Marketing Roadmaps

Susan Getgood

The Death of the Urban Legend?

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Are blogs the end of the urban legend?

Twenty years ago, urban legends were commonplace — among them,  the Mrs. Fields and/or "the department store" cookie recipe story, Kentucky Fried Rat and the little boy dying of cancer who collected postcards/stamps/pins etc etc. These stories spread in a societal version of the game Telephone. Some (the little boy) actually had basis in fact, but he had recovered from his illness long before the solicitations for help stopped coming. Others were out and out fable. They spread through viral networks, aided by the telephone, the early online services (CompuServe and BBSs), the photocopy machine and real bulletin boards in offices, schools and grocery stores.

A story becomes an urban legend when it spreads quickly and broadly without an easy method to verify the facts. The Internet has certainly changed the shape and nature of urban legends. For as long as it has been a mass medium, there have been Web sites devoted to debunking urban legends, and before that you could find the truth in Usenet news… if you knew where to look. But,  the Internet — e-mail — also contributes to the spread of the stories.

In the end, while traditional Web sites, a one to many channel, and e-mail, a one-to-one channel, can both spread and debunk the stories, they just can’t do it fast enough to prevent the legend from getting started.

I think blogs can. I don’t believe the urban legend is dead… yet. But today, I read some blog traffic that indicates that blogs may have created a profound change in the urban legend dynamic. The blogging phenomenon lets people communicate, and converse, quickly. Information can be spread among regular people and experts as fast as we can type. Yes blogs can spread a story — true or not — quickly, but just as quickly, we can get to the TRUTH. Before the legend really begins.

Witness this example:

Over Thanksgiving weekend, a number of blog reports surfaced about Target selling marijuana and other unusual products on their Web site. You can find examples of bloggers that initially believed the report as well as others that clearly understood it to be some sort of prank or technical error (see Boing-Boing). In the end, it turned out to be related to the fact that Amazon provides the back end to Target (Boing-Boing post, News.com story).

There are a lot of things you can discuss around this example — just search on the topic in the blogosphere and you’ll find plenty of discussion on everything from the intelligence of bloggers to Target’s PR strategy.

But, what really interests me about the whole thing is that a wild story that in the old days would have been perfect fodder for an urban legend was dead in one week.

Whatever else they turn out to be when they grow up, blogs may signal the end of the urban legend.

Grilled cheese and fish sticks

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And lions and tigers and bears, oh my. 

Fast on the heels of the 10-year old grilled cheese with the image of the Virgin Mary which sold on E-Bay this week for $28,000, we have a year-old fish stick with the image of Jesus Christ, reported today on CNN (TV, I still haven’t found any online coverage).

There really isn’t much to add to make these stories any funnier or more bizarre, other than I plan on eating my food a whole lot slower from now on. Just in case….

Ethics…

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Warning: today’s entry will be something of a rant, so if you aren’t in the mood, come back another day.

Okay, to the topic at hand: the new British video game JFK Reloaded. To quote Senator Ted Kennedy’s spokesman, this is just "despicable" (CNN’s coverage).

I can think of no good reason for this video game to exist, and the reasons given by the game manufacturer are absolute crap. I hope the market responds appropriately and no one buys it. 

But it got me thinking — someone has to be developing the marketing campaigns for this absolutely awful product. How do you put your head around marketing something so obviously offensive to so many?

In my career, I have marketed a controversial product. However, it would not have been possible for me to market, and defend, the Cyber Patrol Internet filtering software had I not believed that parents DID have a right to manage their children’s Internet access. And that schools and libraries do have the right, and perhaps even an obligation, to create safe spaces for children using the Internet in those venues.

Do the people developing and marketing this game actually think this is okay — to allow people to sit in the assassin’s shoes and pull the trigger? Is this a case of extreme cognitive dissonance, where they are just paid so much to believe it is okay, that any qualms they had are quashed? Or are their ethics so trashed that they market it even though they know it is just WRONG.

How can they not KNOW it is wrong? Have they forgotten that, although he was a public figure, Kennedy was also the brother, father, relative and friend to people who are still living? It is just not right to do something that will be hurtful to others in such a grisly fashion.

Coal in their stockings for Christmas this year.

More on blogs

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There has been a great deal of comment in the blogosphere about the fact that Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, was fined by the NBA about comments made in his blog. Here’s the link to his blog on the issue, and you can surf around for many more comments. My take — we will see more action on the part of corporate entities as they begin to understand the impact of web blogs.

To blog or not to blog…

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With the tremendous amount of publicity blogs received during the US presidential election, it is not surprising that more and more companies are wondering whether and how they should use blogs in their marketing programs.

Last week, I attended an excellent panel about corporate blogging sponsored by AMA Boston. Not surprisingly, the panelists were "for it" but they all agreed on some criteria for successful blogging (corporate or otherwise), with which I suspect many companies will have a hard time, at least initially. In fact, one of the panelists cited a few examples of horrible corporate blogging that have already appeared.

I’ll try to do justice to all the excellent presentations in summary fashion:

  • A blog should be a human conversation, show the personality, creativity and honesty of the writer — "word of mouth on steroids," "authentic," "chatting at the virtual pub."
  • A company blog needs to break out of the rigid style of formal company communication — written by and for real people, not the marketing or PR department ghostwriting it for the CEO.
  • Content is important but the real key is — does the community come and respond? The driving force is the audience.

(You can read more about the panel at John Cass’s PR Communications blog.)

One of the main things on my mind as I listened to the panelists speak was how to square this open, natural conversation, which sounds like a GREAT way to reach out to customers, prospects and other audiences, with corporate confidentiality. Particularly for public companies, but in fact all companies need to protect their proprietary information, brand and reputation.

We had a spirited conversation during the discussion portion of the panel, and the consensus seemed to be that companies should allow, and encourage it, but perhaps provide some additional guidance to employees that wanted to blog, much as they do for general corporate confidentiality.

Personally, I think this will become a major topic as the blogging phenomenon spreads into the corporate world and companies grapple with this just as they have other technologies that have changed the way we do business (web, e-mail, IM etc.) What if an employee blog inadvertently reveals information that affects the trading of the company stock? What about when an employee blog recommends a product that ends up causing consumer harm? Even if the company and the blogger are proved not at fault legally, the damage to brand and reputation could be enormous.

Dave Austin, one of the panelists wrote an excellent follow-up post on the topic: Telephones vs Blogging. I agree with him that the liability concerns aren’t reasons to prevent blogging, but they do seem to indicate, that companies should provide some guidelines to employees, without getting in the way. And as I said, we’ll be hearing more about this …

There’s another issue at hand, which is whether companies should actively embrace blogs as a marketing tool. This is bound to change the liability of the company for the posted material, so let’s distinguish among three types of companies in the blogosphere:

  • companies that simply allow employee blogs, perhaps with some reinforcement of confidentiality guidelines;
  • companies that actively encourage and (quasi) sponsor employee blogs, with the express intent that the blog help build brand, drive business, etc.;
  • a company blog deliberately created as a marketing tool.

When should a company more actively embrace employee blogs, either by encouraging employees to embrace blogging or by launching a corporate blog?

For blogging to work as a corporate communications tool, and not be false or stupid or disingenuous, I think there are two important criteria:

  1. The company must have an open communications culture, where information is valued and shared, not hoarded. Any company that is scared by the idea of an on-line technical support forum should not try a corporate blog.  If employees can’t find the suggestion box, virtual or otherwise, the company is not a good candidate for a blog. If there is any chance that the blog will become simply a press release archive, it’s not a good idea. And that is not to say that blogging technology can’t be used for your press release archive… if you are willing to get the comments 🙂 and are upfront about what it is.
  2. The product, service or idea creates a community of users/believers. For blogging to work, the audience has to engage in the topic, and like to read and talk about it a lot. That’s probably why there are so very many marketing company blogs 🙂 We are a pretty opinionated, generally articulate bunch. And a little bit of controversy never hurts either…

Anyway, I am going to keep thinking and reading on this topic. For now, here are two interesting takes on the topic: Seth Godin, Beware the CEO Blog and yesterday’s Future Tense with Jon Gordon: More businesses consider blogging