In the past few years, corporate communicators have repeatedly been caught speaking as if they were unpaid customers or fan reviewers. Such practices are labeled “astroturf”—that is, fake grassroots. Few examples of astroturfing angered people more than a 2006 campaign from Zipatoni for Sony centered on “All I Want for Xmas Is a PSP,” a site portrayed as the creation of two teenage fans to convince their parents to buy them a Sony PlayStation Portable gaming system for Christmas. When gamers discovered that the videos from the blog were hosted on Zipatoni’s servers, the site was outed as astroturf. This discovery made the site “viral” (at least in the sense that it made those who came into contact with it sick), as myriad gamers saw the situation as an example of Sony’s disrespect for the gaming community. Marketers profiled the site as a “worst practice” example; watchdog groups highlighted the campaign as an example of the need for greater regulation of corporate marketing; and journalists and bloggers used the story (as we do here) to highlight missteps made by major companies (Snow 2006).
However, many examples of astroturfing are not so blatant. Take another now-canonical “lesson learned” from the public relations world: public relations firm Edelman’s collaboration with Walmart in supporting the website “Wal-Marting Across America.” A couple bought an RV and planned to blog about a trip around the country to visit their respective children. In the process, they realized that Walmart parking lots allowed for the free parking of RVs and decided their experiences could provide a unique look at the country. Since the blog series would fundamentally be about their experiences at Walmarts, however, the couple decided to contact Working Families for Walmart, an organization started by Edelman on the company’s behalf, to ensure they had the right to move forward with the project (Gogoi 2006a). Edelman and Walmart not only gave permission; they offered to support the couple, providing another RV and funding a much wider journey than originally planned.
While the impetus behind the resulting blog was truly “user” driven, Walmart and Edelman did not disclose their intervention, save a Working Families banner on the couple’s site. Thus, when bloggers and watchdog groups discovered Walmart’s and Edelman’s involvement, both the retailer and its public relations firm were the target of significant scorn. Many marketing bloggers were particularly upset that Edelman, which had been an industry leader in defining appropriate Web 2.0 strategies, would make this misstep (Gogoi 2006b). While the blog and the couple’s interest had not been fabricated, the situation was a reminder that astroturfing includes not only blatant lies but also initiatives that fail to be completely transparent.
The ethical questions that corporate communicators and audience members both face are crucial and demonstrate the challenges of a hybrid world where goods and media texts move fluidly between the logics of commodity and gift economies. What types of tie-ins or relationships must be made public? Clearly, corporate communicators pretending to be audience members or brands paying fans who speak favorably without disclosing that relationship violate the implicit contract of spreadable media. But what of bloggers who are reviewing a product provided to them by a company or fans being rewarded for their commentaries or promotional work with access to creators? In reverse, were professional marketers participating in the fan activities around Mad Men examined in the introduction inauthentic as fans because of their dual identity as marketers, as Deep Focus intimated? Did they have an obligation to be up-front from the outset about their professional identities?
Numerous questions such as these have led to consistent appeals for governmental regulators to intervene. In the U.S., the Federal Trade Commission updated its guidelines to require disclosure of paid relationships in 2009, sparking discussion among marketers and bloggers alike. While most agreed on the general need for policing unscrupulous behaviors, some bloggers questioned how to handle many of the less clear issues that could lead to their violating guidelines unknowingly. Online journalists questioned whether overly restrictive rules could target too wide a swath of online commentary in the interest of prohibiting unscrupulous behaviors. And some industry leaders felt that government-mandated rules rather than industry guidelines and self-policing could lead to overly onerous restrictions that would create a chilling factor among marketers. Do the guidelines encourage companies to persist in a broadcast-era mentality for fear that collaborating with audiences could lead to legal vulnerability?
What’s certain is that media producers and brands are becoming increasingly cognizant of the potential for profit and promotion in embracing “spreadable media.” However, there exists a strong need for a more nuanced discussion of the economic implications behind Web 2.0. Already, prominent communities are finding themselves increasingly barraged by marketers looking to create a “viral phenomenon” or to generate word of mouth. The “mommy blogger” community, prominent Twitterers, and active fan discussion forums are now on the target lists of marketers and public relations professionals tasked with “reaching out to influencers.” While paid journalists are monetarily compensated for their time liaising with corporate communicators, many of these audience members maintain their blogs out of social rather than economic interests: because their contributions are valued within their communities. As more brands want to foster community and “join the discussion,” brand managers, internal marketers, and the agencies and industry associations need to become better informed about the implicit and sometimes explicit assumptions audiences make about corporate participation in these conversations. Likewise, fans, bloggers, gamers, Twitterers, and other online community participants need to develop a more nuanced understanding of the implications of their new entanglements with advertisers and producers.
We Don’t Need Influencers
While public relations professionals have accepted that they can no longer just think about journalists when hawking their wares, some now contend instead that there exist a few elite members of any given community who—if convinced of a brand’s message—can convince everyone else to follow suit. We argue throughout this book that content creators need to pay attention to the audience’s agency in circulating content; however, we are not claiming that so-called influencers are more apt to be effective at circulating content than the rest of us are. In fact, the influencer is one of the major myths of the Web 2.0 world. In The Tipping Point (2000), Malcolm Gladwell based his theory of the influencer on the now well-known “Small World Problem” study (Milgram 1967; Travers and Milgram 1969), in which, through multiple experiments, Nebraska and Kansas residents were asked to get a letter to someone in Boston by passing it through social contacts they thought would be closer to the eventual target. Famously, among those instances when the letter successfully transferred, it took an average of five exchanges to get it to its intended target, or “six degrees of separation,” as it has now popularly been labeled. In his use of these studies, Gladwell emphasized that the letter eventually reached its intended target through the same few friends in most cases and argued that these “influencers” were ultimately the ones who needed to be engaged to reach the target audience.
Since Gladwell made this argument, the “influencer” has been emphasized in countless marketing case studies discussing why the attention and endorsement of key audience members is crucial for success. The argument is that the best way to reach anyone in a community is to find the few prominent people who influence most of the members. In particular, the language of the “influencer” has been used often by public relations professionals to justify the importance of reaching beyond traditional journalists to bloggers.
However, Peter Dodds, Roby Muhamad, and Duncan Watts (2003) tested such thinking by asking more than 60,000 people to reach 18 “target persons” in 13 countries by forwarding an email along to an acquaintance who might know them. Their study found a median of five to seven steps for the message to reach one of its intended targets (reinforcing the “six degrees” concept), but they did not find any evidence of “influencers.” As summarized by Clive Thompson, “[Watts] found that ‘hubs’—highly connected people—weren’t crucial. Sure, they existed. But only 5% of