Astroturfing Like It’s 1999
Wow, what a difference a day makes. I felt bad after I stalked out of the blogosphere yesterday, but the real-world subsequently got very interesting. Among other signal events (that I’ll hopefully be able to reveal soon), I also talked for a solid hour with a Wall Street Journal reporter about “marketing in the social media era.”
In the course of the WSJ chat, the subject of the Comotion Group’s scandalous TechCrunch post came up. The scandal came from Dan Ackerman Greenberg’s admission of some “clandestine marketing” tactics on YouTube:
Every power user on YouTube has a number of different accounts. So do we. A great way to maximize the number of people who watch our videos is to create some sort of controversy in the comments section below the video. We get a few people in our office to log in throughout the day and post heated comments back and forth (you can definitely have a lot of fun with this)…
Also, we aren’t afraid to delete comments – if someone is saying our video (or your startup) sucks, we just delete their comment. We can’t let one user’s negativity taint everyone else’s opinions.”
Ugh. Sound familiar? FWIW, a lot of Greenberg’s OTHER suggestions in the TechCrunch post were pretty darned good (and ethical). Anyway, it’s been widely covered. But, here’s what got me scratching my head: when the WSJ reporter asked me…
How were the tactics described by The Comotion Group all that different from the tactics used by The Blair Witch Project producers, in 1999? Didn’t that campaign generate a lot of positive buzz, ostensibly by duping people online about a fake mystery?”
We agreed that nowadays, the vast number of interconnected online sleuthers would quickly ferret-out the truth about a Blair Witch-style campaign.
But the question remains: if someone was clever enough to pull off the same type of stunt, would we applaud as we did back in 1999? Or would we hiss at the lack of authenticity?
My take: most folks don’t mind going along with a joke; they’ll participate in online scavenger hunts, for example, even if they know they’ll be purposely misdirected at times. But no one likes to play the fool, especially as our time seems to grow ever more precious.
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Thanks, all, for the thoughtful comments.
Jen, I tend to agree most with your take (including the fact that there may be too much nuance for us all to grasp it!)
Interesting discussion here, but let me provide a perspective on Blair Witch, a project that has never been properly (accurately) fully documented.
Full disclosure: I am the co-producer of Blair Witch, and one of the 5 (former) college students from Orlando behind the whole thing.
While we were building out the website and the community, we always knew we were walking a line, but we decided we were not going to try and hoax people outright. The regular members of the Blair Witch community, the people who lived on the forums, communicated with us regularly, built fan pages and went out into the world and buzzed about the film all knew it was a work of fiction, even before we premiered at Sundance in January 1999. We used to send out a production email newsletter to fans where we talked about the making of the film, and we did stories in the media leading up to Sundance were we discussed how the film was made (NY Times, Filmmaker Magazine). When the film was sold at Sundance, a full seven months before the theatrical release, pictures of the actors and stories appeared in publications from Premiere Magazine to Entertainment Weekly to local newspapers. We were not trying to fool anyone.
What we were trying to do, is create a world online that continued the “real” aesthetic of the movie, and allowed people to play in that world. Most of the fan sites that popped up played with this aspect — people created sites to further investigate the mythology, some even created Private Investigator characters and added their own twists to the mythology.
That being said, a lot of people thought it was real. Many, many people would come to the site, scare themselves silly, find out it was fiction and then send all their friends to the site, telling them it was real to give them the same scare. Those who investigated, found out the truth, but the buzz spread to many more people than actually visited the site, hence many people believed it was real.
The BW experience was never ultimately about fooling people, and that’s why very few people actually felt betrayed by it.
As for the difference between Blair Witch and Lonely Girl 15, I think that the LG creators allowed the “is this real” question to overshadow the story they were telling. The mass attention went from people involved in the story to people trying to figure out who was behind it.
But probably the biggest difference is that Blair Witch was constructed in a way that you didn’t identify or invest in Heather, Mike and Josh as people — they were already dead and the audience was piecing together a mystery that already took place. The fans of LonelyGirl felt they had a relationship with the character, they communicated to her and she responded back to them. They were all part of a community, so when it was revealed that she was a fiction, people felt betrayed because they were emotionally invested in her.
If you are going to walk that line, you have to be respectful of your audience and their emotions. People love a good prank, but they don’t like to have their emotions manipulated falsely.
I never really looked at LG15 from the eyes of the young girls who got emotionally involved. As a college student during the BWP, I started following it before it was revealed to be marketing. After the hoax was up, it actually got me excited about the movie. I guess with LG15, I thought people would be excited about a new form of entertainment, an innovative new use of the media.
In terms of entertainment, we will see more interactivity (see NewTeeVee article: http://tinyurl.com/2j4vsh). In terms of marketing, we have to continue to remain transparent. I think we also have to move away from quick entertaining videos that contain messaging, but actually engage people in a conversation with our clients through new video strategies.
Great Discussion, btw!
Wow – I just didn’t like the movie, and actually got my money back.
And, truth be told, it stank back then and it still stinks now. Manipulation is manipulation, no matter what year it is.
Michael, thanks for the clear, thoughtful response. I was (downright shocked and) thrilled that you stopped by and took the time to clarify those far-off events. Sounds like ya’ll took the right approach (even for these more demanding times), and the success your team had with that first film speaks for itself. Thanks again.
Hey Todd,
Fun topic, no? Let me ask you (and the audience) if there’s a huge difference between what The Commotion Group is doing with videos, and what every SEO/SEM firm operating on the web is doing with text or links? Gaming organic results, right?
What about parallels in other mediums? Having “fake” comments and multiple people “in” on getting a controversy started around a video is a little like having a laugh track on a sitcom, don’t you think? It’s there to infect the audience and get them invested in what they’re seeing.
I don’t know…the SEO/SEM industry is probably the closest parallel to what happened here, and no one is up in arms about how they fix search engine results. They’re not even an open secret anymore.
Joel – Mainstream media journalists have solved these problems many decades ago. They at least, in spite of some other faults, draw a line in the sand regarding “advertorials”, fake letters to the editor, and so forth.
If your client has a valuable, beneficial, infotaining product, you won’t need to resort to dubious “gaming the system” practices to promote and sell the product.
Google has destroyed PayPerPost and all artificial, contrived “word of mouth” campaigns are doomed to fail, backfire, and cause more ill will than success.
Laugh tracks on sitcoms are so stupid, I can’t see how anyone would think that’s a good idea. If you think your audience is so dumb, they need a laugh track to provoke genuine laughter and enjoyment, how lame is that?
Fake comments and fake user accounts, culminating in fake blogocombat and fake audience creation is for idiots and crap products.
Great points Todd. I feel your pain on this one. We all know this can be a successful method in generating buzz but at what expense?
Myself personally, I feel transparency is key and call it moral fiber…I just can’t professionally drop down to this level. Besides not wanting to, I think my time would be better off discovering another blog, reading an article on PR-Squared, or picking up the phone and creating a conversation.
The buzz around Blair Witch was exciting back in the day, hearing from a friend of a friend that it was real, but if you did any amount of REAL research, it was obvious it was not. As for LG15, its just sad, so very, very sad people went to those lengths.