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Open Source Word-of-Mouth Advertising
An anonymous reader writes "Plenty of corporations are willing to hire shills to generate buzz for a new product. But what people don't need to be paid to promote?
Boston company BzzAgent found that their volunteers promote products simply because it makes them feel good. The NYT Magazine interviews several 'agents'. The volunteers cite the feeling of being 'on the inside', like sharing opinions with others, and enjoy feeling altruistic. Has Madison Avenue figured out what open source developers knew all along?"
exposure may be the thing that hurts many people trying to spread their product. Although linux was held in high regard among many people for a long time, a good majority of the mainstream populace are still unaware of it simply because mainstream people are fed mainstream media.
+5, Truth
Just look at the evangelism of some of the gentoo users. They are completely dedicated to spreading the word. On some OS or Tech News sites, there are few distro related posts that doesn't have a gentoo disciple posting a follow up about the superiority of their distro. This would be massive free advertising if some commercial product would get that kind of devotion.
Alternatively, instead of going for word of mouth you could just shamelessly push your product on Slashdot pretty much every post you get, doing your best to sound on topic and/or karma whore in the hopes of getting modded up into visibility. I know I've seen plenty of people trying that strategy around here. Maybe you should give it a go - it might work for you to...
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Firefox has been a 100% grass-roots effort to date. SpreadFirefox.com, the site devoted to informing people about Firefox's benefits over IE, has 35,000 members, basically volunteers that provide free advertising.
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Everything is not well though. They are being a little too secretive about the status of the NYT ad, which garnered $250,000 from the community. Threads have begun to pop up about what exactly happened to the ad, and some people are starting to whisper "refund":
http://www.spreadfirefox.com/?q=node/view/4700
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=172
http://almostsmart.com
Anonymity is crucial to any Bzz campaign. If the word gets out that one member of a community is covertly foisting products on the rest, a general sentiment of deceit smites the social atmosphere. I feel that, although this is a perfectly legal, dare I say brilliant, marketing system, I would make it a point to rout out and publicly humiliate any Bzzers I discover.
then they'll advertise it for free depending on their means. Otherwise it's going to take a paycheck. If I don't like a product enough I'll negatively advertise it.
If there is a cost involved with advertising the product then of course someone is going to consider whether they will demand a fee or not depending on how much they like or dislike the product.
If a rich person really likes or dislikes product A then they may spend a million bucks advertising it because they want to. This happens in politics often. A local millionaire spent a lot of money campaigning against a recent proposition. Other rich people campaigned for it. If a modestly wealthy person likes product A then they may seek cheaper avenues to advertise such as basic word of mouth or print ads.
This isn't late breaking news or anything that has to do with Open Source. This has been public knowledge since forever. Word of mouth is the cheapest and best advertising and you can only get it from people who like your product enough to talk about it.
Every company seeks to get word of mouth. This is why they have occasionally steeply discounted or free samples of their product. A limited number of people buy it because of the price point and then advertise to friends and family who then may pay a higher price for it after the sale ends.
Work Safe Porn
This is not open source "advertising".
Its about a corporation using people's time and effort to further its bottom line.
(ooops. that does sound like open source)
Read the article. The main reason people are doing seems to be as quoted in the story, not that they ARE trendsetters....but they would LIKE to be trendsetters.
So people trying to be cool are being used by Corps to hock their STUFF in a most unseemly way to me (IMO).
Why unseemly? I'll give you a example. Let's say I am throwing a party, its a pot luck and everyone is supposed to bring over a casserole or other dish.
If a bzzz agent brought over "Lenner's Sausages" and starts to extol the virtues of said meat links... i WOULD THROW HER ASS out of my party.
I invited my guests over to relax and forget about the world NOT TO BE SOLD TO.
Isn't it enough with billboards on roads and product placement in TV shows?
Now they want guest and friends to sell me shit?*
*And no, i don't care if they really believe in the shit they are selling, there is a fine line between a friends reccomendation and a sales pitch. These people cross it.
Oh and can we stop apply the ever-so hip "Open source" to everything?
Cheers,
Ian
Buzz Marketing has been around for a long time. Books like the Anatomy of Buzz have been out since 2000 and have be subsequently refined conceptually into defining who people listen to by books like The Influentials or more geographically with books like Hub Culture.
It's not really that big of a deal. Buzz marketing is just another way of saying a product web of trust, and Slashdot is perhaps one of the better examples of buzz marketing I can think of.
Let's see in the last few days, people on Slashdot have mentioned Firefox and Thunderbird, AbiWord. and other programs. There are even whole sections - Book Reviews - that are essentially a form of buzz marketing.
The problem that people have is when this is disingenious. Slashdot deals with this by giving you the negative buzz too - anyone here going to rush out and buy a Treo 650? I know I'm not - and I'm thankful to the guy who posted the comment so I am aware of the problems of the new Treo.
Bottom line: buzz marketing - so long as it is accurate, is offered by someone you trust (or forum or what have you) and is appropriate given the circumstances (posting about a bad product experience on Slashdot for example) is not necessarily a bad thing and is often quite useful and good.
Hearing about new restaurants in your area, new software products, or whatever from people that have actually used them and had a good (or bad) experience is often an excellent way to find out about new things. I think most of us would agree on this point. So, don't get all bent out of shape about a 50 cent word used by marketroids.
The Bzzers don't even need to like the items they market . . . and more often than not, they don't. For example, on the Bzz site they have a testimonial from a Bzzer who was trying to promote 20Q (a great website, but a lowly toy) to other mothers at a bus stop. She mentioned that the toy was making a lot of noise because it was getting "Torah" wrong, repeatedly. Others asked where to buy it, though. So, even though it is clearly an inferior toy, she tricked them into finding it appealing. She even described her methods online.
Obviously, it was not $10 well spent for those mothers. I can't imagine that the peer pressure on the mothers, with all of their kids flocking to the little blipping, flashing, toy helped.
People shilling products for free is nothing! Look at how many people pay money for the privilege of shilling products on their clothes.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak