April 26, 2005

I stumbled across this little prize earlier today. According to Nick Lewis, CNN recently engaged in a rather unusual marketing campaign in the blogosphere. The campaign allegedly combined blackhat search engine optimization techniques, viral marketing tactics, and guerrilla comment spam.

Lewis makes a decent case for it in his blog, yet I couldn't help but wonder...who is this guy and is he credible? (Based on his bio, I'm a little skeptical.)

If Lewis is correct and CNN really is employing such clandestine tactics, shame on them. But what if Lewis is wrong? Will CNN's brand suffer long-term damage from such rumors?

Some might think this is strange coming from a Marqui employee since we pay bloggers to blog about us -- a decision that some have labeled unethical in its own right. However, we have always been very up-front about our objectives and tactics.

Reading through Lewis' post, three things come to mind:

1) Is the blogosphere really as self-cleansing as people believe?
2) How much longer can companies get away with ignoring bloggers when posts like these can spread like wildfire?
3) Given how fast the blogosphere is expanding, will companies be able to react to blogs effectively without using some sort of automated system? And is this sort of thing really unethical?

At any rate, if anyone can confirm or refute the CNN story, I'd be very interested in what you have to say.

Posted by at April 26, 2005

Comments

Nick Lewis email - nicklewis.smartcampaigns.com

You make some decent points. If I may defend myself on a couple of them, however. CNN never responded to my request for a confirmation or a denial, so as they've stayed silent, I've been forced to get to the bottom of this by other means. Unfortunately, those means were limited to researching questions such as

"Do the patterns suggest a person with an opinion that they want everywhere, a prank, or guerrilla marketers?"

"Is this campaign a viable solution to some of CNN's current challenges? Would it be something worth experimenting with?"

Through researching those questions, I've become convinced enough that this was CNN to stake a great deal of my reputation on it. Thankfully, though, this has created enough of a Buzz that we'll hear CNN's side very soon. I've been speaking with some interested journalists who are in a much better position than myself to get access to CNN. So fear not, real journalists are now on top of this.

So if there is any lesson from this that might be applicable to Marqui its this:

"Be responsive to any bloggers that are investigating your company. Especially when their allegations can hurt your corporate reputation. If you fail to respond, you're putting yourself at risk. (duh)"

Tracking the conversations bloggers are having about your company is not a difficult thing. Its called an RSS reader, and technorati watchlists via RSS (how do you think I found ya'll?). I might also recommend pluck to take advantage of their google perchs. The perches track changes in the results for any search. Its what I used to track the comment spam.

Tara email - www.marqui.com

Nick,

thank you for your timely and thoughtful response. Regarding your comment about the automated response system, should a company only respond to negative posts...or is it a better practice to respond to/acknowledge as many posts as possible? I think the latter is true, which gets to the magnitude/manpower issue. Although perhaps an automated system defeats the purpose...

T.

Nick Lewis email - nicklewis.smartcampaigns.com

The question is: "should a company only respond to negative posts...or is it a better practice to respond to/acknowledge as many posts as possible? I think the latter is true, which gets to the magnitude/manpower issue."

Well, I (along with any research being done about the blogosphere and PR) would warn that any automated response system would do far more damage to a company than good. Using an automated response system as a way to minimize the amount of damage that the blogosphere can have on a company's image will be as successful using touchtone robots to handle customer service calls (i.e. "if you'd like to complain about our employee's apperence, press one".) The message received by whoever complained, and whoever happens to read the complaint will be "Wow, I'm glad this company is so concerned about our opinions as to send us an automatically generated press release."

For me, clearly the answer for companies is not to automate the responses, but to automate the processes they use to listen. As I mentioned earlier, the amount of bad posts about CNN was remarkably small; had even one employee been given the task of watching everything being said about CNN, I don't think his job would have required more than 10 hours a week and that includes the time required to respond to every complaint. I'm serious about that. There is a tendency to see the blogosphere as in terms of huge numbers -- 10 MILLION WEBLOGS AND COUNTING. However, the fact is, most people don't bother to use their blogs to complain, or to laude a particular company. They are more interested in showing the world pictures of their cat. And actually, most people don't bother to update their blogs at all.

Nick Lewis email - nicklewis.smartcampaigns.com

There is no need for automated responses, because the amount of bad things being said about even CNN is relatively small. I don''t think I found any more than 40 posts that were critical of CNN. Which, I might point out, makes 12 posts with the spam look more significant, especially when you consider that the spammers avoided A-listers, Kos, and Free Republic; not to mention, not every blog has comments.

BTW, I think your sponsership program is a shinning example of how to market a company in the blogosphere the right way.

I''ll be sure to let ya''ll know how this develops.

Nick Lewis email - nicklewis.smartcampaigns.com

So to your question of whether companies should respond to both good a bad, I say both. Dave Sifry the CEO at Technorati (which, I might add, is a key service for anyone who wants to know what is being said about them)always responds to posts that mention technorati. I remember last summer, they had a fire at their warehouse, and I posted about it, and wished them luck. Within 3 hours, there Dave was -- in my little comment box -- thanking me for my concern and assuring me that they were doing everything possible to get the service back online. What was the result of that conversation? Well, me giving him good PR right here, almost a year later.

(sorry about this long comment, btw... I must write 10,000 words a day, at least...), so I guess, I''ll summerize this all in two sentences: The technology exists that allows companies to listen to everything that is being said about them, and in some ways, most of that technology is free. If you make an effort to let the customers know they are being listened to, and that you care, the returns in terms of loyalty, can be enormous.

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