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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?"
i can certainly relate the advantage of word-of-mouth to a game site that i'm working for. there's a strong community forming and new players are coming from word-of-mouth (or text-of-email) because of existing players' experience in the game.
of course a bit of incentive wouldn't hurts, but it doesn't have to be in monetary term. it can be in the form of being credited or recognized.
the only catch is you need to stay good, because of the old marketing saying - a good mouth told 3, a bad one told 10.
the article mentioned "revealing her (the marketer) identity, she said, would undermine her effectiveness as an agent.".
it's similar to teenagers never listen to their parents about what is good for them, but peers always have a greater influence.
Play iCLOD
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.
This is open-source how?
I didn't know that some company had developed a proprietary speech format that just happened to be good at spreading advertisements. I also didn't know that those of us that are in the OSS community developed our own speech format to be used freely by the masses.
I guess I learn something new everyday.
What if the entire Universe were a chrooted environment with everything symlinked from the host?
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.
1 76
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
So, do we love the new volunteer advertizers, or hate them for being advertizers? Myself, I think I will go on the side of hating them -- I mean, it is still advertizing.
On the other hand, these people (I think) all belive in what they are saying, so I might actually listen to what they are saying.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
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?
I was thinking just earlier today that my experience with Open Source has made me mistrustful of advertising.
I expect to hear about good products from other people. If I see an ad for something I haven't heard of my initial reaction is "Why haven't I herad of this, is it no good?" If a product is good, word gets around. I'm hesitant to buy any tech product without hearing other's experience with it on sites like Slashdot.
Spencer Ogden
But other people do these studies because it makes them feel "a part" of such a great software company, and I'm sure they tell all their friends.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
I've been trying to get my company to take advantage of Open Source solutions but it's not easy. Sometimes it seems that they think if it's free, there must be something wrong with it. I suppose they like the support of paid-for software. My strategy right now is to replace all the non-supported software with open-source ones. Once they feel they can trust open-source software, that when I can seriously push open-source software as an option for our bigger problems and needs.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
Cheers,
Ian
The whole idea of word-of-mouth is that it has some honesty that's not been tarnished by commercial interests. This word-of-mouth marketting association is one more reason to dislike unashamed capitalism that seeks to milk out everything.
Lets call them buzzards. I think that's a better name. Tar and feathers for the lot of them, I say!
No one's paying me to post www.subservientchicken.com/ but I do.... it must be a good example of what we're talking about...
UK Laptops
to anybody who can either convince me that this BzzMarketing crap is not an MLM, or to actually tell me what the hell it is they do.
Because the latter is not clear, I am assuming that the former is false.
It's just time for Slashdot's daily ads. This is a non-starter. The very fact that I found the phrase:
"Reality Marketing"
on their site immediately disqualifies them from my list of companies to do business with, whatever the fuck it is they're selling.
Hey Taco! Looks like you're using the "infinite monkeys and typewriters" scheme to generate Ask Slashdots again...
Gabriella asked a manager why there was no Al Fresco sausage available.
I got your Al Fresco sausage right here, Gabriella Bay-bee!
"Wow. Now THAT'S a lot of angry Indians." - Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer
This model is obviously not applicable everywhere, but it has a great deal of advantages over regular advertising really - the main thing being that the customers actually know what they're getting, by using the product themselves instead of listening to how some marketing guy somewhere decided to describe the product. This is a great advantage for open source projects in general IMHO.
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.
"They were invited guests, friends or relatives of whoever organized the get-togethers, but they were also -- unknown to most all the other attendees -- ''agents,'' and they filed reports."
WTF?! I would be completely insulted if I invited somebody to my house and they tried to advertise a product.
Marketing has infiltrated our lives enough already, yet these idiots volunteer to advertise and file reports about their friends and family to some market research people. I find that more than a little creepy!
It's amazing that people think that this is not only okay, but that they would volunteer to do it.
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
Yet another company has discovered fanboys and astroturfing. Yeah, that's sooo new.
Can't even say it has anything to do with OSS. Anyone who's played a game and ever posted on a gaming board, has already met the unpaid fanboy acting like he's Holy Defender Of The Publisher, Minister Of The Truth, Silencer of All Heresy. "You dare complain about bugs and crashes? Nooo! The game is perfect! It's your system! It's your drivers! You're too stupid to use a computer!"
Cretins.
And yet another set of corporate fucks are willing to plunder and rape public comms channels to line their pockets. Much like spammers do.
There's a reason why people would rather trust each other than trust the marketters and professional reviewers. I know _I've_ had enough of marketting lies and bought reviewers dutifully transcribing the hype that the vendor wants printed. And I don't even mean creative exaggeration, but outright bullshit, lies and snake oil.
But it used to be that at least there were public communication channels, in the form of bulletin boards and newsgroups and the like, where we could talk to each other about it. And about other stuff. And now a bunch of corporate fucks have basically discovered that "hey! We could make a profit by polluting these channels to carry our corporate message."
So what's the difference between that and what spammers did to a different public resource? Nothing. The exact same "hey, we can make a buck by polluting and poisoning a comms channel" mentality.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
This kind of confusion between "honest personal opinion/review/dogma" and "corporate marketting to make a buck" is just what those unethical corporate shills are exploiting, and what they'd like you to believe. "Sure, there's no difference between Joe talking about his new car from experience, and Jack who's regurgitating corporate hype for, say, Ford." Wrong.
You even almost see the difference on your own when you say "Slashdot deals with this by giving you the negative buzz too." Well, bingo. That _is_ the whole difference between a real review or opinion, and corporate marketting.
The whole "trust" part in that web of trust, refers to trusting someone to give you their honest opinion. I.e., if you think a product sucks, by Jove, do tell me in which ways. I want to hear _all_ the info: the good _and_ the bad.
You also trust that they have nothing to gain out of deceiving you. E.g., if I'm talking about my Psion 5 and how I find it to be the greatest palmtop ever made, in the end I have nothing to gain whether you believe me or not. I don't own any shares in Psion or Symbian, I don't sell Psion 5's, I don't sell software for them. I.e., the assumption of trust is that you can trust that I have no reason to lie to you.
I may of course still be uninformed, pissed off, a fanboy, or simply my uses for a PDA may not match yours. E.g., I love that keyboard for typing, but if you don't do a lot of typing on a PDA, a Palm may serve you better. What I love about it, may be completely irrelevant to you, or may even be what you'd hate about it. (E.g., partially because of the keyboard it _is_ also bulkier than a Palm.)
But you trust that I won't deliberately lie to you.
And, sorry, I fail to see how can I apply that trust to someone actively marketting for a corporation. They're not feeding me a honest opinion, they're not telling me their own experience in using the product (which generally they don't even own), they're just regurgitating a marketting text. Sorry, _what_ can I trust there?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.