• by Bernice Kanner , David Verklin , August 2, 2007

Online chatter has grown too loud and too influential for companies to ignore

David Verklin addresses how online media is changing marketing paradigms in his new book, Watch This, Listen Up, Click Here: Inside the 300 Billion Dollar Business Behind the Media You Constantly Consume. In the following excerpt, Verklin and co-author Bernice Kanner examine the blogosphere -looking at the influence that bloggers wield, as well as how large companies are harnessing blogs to promote themselves.

A malicious "Dear Steven" letter posted on a billboard in mid-Manhattan caught more than Steven's attention. "I know all about her, you dirty, sneaky, immoral, unfaithful, poorly endowed slimeball," it ranted. "Everything's caught on tape. Your (soon-to-be-ex) wife Emily."

"Good Morning America" invited "Emily" on, British Glamour tried to profile her, and throughout blogville, antennae went up. Bloggers dug in and quickly deduced that billboards identical to this one beamed over Brooklyn, Los Angeles and Chicago, and Emily, rather than the victim of cheating husband, Steven, was the fictitious persona behind thatgirlemily.blogspot.com.

Faster than you could mutter blogosphere, the denizens of this new world also nailed the source and rationale behind the stunt. Court TV was promoting a new reality show, "Parco P.I." Even uncloaked as a publicity ploy, Emily's blog reeled them in (one million visited), a phony surveillance scene from it became one of YouTube's most viewed videos.

In the dark ages at the end of the twentieth century, corporations ran ads and bloggers blogged. Then, as companies increasingly saw their interruptive advertising wasn't penetrating, they ventured into the unknown territory of online journals where readers join in a back-and-forth conversation - and where the chatter had become too loud to ignore.

Marketers, however, consider it media that is finely, almost surgically sliced, the answer to their dream of selling Polygrip to the toothless. Because bloggers often talk about what they like and dislike, a cat-food company, say, can zero in on the feline-focused. And even though advertising inventory (freed from limitations of the page and the clock) is virtually infinite - and thus cheap - advertisers willingly pay more for highly targeted sites that are relevant for and interesting to the blog's audience.

Only two blogs get more than one million visitors a day. After that it's off the cliff: No traffic jams block the 10th-ranked blog, which gets on average only 120,000 visits a day.

The fractionalization of blogs belies their power. During the 2004 presidential election campaign, bloggers took down CBS' Dan Rather for going with what turned out were fake memos about Bush's Texas Air National Guard service on "60 Minutes."

Some companies, eager to join the party and make their brands part of the conversation, have sailed into the wild blog yonder by creating sections on their corporate Web sites that invite and respond to public comments.

            Other companies have tried to squash blogs that have invaded what they consider their zone. As soon as FedEx caught whiff of a blog in which an Arizona man displayed oddball furniture he'd fashioned from FedEx boxes, the carrier invoked provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to force the site down. Bloggers saw it as an unnecessary show of force against a company fan.

Other companies, less inclined to expose themselves to stinging criticism in return for a dialogue that could prove wildly beneficial, have tried to conceal authorship. They've created fake blogs and character blogs and paid real-life bloggers to blog for them.

For the most part, bloggers resent marketers masquerading in sheep's clothing to hide their ulterior motives, and bristle at their artificial language of exaggerated enthusiasm, which stands out against the personally written, conversational notes of most blogs.

Dr Pepper/7-Up's blog was one of the first to go sour. In 2003, to launch its new "milk-based drink with attitude," the company created a blog with Raging Cow's persona and courted young influential bloggers to hype the beverage. But Dr P. didn't want these brand advocates to divulge who was prodding them, and the would-be nefarious arrangement blew up when blogs exposed it.

Bacardi also came under fire for fronting a 21-year-old "Bacardi blogging dude" it paid in bucks and booze to share his (edited) line online. Everything about its BetterThanBeer site reeked of legalese; it had obviously been filtered through Bacardi's pr team and most of it was instigated by the marketer.

One area where marketers need no help is in recognizing that anyone, whether a peeved customer or ex-employee, can skewer their reputations and devastate their brands in the blogosphere. Dell learned this the hard way after Jeff Jarvis, on his BuzzMachine blog, documented a string of mismanaged e-mails and phone calls as he tried to get Dell to fix his malfunctioning computer. The open letter he wrote Dell calling its pc "a lemon" and its customer service "appalling" became the third most linked-to post in the blogosphere the day after it was posted.

But blogs can actually help companies. In September 2004, word raced through the blogosphere showing how Kryptonite's U-shaped locks could be easily picked with the plastic casing of a Bic pen. Kryptonite funneled the noise into an improved lock. Companies have used blog buzz to guide future product design, address what's on customers' minds, and fix a problem with the product. Surprisingly, blogs also seem to have cut calls to corporate help centers: Customers with problems often go to a blog they trust before phoning a company they're less sure about.