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?"

Comments

However, exposure

[utopianfiat]

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.

Can't beat True Believers

[mordors9]

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.

Re:Can't beat True Believers

[Coryoth]

Just look at the evangelism of some of the gentoo users.

Though, to be fair, that can be as damaging as it can be helpful. A lot of advertising is about association - you associate a product with a certain lifestyle, or try and break traditional associations about the product. In the case of the Gentoo evangelists they do a fine job of furthering the association of Gentoo with die hard geeks. Unfortunately they also tend to further the association of Gentoo with 1337-speaking h4x0r wannabes who just want to look cool and extra-1337.

Please note, I'm not saying that's what the Gentoo community actually is - just that that's the association that a lot of Gentoo zealots (i.e. the most vocal ones) tend to help promote.

Word of mouth can work as much against you as for you. While the evangelists helped the initial growth of Gentoo, they've also helped box it into a small limited market where it will stay until perceptions change.

Jedidiah.

Re:incentive is not always about money

[Coryoth]

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.

Huh?

[goofyheadedpunk]

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.

Re:Huh?

[Eric Giguere]

Yeah, this kind of "viral marketing" is nothing new. Time Magazine published an article in 2000 about the viral marketing efforts for Christina Aguilera that helped her "make it". Plenty of software companies already have "Team XXXX" or "MVP" programs that reward non-employees who answer questions and help others fix problems, and most of them do it for no payment. Those latter programs usually start as a grassroots, informal kind of thing, though, and these guys are trying to formalize the process to make it more predictable and more controllable.

Eric
Tired of MySQL? Develop with ASA for free (that's my viral marketing plug!)

SpreadFirefox

[ewithrow]

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.

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=1721 76

Re: SpreadFirefox

[Alwin Henseler]

Everything is not well though.

You got that right. Have been a long time Firefox user now, and very happy with it. But shameless call on Mozilla developers and project managers here: get your act together on issues like localization. Take the Dutch translation for example:

A lot of tam-tam was done around nov.9, when Firefox hit final 1.0 release. Parties were organised worldwide, and local Dutch media reported the release.

But in the Netherlands, you'd want a Dutch translation, right? Turns out older 0.9 releases had bad or incomplete translation (so lots of translation work had to be re-done), and catching up for 1.0 wasn't done during 1.0 pre-release period, but mostly started *after* 1.0 final release (sorry, but I think that's braindead project management style). As a result, it took some 3 weeks (!) after 1.0 release, until a quality, 'officially approved' Dutch translation was available (around dec.2). And when it finally was, very little mention of it in local media. But there's more:

As a Dutch user, you'd try some URL's: Firefox.nl (used by some unknown party), Mozilla.nl (fake, nothing to see here) or http://nl.mozilla.org (says "host not found" here). There DO exist several Dutch Mozilla-related sites, like MozBrowser.nl, but no link to be found anywhere on Mozilla.org. Also, it's possible to install English language version, locale-switcher extension and a language pack, to obtain non-English Firefox. But no mention, or links to this, on Mozilla.org site either (or damn near impossible to find).

Okay, I know Mozilla is a large project, but how hard is it for instance, to make <countrycode>.Mozilla.org domains work, point those to country/language-specific sites, and provide some basic info on options, status and downloads for translations there? Mozilla organisation could improve a lot here. For Dutch translation alone: Netherlands have some 16 million people, computer use & broadband is very common here, so huge potential for localized Mozilla builds.

"You think that is air you're breathing?"

Re:incentive is not always about money

[Walt Dismal]

This is why I run naked through Starbucks shouting "I LOVE my new HP computer with an Intel processor and Microsoft operating system! I love my X-Box!" It makes me feel like I'm getting the attention I deserve while influencing my peers.

Yes, let's breed distrust among our friends

[Nomihn0]

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.

If people actually believe in the product

[KalvinB]

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.

re

[computerme]

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?

Re:re

[saitoh]

what you've described and given examples of, is very very similar to what marketing classes call "undercover marketing" (Guerilla and Buzz have both been used for the same concept). The catch with undercover marketing is that you unknowingly are marketed to. Keyword there being unknowingly. If you can pick it up, either you have studied this, or its being done really poorly. There really isnt much if any middle ground there, and the reason is this:

If someone with a thick spanish accent stopped you on the street, and asked you to take a picture of him and his girlfriend. You have never seen this camera, and he shows you how it works so you can take their picture. Its a sweet camera. You take the picture, and your off on your way.

They just pimped a new Sony camera that you'll see next month, yet you were being nice. To pick up on this, either one, you see the example beforehand and wear a tinfoil hat, or two, you dont see it and it doesnt seem like advertising, but just being nice and touristy. That is until you sit across the street in the cafe and watch the preceedings for an hour. This is the classic example I've seen in my classes, and its really hard to pick out without wearing a tinfoil hat and beleaving that everyone is out to get you with advertising.

Personally, that doesnt bother me, cause it doesnt feel like advertising. Thats part of what many people dont like, is that feeling of being sold to. If you can hype a product (which is all this does, if the product sucks, you dont have nearly as much to stand on as tv advertising does), and it is discovered that it was artificial hype, then it goes down in flames faster then the hindenburg, and everyone remembers the bitter taste in their mouths of that betrail, and its *extremely* hard to recover from that. I've seen it go both ways.

Apple

[mccalli]

I was going to add an opinion but really - do I need to say more than "Apple" on this subject?

Cheers,
Ian

Re:incentive is not always about money

[Soko]

True enough.

Whenever I can, I link to my friends book - which was featured on Slashdot last month. I do keep things on-topic of course - I don't want to shill his book, just point out every instance where it would be helpful - like "Clearing viruses from Windows? It's easy with Knoppix - go get this book to show you how." in respone to a lament about a tough to get rid of infection.

Since I'm advocating a purchase, I am advertising, but moreover trying to be helpful - to my fellow /.ers as well as my friend.

Soko

Re:incentive is not always about money

[Eric Giguere]

you could just shamelessly push your product on Slashdot pretty much every post you get

Surely nobody does such a thing!

Eric
Buy my upcoming book | Buy my previous books | Learn why Vioxx reduced spam

They're being handed the items

[Nomihn0]

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.