is going out of town or will be unreachable, we will provide you with an alternate point of contact.
  
• We encourage you to disclose our relationship with you to your readers, and will never ask you to do otherwise.
  
• You are entitled to blog on information or products we give you in any way you see fit. (Yes, you can even say you hate it.)
  
• If you don’t want to hear from us again, we will place you on our Do Not Contact list – which we will share with the rest of the Ogilvy PR agency.
  
• If you are initially interested in the campaign, but don’t respond to one of our emails, we will follow up with you no more than once. If you don’t respond to us at all, we’ll leave you alone.
  
• Our initial outreach email will always include a link to Ogilvy PR’s Blog Outreach Code of Ethics.

Overall, I agree with what they're trying to do here and think this serves as a fine reference point for conversation (and others agree - see Jeremiah Owyang's post for more.) I'm not sure this goes far enough to address the point Simon so elegantly made in his post:

[W]orking in an online social environment the PR industry needs to abandon process and adapt to working in a networked world of individuals. This invokes real effort, spontaneity, trust, genuine dialogue with real people. It's the stuff PR should have been about from day One but which got lost in the world of mass communications.

The Code still treats online PR as a process rather than working in a social network of individuals. In a network - in the "real world" - there are simply things that don't fit into a structured set of rules, into a process.

I have said before we need to figure out "how" to do this - frankly, we know how. It's a challenge dealing with individuals, but that's how you have to do it. It really is throwing out the old rules of engagement (to use CC Chapman's description) and not so much writing a new process as dealing with things on an individual level. You can no longer spam a press release to 500 people, get 100 hits and call it a success. But one good post on a forum related to your target audience, where 500 interested and passionate individuals might see it - now you're cooking with gas.

Next post: the rights and the wrongs of community interaction, from a couple of case studies in (what else?) games.

The Value Of Engagement

I had an interesting discussion yesterday with a coworker who asked a common question when dealing with the folks here in EIS: "what value are you adding?" If I had a dollar for every time I've heard that, I'd have a lot of dollars.

But underlying that question is a sentiment that lies at the heart of both PR today and specifically what I do, and where I think we need to go from here. We (meaning, the New Marketing folk) have trained the traditional marketers to see the Internet as something of which they need to be aware, and in which they need to participate. That's good, but it's only the first step on a long road and unfortunately it seems that more and more, traditional PR practitioners see it as the destination rather than that first step.

The traditional PR "comfort zone" modus operandi is this:

1. Examine product or service and create a catchy strategy for getting people exited about it.
2. Call or write or email (aka, "pitch") magazine or newspaper with catchy product idea. This can be a clever press release, a press kit that may or may not relate to the product itself, or a "product sample" that the reporter can play with and then choose to keep. Or a combination thereof.
3. Set up an interview with the reporter, where the PR person prepares the company's spokesperson with a series of questions the reporter could ask, the important things the spokesperson needs to talk about, and a little bio about the reporter that details what the reporter likes and dislikes.
4. After the interview, the reporter writes the story, and PR provides them with images, answers follow-up questions, and so forth.

I realize I squeezed a lot of traditional PR know-how into four sentences and obviously glossed over some things, but if you reduce the total to four main components, it would look something like that.

Traditional PR people like that because it's safe and controlled (to a certain degree), but more importantly they can measure the value in such a thing. Another way of saying "what's the value" is "what's the ROI" (return on investment.) That's a marketing and advertising term that bled its way into PR after people realized the importance of our industry, and advertising and marketing people started migrating over to PR jobs. ROI can best be expressed by an equation:

ROI = ((X*Y)^Z)/A, where X is the number of stories about a product, Y is the tone of those stories measured on a standard scale, Z is the circulation numbers of the publications, and A is the "investment" in time and resources (AKA $$$) spend on securing the coverage.

There's a reason people like this method: it's quantifiable, it's trackable, and in the end you can present hard numbers to a superior (or an auditor) and say "look at what we did with our budget!"

Author's Note: I was not a PR or business major, so I'm sure someone who studied this stuff will correct me on the formula and definitions above - but the spirit of it is correct.

So when faced with the Internet and "the blogosphere," it's not surprising to see traditional PR people looking for something sane and familiar. They see blogs and think: "blog = news outlet, blogger = reporter" and want to engage and measure appropriately. Several times I have run into the question, "why are we planning on outreaching to this blog when this other, completely unrelated blog has a much higher readership?"

Here's the thing: this really is the first step in a much larger process, and "success" should not be measured by the number of stories appearing on blogs and the total readership of those blogs. Why? Because that isn't where the interesting things are happening on the Internet. Sure, you should try to get bloggers to write about your stuff, but what's really interesting is in the comments sections in the blogs, and on the forums and newsgroups and email lists where real people are sharing their opinions of the product. The real measure of success isn't stories, it's sales, and you can have all the great stories in the world - but it ain't the reporters who are going to line up to buy your product. It's the people doing the commenting, the people engaged in the conversations.

Here's another way to look at it: when I was a tyke, I read two sections of the newspaper every morning, the comics and the Opinions page. The comics because they're funny, and they were still publishing Calvin and Hobbes back then. And the Opinions page because it was the most interesting section of the newspaper. Who wants to read the news, when you can read what people think about the news? What gives you more insight into your community (I use that term here to indicate "the town in which you live") - news about your town, or what the people in town think about the news about your town?

Of course, a lot of bloggers put their own opinions into stories, which is good - and it's one of the things that differentiates them from traditional news sources. Just like in literary studies, there's kind of an unwritten rule in blogging: if you're quoting a source (say, an article you picked up somewhere else or a song you're posting), then you should write at least as many lines discussing the quote, if not double the number of lines. It's a rule I haven't always followed, but it's one I try to follow as best I can, and many other bloggers do too.

But like the Opinion pages of yore, the most interesting perspective of the online community is in their discussion of goings-on. At WizKids, I used the community's reactions to identify short-term problems but also long-term trends, which we could then use to adjust our overall strategy. It's definitely an investment in time, but it's one that companies would do well to invest in more often.

UPDATE: Next post in series: the current debate about how to engage bloggers, and why it doesn't go far enough.

The End of the Flat Blogosphere

Via The Stranger, a fairly high-concept story on the new liberal blog Open Left about "The End of the Flat Blogosphere." While it is very much a deconstruction of the liberal/progressive blogosphere, the lessons here apply to blogging in general - especially blogging as a form of social networking. Perhaps the best way to compare what the article says about blogging today is to see what it says about blogging in 2002:

Back in late 2002, there was a nearly universal, structural format for progressive blogging, that centered around the following five, ubiquitous characteristics:

1. Individual. A single writer produced virtually all of the front-page content. Group blogs were extremely rare.

2. Independent. Five years ago there were virtually no "official" blogs for electoral campaigns, party committees, politically focused news outlets, think tanks or advocacy organizations. Whatever blogs were around were independent of established media and political outlets.

3. Hobbies. Five years ago, political blogging as a profession simply did not exist. Advertising was non-existent on progressive, political blogs. Fundraisers for the proprietors of blogs were extraordinarily rare. No one blogged full-time and no one used blogging as a primary source of income. Blogging was a hobby that operated almost entirely outside the market economy.

4. Limited Communities. Comment sections were not moderated in any way, shape or form. Registration was never required to post a comment. Opportunities for reader generated content, such as diaries, were limited. Comment threads were sparse by today's standards.

5. Less varied and original content. Original reporting and research almost never took place. Multimedia options such as video were equally rare. Guest posts from prominent media and political figures were unheard of. There was comparatively little in the way of direct activism on behalf of candidates and causes. Overall, at the time, content in the political blogosphere could be accurately characterized as micro-punditry on current events that was driven almost entirely by reporting from established news sources.

To get the state of the blogosphere today, basically reverse those ideas. However, the writer acknowledges that the "long tail" of the blogosphere - about 95% of blogs - still follow the above rules, but the "short head" tends to do the opposite. The short head, in this instance, are giant blogs like Daily Kos that comprise a relatively small part of the 'sphere, but constitute a great majority of its traffic.

The term for large blogs like that in PR circles is "influencers," bloggers whose stories are constantly picked up on smaller blogs - the "head" influencing the "tail" if you will. I'm actually not entirely sold on the author's comparison to the long tail, because that's really more of an economic model of profits that doesn't always accurately describe what's occurring on smaller, more personal blogs, but it's a minor point. The insights about the changing nature of the blogosphere are certainly worth checking out.

If you're worried about the liberal bias, you can just substitute "conservative" for "liberal" and "Free Republic" for "Daily Kos" and the article reads exactly the same.

"Radical Transparency" and Me

I have to admit, last week's little kerfluffle over blogging and transparency made me think far more than I thought it might. And not think in a "well, that's interesting" kind of way - it really created the kind of existential crisis that I typically only face every couple of years. And rather than shy away from the abyss, I stood my ground, stared back, and I feel as though the flames of Internet discussion have tempered me a bit.

It wasn't the notion of Radical Transparency (discussed in the issue of Wired in question, and on Chris Anderson's blog here and here) that caused the crisis - but what resulted from it was that I had to redefine what transparency, radical or otherwise, means to me and my job.

Two things caused me to really start thinking. The first was a comment on Frank Shaw's blog, reproduced here unedited:

Dude, somebody needs to wipe that candy-ass :) off your lyin' face!

The sad part of this business is that PR guys like you have sold your soul to the man, and are too smart by half.

You lie for a living. In the old days, that meant you would burn in hell for eternity. Now it just means that you can take home a fat paycheck.

You look in the mirror & what do you see? That :). Yuck.

The second was something Seth said to me in an IM discussion. I didn't save the transcript, so it's not exact, but he said something to the effect of the perception of many people is that PR is an inhibitor to communication. Referring of course to the "spin factor" - call it lies if you wish - people associate with the term "PR."

Taken together, I sat and stewed on this one for a while. Not long ago, I sat in on a meeting with Edelman's Corporate PR team - the guys you call when something really bad is about to happen, like a product recall or something. I asked them point-blank if they would ever turn down a potential client who was obviously guilty of something pretty terrible (the answer, incidentally, was yes.) But before that, they told me that it's important to keep in mind that everyone deserves equal representation - everyone deserves to have their side of the story told.

The answer really didn't sit well with me. I mulled that over on the way home last week, after reading about the Wired kerfluffle for most of the day. My belief in the American system notwithstanding, aren't there some douchebags who are better off just ignoring? Perhaps it was the fact that, just a few days prior, I saw the slimy defense lawyer on Battlestar Galactica use that exact same phrase to explain why he would defend Dr. Baltar, who was responsible for assisting the Cylons in their destruction of the Twelve Colonies - and then later responsible for collaborating with them during the occupation of New Caprica (I'm a geek, deal with it.) But one of the awesome things about Galactica is that it shows us Baltar's side of the story. He was an unwitting accomplice before the attacks, because a Cylon was using his hubris to gain access to information. He kept his involvement a secret for fear that the survivors would simply shove him out the nearest airlock. On New Caprica, it is certainly possible that he was collaborating because he thought it was the way to save more lives - the Cylons had superior firepower and any attempt to fight them on a mass scale would have resulted in a lot of deaths - possibly the deaths of all on the planet. It's a utilitarian argument, but a plausible one.

But seriously, is that the best defense I have - that I'm like the guy defending Gaius Frackin' Baltar (I warned you I was a geek) because "everyone deserves a chance to tell their side of the story?" Well sure, on one hand, that is true. It's the foundation of the American justice system for fuck's sake. But on the other hand, people tend to form opinions that are very hard to change. When you read something that presents a point of view from only one angle, you're more likely to agree, especially if you don't have a previous opinion about the subject matter. And if you've already formed an opinion that's similar to that being expressed in the story (X is evil, or Y is good) then you're even more likely to agree. I simplify, of course, but it's basic human psychology.

But it's not the best defense I have. What Seth said stuck with me, and I thought about it more in the context of what I used to do at WizKids: I was the guy who was responsible for entering information into the HeroClix figure gallery. I was the guy who put out press releases (and wrote them.) My job was to let the community know what was coming in future HeroClix releases, because it got them excited. Did I have to break bad news? Sure. But I did it honestly, in a straightforward manner, and I'd like to think they appreciated me for that.

So the dissonance here comes from what I do and the perception of what I do: I don't inhibit information flow. If anything, I facilitate it. And I use that term in its true definition, not the "new business" definition - I'm not going to petition to change my job title to "Information Facilitator" anytime soon.

However.

As any HeroClix players reading this site can attest, we didn't simply dump every bit of information out into the community. We announced expansions at a certain time so it wouldn't deflect interest from current releases. We trickled information about set contents to keep people interested. We knew what people wanted to know most, and we knew we could drive traffic if we held back a couple of days on posting that information, so we would (Superman anyone?)

More importantly, there were things that were never discussed in public. We never released the HeroClix point formula, and to this day no one has accurately cracked it. This occurred for two reasons: if we released it, people could simply create their own dials (or try to "correct" our dials), and second, it was WizKids' intellectual property and probably worth quite a bit of money to the right people. Games are a competitive business. Nuff said.

Nor did we discuss other internal goings-on: meetings where we decided what conventions we would attend, how to reorganize things to meet our budgets, and which people in the company argued for various sides to those questions. Why? The public simply doesn't need to know that stuff. There is no benefit whatsoever to the public at large seeing that information.

On a more personal note: look around the blog you're reading. You can make some fairly accurate assumptions about me here based on information I have chosen to share. I like comic books, and specifically Groo. You can see things I've taken pictures of. You can see my friends and interests by reading who I link to. You can see what music I've listened to most recently on my laptop. You can tell when I'm playing my Xbox 360, and when - exactly - I've reached certain points in certain games. You can tell I have cats, I'm married, and get a vague idea of where I live.

However, you will never see other kinds of information here. You won't know before or while I'm taking a vacation - only after. I don't want you to know why my house is empty. You won't know my exact address. You'll never learn my phone number, because I value my privacy (just ask some of my former WizKids pals, who were woken one morning by a gamer calling their house to ask them rules questions for the MechWarrior game.) You won't know when my wife and I fight. You won't know if I'm looking for a new job, because people from my office read this blog (it's OK guys, I'm not going anywhere.)

Why? Because that information isn't relevant to the discussion occurring here. Sure, some of it shapes who I am - from my experiences in the long run to my current mood - and there are people who share all that information online. Bully for them. But for you, the reader, it's simply not relevant.

And that's basically where I arrived. Chris Anderson, as much as I agree with his Long Tail theory, needs to acknowledge that even "radical transparency" has its limits. There are nods to this in the print issue of Wired - he notes that Coca-Cola probably shouldn't publish its secret formula online - but there are simply things that are not relevant to a conversation. In other words, there can be - can be - such a thing as "too much information."

Not that Anderson's underlying idea about radical transparency is necessarily a bad one. There is something to be said for a CEO blogging about his doubts about business decisions - traditional thinking says it will spook the investors, lower public confidence, and damage morale. And those things may be true. But it also creates a rapport with the public in ways that no amount of traditional PR or advertising ever could, ever. But I'll bet that the same CEO does not blog about specific meetings, publish every memo or email he writes, or mentions when he waits a couple of extra seconds on the elevator to watch a shapely intern walk by. Because that information simply isn't relevant.

One response might be "well, selectively sharing information isn't really being transparent at all, is it?" And the simple answer is: I don't know. Transparency, radical or otherwise, isn't defined and it certainly isn't quantified. It's certainly not extreme, as many of the community members who commented on Frank Shaw's blog viewed it (and, I suspect, many in the community would view it - tell us everything, damn it!) And there is a lot of information out there now. The Internet is, basically, a neural network that represents the sum total of all human knowledge. If you want to find information, you can do it. MSNBC can run up to five scrolls of stock reports and news tickers at once. Football games are full of statistics, cameras and microphones on the field are now the norm. As Lewis Black said, "the only place left to go is to put a camera up the linebacker's ass to see what he had for dinner last night."

A cynic might say it's disingenuous to talk about transparency in the same space as talking about choosing which information to share and not to share. Is that any more disingenuous than selling an issue of Wired about being "transparent" by putting an extremely airbrushed model on the cover? Perhaps. Perhaps I'm simply rationalizing this in my head, and I'm wrong. But somehow I don't think so.

After all, ten years ago I could not have conceived of working a job where I wouldn't have gotten fired for posting what I just wrote - as many of my readers perhaps can imagine as well. And I sit here ten years later, encouraged to think about - and blog about - these kind of things by my supervisors.

Information facilitation. It's what we do.

David Lynch On Product Placement in Films

Although certainly not being discussed at the moment in the same way PR efforts are, marketing and advertising efforts to place products in films and TV shows is a far older discussion. If you can spot a product in a movie, chances are the company paid to put it there.

My favorite director weighs in:

Via MeFi. Incidentally, the interviewer is wrong: this isn't a "growing trend," it's been going on for years.

By the way, one of my favorite solutions for a movie that couldn't receive any product placement offers, Repo Man:

Image comes from an interview with Repo Man director Alex Cox, which contains the story of the awesome generics.

On Viral Marketing, the PSP, and the FTC

There's been some interesting buzz lately about viral marketing, due in no small part to the efforts of a marketing company linked to Sony's PSP handheld. The basic recap is this: a website goes up that claims to be a blog started by an 11 year old who wants a PSP for Christmas (or maybe his friend wants one - it really doesn't matter.) The kids post in "kiddiehip" AOL-style speak, and they've made some kind of rap video that went up on YouTube (but has since been removed.)

A little Internet Detective work by fellow goons on Something Awful uncovers something rotten: the domain is registered to a marketing company called Zipatoni - not exactly the 11-year-old that the site claims to be owned by. This starts to get pickup on video game blogs, and it's pretty clear to everyone that the site is a fake. Oddly enough, the name "Zipatoni" is banned from the site's comments as a "curse word."

Well, Sony eventually owns up to their shenanigans - two days after the news about the site being a fake hits. In online marketing time, that's an eternity. When the fellows are Penny Arcade are using terms like "do irreparable damage to their brand", you know you've got a problem.

The problem, of course, is transparency. In a coincidence worthy of of Charles Dickens, the FTC ruled on the same day that the blog started getting notice that "WOMM" (Word of Mouth Marketing) needs to clearly state its source. For example, you can't make pseudo-kiddie blogs without stating clearly that you're a marketing firm representing Sony.

The accounts on which I work at my firm are very strict about transparency in word of mouth marketing; it's been a policy for as long as I've been there. At WizKids, although it was never a written policy, it was one I adhered to (hell, one I developed) for one simple reason: if you want someone to trust what you have to say about a product, then you better not give them any reason not to trust you.

The shift to online and WOM marketing means that the days of claiming something to be true and it isn't are over. Between Internet Detectives and the kinds of news cycles online communities generate, you simply cannot afford to be deceptive in your marketing practices. Studies are starting to show a shift in how customers make buying decisions about products: rather than advertising, traditional news stories, or even product reviews in magazines, they are turning to online communities to gauge reactions of trusted influencers to a product in which they are interested. In nonmarketingspeak, people are going online and reading - if not outright asking and talking about - the opinions of others online that they trust. If a company wants a chance in hell of being part of that influence, they need to be able to demonstrate that they aren't jerking customers around, which is what transparency accomplishes. There are also legal boundaries, of course, but beyond those reasons for transparency, trust in a customer base strikes me as a far better reason for a company to maintain transparency in its online communications.

I'm working on two separate accounts now where transparency is a daily need (incidentally, I'm not working on the Xbox account or any other product that could potentially compete with the PSP at all at the moment - just to maintain the spirit of disclosure.) If you're reading this as a new marketer, don't just pay lip service to transparency or make it a policy because it's legal. Make it a policy because you need to in order to establish trust with online influencers.

Also, this would be an excellent opportunity to give a nod to Managing the Grey, a new marking podcast that Seth introduced me to. If you're interested in new marketing, you need to subscribe to that podcast.