IMV32 : The Dangers of User Generated Content

The following is a transcript for IMV32 : The Dangers of User Generated Content. The original podcast is located here.

Announcer:

Welcome to the Internet Marketing Voodoo podcast, brought to you by MindComet. And, now, here’s your host, Ted Murphy.

Ted Murphy:

Welcome to Internet Marketing Voodoo, Episode 32. I’m your host, Ted Murphy, and with me today is Mark Naples, managing partner of WIT Strategy. Welcome to the show today, Mark.

Mark Naples:

Thanks Ted. Good to be here.

Ted Murphy:

Mark, could you start off by telling us a little bit about yourself and your background and what your firm does?

Mark Naples:

Okay, my background is that I came to this through the privacy lens, if you will. I was the public affairs specialist, a lobbyist in Washington for about 14 years. During that time I got to work at AOL. I was an acting managing editor for AOL.com in ’86 and got very involved in privacy after that. A lot of what people were doing then in terms of leveraging privacy for marketing means gave me some insight into how to use public affairs strategies for marketing in our growing business. So we developed a nice little niche practice in the last four or five years.

Ted Murphy:

We’re here to talk specially today about user-generated content and what’s going on online there. And I was wondering if you could give your perspective in terms of what you believe is fueling the recent onslaught of user-generated content.

Mark Naples:

The starting point for understanding the onslaught and buzz about it is that marketers in this country, especially marketers online, wanna know how to reach young users with their brand messaging early on. User-generated content is something that is obviously very sexy in terms of previews, you know, time engaged with, etc., where these 25-year-olds set. The numbers are staggering, really, on how much time you guys are spending online – kids today are spending online in UGC environments. The long and short of anything that I’ll say on this broadcast today will be buyer beware, because there are as many pratfalls in this kind of media or sub-media as there are in all other kinds of media combined, I would say.

Ted Murphy:

Let’s talk a little bit about those issues. What do you think those issues are, and what does an advertiser need to look out for when they’re looking at user-generated content?

Mark Naples:

Mostly revolves around control. The reason that someone wants to get involved with advertising versus, say, public relations or media placement strategies, there are a lotta reasons for that. But primarily it’s about control. Message control, brand control, and ability to align your brand with certain kinds of contents. Most sophisticated advertisers are very, very good at this. You don’t see a Nike ad where it doesn’t belong. You don’t see a Coke ad where it doesn’t belong. It makes sense in the environment in which you’ll find it.

You can’t do that in most user-generated content environments. In fact, even the best advertising, the best strategized advertising created in UGC environments, will end up having less control than most public relations campaigns because of what is going to be seen with, near, and how it’s going to be engaged with. Think of how viral works – what has become standard Internet marketing world. Viral campaigns, you might get tremendous response or you might not. You might have a lotta danger in that. That's what UGC is most easily compared to, in my mind’s eye.

Ted Murphy:

If I’m looking at this from a brand’s perspective, I guess the question is do I jump into it and really embrace it; or do I try to fight it? And I’ve watched brands kinda take both sides of this. On one side you have people that are going after users who are using their logos improperly and making videos or Web sites or whatever else it may be. And then you have other people that are really embracing it, saying, “Go out there. Here are some assets. Go ahead and have fun with ‘em.” What do you think is the right mix there? What’s the right approach?

Mark Naples:

It depends on the brand. I mean it’s kinda – might sound like a simple, easy answer for me to give, but think of the audience, think of the dangers, and then think of how your brand – think of the bad side, a downside of your brand engagement. If you’re a record label, if you’re a soft drink, if you’re something that is cool or indifferent regardless to the younger set, then, by all means, do a test. Find the differences among the different user-generated content media brands. See which ones work, because those are the kinds of brands that are enjoying a lot of success in UGC.

Let’s not forget that when MySpace got hot, it was around record labels, primarily, underground record labels. And when Murdoch’s people buy a company like that, they understand that they’re going to be able to tout their own media brands, their own shows on there. So while there’s a lotta buzz about UGC, let’s understand what specifically this buzz is about. So if you’re a mature brand or a men’s clothier or whatever, some other brand that the fit might not be so streamline, it really does matter what you’re talking about throughout the whole.

Ted Murphy:

So what would say are some of the best and worst user-generated campaigns that you’ve seen out there?

Mark Naples:

Boy, oh, boy. I was very, very close to MySpace last year and into the beginning of this year because of their privacy problems before. I saw some fantastic stuff for automotive. In fact, some of the buzz that was generated for one campaign for Mazda that was all over MySpace, led people to think that the creative wasn’t developed by somebody Mazda paid. It was so guerrilla. It was so edgy. It was so down there, you know, the cars dominating parties, the cars going and eating people and whatnot, stomping on people. You know, really different, nutty stuff. I just think stuff like that, if you’re willing to take the risk, is, you know, really, really compelling and the sorta thing that kids will remember.

But that kind of illustrates the other point I was making. Well, if you’re the guy who’s responsible for that brand, you’re really taking a big risk. He mighta lost his job. He might’ve gotten a lotta new customers. So he mighta lost his job. That’s the sort of thing that people who are on those sites wanna see.

Ted Murphy:

What did you think about the Snakes on a Plane campaign and their utilization of user-generated content? I heard that actually the logo that they wound up using was something that a user had actually originally created, and then they had modified that and embraced that themselves. What do you think that that campaign taught us, either positively or negatively?

Mark Naples:

That’s a fantastic question, and I heard the same thing that you heard about the logo. I have a lot of clients that’ll come to me, or would-be clients that come to me and say, “I want to have my face in the dot matrix in The Wall Street Journal.” And I say, “Why? How is that gonna drive your business? What difference is that going to make?” You know, these guys sell software, whatever they sell, some DVD player. It’s just vanity stuff.

The answer to the question you just asked me is another question. What good is pure buzz if it doesn’t drive the results that the buzz is intended to drive? Snakes on a Plane, I don’t know what the numbers were, but I understand that it really flopped at the box office. That true?

Ted Murphy:

I don’t believe it did as well as they had originally thought. Actually, that goes to another issue, is that you can generate all the buzz and hype out there that you want. But, at the end of the day, if you have a bad product, it’s not gonna do anything for you.

Mark Naples:

Right, yeah.

Ted Murphy:

So I think that, actually, they were pretty successful in the opening weekends and the opening week getting people to the movie theater. The problem was is once people actually saw the film, I think it disappointed in terms of what they originally thought they could achieve.

Mark Naples:

Right, you and I are making the same point. You have to have a good product, and I think that most first-run movies that have big budgets, the idea is that users see it twice. They don’t make money in theaters unless most of the people that go the first week will go again. Especially movies that are targeted to the younger audiences. If Snakes on a Plane doesn’t open with a big bang, doesn’t have a lot of those users see it again, it’s not gonna make money. It’s my impression that it didn’t open with much of a bang at all. It might have been number one, but not in a big number. Then it was down in number seven in a week or two.

Then your buzz kind of can bite you in the back a little bit, because then the reviews you read are that they were Samuel L. Jackson was just a marketing guy here, and it was something else. It wasn’t movie as art. It wasn’t something else. It was bald-faced marketing. That makes everybody look kinda bad. It kinda makes ya – it’s kind of a post-modern thing. The closer you get to our industry, the more you wonder about how important the whole marketing scheme is. If you are outside of what we do, you look back in on it, you’re like, “Snakes on a Plane, what’s this buzz? Who cares?” You know. You had – it’s easy to get some distance from it and—

Ted Murphy:

I know that I was absolutely amazed when I started to see Snakes on a Plane posters months before the movie came out. Inside our office, hanging up in peoples’ workstations. I was just like, “Are you guys kidding me?”

Mark Naples:

Yeah.

Ted Murphy:

Like I saw the preview for that. It’s not good.

Mark Naples:

Right, right. And, now, think of some other marketing campaigns over the years that have generated a lotta buzz, but then were very short-lived. People will kind of, you know, laugh at this a little bit later. Okay, well, good for them. It drove a lotta buzz, but what did it get ‘em? You know. What did it really get ‘em? You can do some good things with this media, but you have to be really careful. People in the political world are really trying to figure out what they can do with this medium now, with this little sub-segment of ours, but I don’t think you’re gonna see much in there, because of the dangers that we were talking about before.

Ted Murphy:

So the question on the Snakes on the Plane thing real quick, though, in your opinion, was the marketing successful or not? And did it really just come down to the product wasn’t good? Or the marketing was a flawed approach, or what?

Mark Naples:

No, I think the marketing was wildly successful. I think all the marketing can do is get people to understand, yeah, you and I both know what this brand is. I didn’t see the movie. I had no intention of seeing the movie. I certainly read a lot about it. The marketing, the quote unquote earned or free marketing they got from these campaigns is probably in the billions. I’m sure they didn’t spend billions. But, at the end of the day, to use that tired cliché, at the end of the day, the product still has to be pretty good. In this case, it wasn’t.

Don’t blame the marketers. Maybe the whole movie was written after they got the idea for the marketing campaign. I don’t know. The marketing was fantastic, though. You can’t do better than that. Everybody below the age of 60 in the U.S. heard something about that.

Ted Murphy:

I don’t know how much time you spend dealing with search in your practice, but are you seeing that user-generated content and search are starting to go hand-in-hand, and you’re really starting to see that affect search engine results?

Mark Naples:

Yeah, blogs, specifically, of course. I’ve had that one specifically do harm to my clients a couple of different times. You know, then you end up having to do other things with other user-generated content to suppress those results. It’s annoying. It’s incredibly annoying. And that kind of UGC, to me, is very, very dangerous, that idea that there are blogs out there that may or may not be moderated responsibly. And that they are given credibility by the search engine is maddening. It’s very maddening, but you have to combat it. You have to be ready for it. Message control becomes essential if you’re in an industry or working for a company that has opponents out there who will just hammer you on their blogs. It’s kinda like you think of what people who do what we do for a living. You’re juggling eight balls on any given day. Well, somebody just handed you two more because of user-generated content, and your ability to combat.

Ted Murphy:

Yeah, if I look at it ten years ago when you were maybe juggling a couple hundred media outlets or a couple thousand media outlets. And now you’re looking, you’re juggling those plus 50 million blogs.

Mark Naples:

I don’t know if I’m allowed to use the F Company Web site. And anybody who is listening to this better—

Ted Murphy:

This is a mature audience.

Mark Naples:

Yeah, okay. Anybody who’s been in this business long enough to remember Fucked Company, there are a lot of people, as things were getting bad in 2000, ’99 and 2000, who would go on there every day. And people in every major company were posting on this thing. And I was working for a company then called Real Media, where people would get very upset about this stuff. And I kept telling ‘em, you know, you don’t have to go there. You don’t have to go there. I mean, okay, so it’s gonna come up on the search engines, and you’re gonna have to answer a couple of questions.

But you don’t necessarily have to get yourself too absorbed in it, because the more you get absorbed in it, the more you’ll fan the flame. If you respond in kind, it’s just gonna hurt you. It can only hurt you, because they control that media. What I’ll tell clients is if there’s a specific blog that’s hurting them, what they can do is what the politicians do. Go after that blog. Don’t necessarily go after that blogger. But for those audiences that matter to you, for those 50 individuals, or whomever your stakeholders are, just make sure that they know who that blog is and what that blog’s design is, what its intention is. Because it’s a lot easier to do that, and you can definitely appear more prepared, appear smarter, more savvy to your consumer audience, as your customer audience, your stakeholder audiences by doing it that way than you can by fighting it episodically.

Ted Murphy:

So let’s talk about the positive effects, though. As much as there’s the negative out there, and you have people that are clearly angry and totally biased, I think that there’s also a lot of good out there in monitoring this stuff and seeing what your customers have to say about your products or service or Web site. How have you seen user-generated content utilized in a positive fashion to improve a product or customer service or whatever it may be?

Mark Naples:

You can do a lot with individual blogs. Yes, you can. I think that, just as you have the 80/20 rule in some of the other media, and you definitely have it in blogs. I generally, especially for my clients that are involved with some of the arcane services that you can be involved in in digital medial, I instruct them to focus only on the blogs that are branded. Media blogs, the bloggers behind the columnists and that sort of thing. And who all need content and treat it like media relations, but with a lot more individualized attention.

By and large, the media blogs, the branded blogs, are going to have higher results anyway, and they’re going to be more trusted. Just as, like I was saying before, there’s a real gradation to these things, and I don’t think that all blogs are created equal.

Ted Murphy:

So if you had to give marketers one piece of advice surrounding user-generated content, what would that be?

Mark Naples:

Watch your ass. In my most recent column in iMedia, I wrote about the apology from the Facebook’s CEO. Zuckerberg, I believe his name is. His apology after the quote unquote crisis of last week, I think says it all. A lot of his users, hundreds of thousands of his users were extremely upset, and his apology said, “Well, we’re sorry if we offended anybody, but all we were doing was—” No, no, no, no, no. No. He’s a 22-year-old guy. You know, you can’t expect him to issue an apology that’s a blanket apology. He upset his users. That’s the end of the story. I’m sorry. It’s such an immature sub-segment of media. It’s the top of the first inning. If you’re going to engage its users, you better be really, really careful. I mean you better understand what the possible downsides are. What might go wrong. Because something will go wrong almost invariably, unless you’re extremely lucky.

Ted Murphy:

Well, Mark, it’s been a pleasure having you on the show today. If our users want more information about WIT Strategy, they can visit WITStrategy.com. Hopefully, we can have you back on the show again in the future.

Mark Naples:

Love it. Thanks, Ted.

Ted Murphy:

All right, thank you. Bye.

Announcer:

For more information on this week's topic, visit http://www.InternetMarketingVoodoo.com. This podcast has been brought to you by MindComet, the Relationship Agency.

[End of Audio]

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