"Fool us Onc...": Why Social Media Renders Most Marketing/Advertising Worthless

When it comes down to it, most marketing/advertising (and a lot of public relations) in the modern era is about fooling people. Fooling them to infiltrate their social sphere to influence them, fooling them to thinking they need things that they don't, fooling them into thinking that one product is better than another.

So the model goes, you think of a new way to fool a bunch of people into paying for your product/service, they get wise, they stop paying, you think of a new way to fool them into paying for your product/service (and lather, rinse, repeat as needed). It's a dance.

That model is only economically-viable when you're able to fool a large number of people at once for a relatively low cost. In an environment saturated by ubiquitous technology and social media - that model fails because the costs and barriers change. Even if you figure out a way to game the system, the lifespan of that new tactic is extraordinarily short because people are now always networked and communicate with each other. The lifespan is so short that it's a fraction of the length of many advertising / promotion campaigns, so before you can even get the word out - the verdict from the audience is already in.

Here's how it works:

First, it's increasingly difficult to even find the people you need to fool. People are opting out of the traditional mass media in droves, so one must spend vastly more resources piecing together an audience of any considerable size. [Translation: Big cost barrier.]

Second, once you do find a way to reach your audience, they've become highly tribal and have set up discourse communities with increasingly-esoteric communication codes to police their membership. The time you'd invest learning the communication codes of a discourse community in order to infiltrate it isn't worth the comparatively small payoff of the tiny "Long Tail" audience you reach. [Translation: Big cost barrier.]

Third, even if you find the audience and learn their language - if you disappoint them (either with a product/service that doesn't meet their needs or that is inferior), you stand to lose them forever. Worse, if you disappoint them enough, they may tell their other tribes about you. [Translation: Big cost barrier.]

That's the bad news.

The good news is that there's a world of opportunity for good products/services (as Jonathan Coulton will tell you) provided by organizations that are responsive and accountable to their stakeholders, and the barriers are lower than they've ever been. There are even opportunities for big companies, provided they're willing to stop trying to fool themselves (and customers) into thinking that they can be all things to all people and they're willing to shrink down to the size that best serves their stakeholders. (Seth Godin just expounded on this point in his blog).

Balance Isn't Enough: How PR Makes Everything a Wash

As the traditional media continues to radically cut back on the quality of its reporting during the fiscal collapse of the industry, it opens a lot of opportunities for unethical manipulation (chiefly by public relations practitioners; especially in the context of the declining power of advertising).

This problem is not new, because the decline in the quality of for-profit journalism is not new. Slowly (and with the help of heavy lobbying from the media corporations) the wall of separation between the ad sales office and the newsroom has eroded. One of the consequences has been that we've come to accept news coverage that gives equal time to "both sides" as being "balanced," when nothing could be further from the truth.

The reality is that nice guys finish last in the concision-minded medium of the traditional broadcast media.

So in the debate over environmental policy, scientists and academics who are honest about the limitations of research and who do their best to do the most comprehensive analysis (which can make such analysis difficult to understand) end up losing out in the arena of the news media which provides a false equivalency between academic research and the sort of partisan, pay-for-play research used by interest groups in disinformation campaigns.

That was the conclusion reached by Eric Pooley, Fellow at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy (and former editor of Fortune magazine) from a case study he did on how a "Cap and Trade" bill was defeated with assistance from a grotesque public relations campaign from the National Association of Manufacturers, and the American Council for Capital Formation. He recently appeared on an episode of On the Media.

The study of a research model of the NAM and the ACCF was pitted against a meta-study of five different models by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). Pooley explains:

"These models, as I say in my paper, are not crystal balls. EDF said that right up front. You can't believe any one model - that's why they took the five best and put them together to see if there was some sort of rough consensus emerging - and there was. However, what their opponents have been doing is taking one very skewed report and pretending that they do have a crystal ball. [...]

We took a sample of 40 stories that explored the cost of it [cap and
trade]. We found that seven of them were one-sided - on one side or the other, 24 were balanced in a sort of stenographer sort of sense, it was the 'he said,' 'she said' opposition and then nine stories attempted to play what I call a 'referee' - calling one side or another if they were playing fast and loose with the facts. And that's my model for how you have to work a very contentious policy debate like this.

Reporters aren't getting the time on the beat that they need to master this material, and if you don't master the material you can't hold the combatants to any sort of standard because they will game you."

Given the current climate in the newsmedia, this situation may likely get worse before it gets better (especially at the local level where coverage has already been deficient for years). There is no clear solution to this problem. Certainly the medium of the Internet will continue to help individuals quickly brush up on complex concepts, but thus far it's not proven to be a cure-all.

[Read Eric Pooley's Case Study "How Much Would You Pay to Save the Planet? The American Press and the Economics of Climate Change"]

Fighting Back Against PR Spam

A few months ago, Wired Magazine's Chris Anderson blasted public relations companies for spamming him with irrelevant media pitches - echoing the sentiments of many other journalists. As an act of punishment, he also posted the email addresses of the spammers on his blog (thus opening them up to becoming targets of spam themselves from data-mining bots that would, ironically, deliver them to the lists of other spammers).

The move caused something of a stir in the PR world, as some of the domains blocked belonged to some of the biggest names in the world of public relations firms.

The issue has resurfaced again as blogger Matt Haughey has done the same thing, publicly admonishing PR spammers. The interesting note is that Gina Trapani of Lifehacker has had enough too, and went the extra step of setting up a wiki site so that journalists and editors can post the domain names of notorious public relations spammers to make the process of blocking that spam easier (as it can be directly uploaded into a spam filter's blacklist).

Though I work in PR, ultimately I side with the writers/editors. In this day and age, with access to the Internet and services like Bacon's online, there's really no excuse for the "shotgun" approach to press releases. Everything is personalized now (as the suffering broadcast and print media are learning) and the dinosaurs need to take note or slip further into the inky black tar pit of irrelevance.

Sure, it's tough as a PR pro to say 'no' to a client that wants you to blast everyone in the world with a release about their product (it's even harder to talk them out of a release altogether when they have something that is not at all newsworthy), but you have to do it for their sake and yours. It hurts your reputation and theirs to hit unreceptive audiences with an irrelevant message, which could turn them off to future messages from you that are spot-on.