people to take media texts from one context and transplant them into the other without much difficulty. But, as we have already discussed with regard to disputes over terms of service or control over intellectual property rights, these transitions aren’t always smooth. This is why the clarification regarding “free” is so crucial. The use of “free” attempts to describe transactions based in reciprocity while clinging to the language of the market, obscuring the underlying social mechanisms in a way that invites conflicts and violations on both sides.
Often, commercial motives for offering a platform or text for “free” include commodifying audience labor, creating opportunities for gathering data, adding people to a contact list to be sold to marketers, or bringing together an audience to sell to advertisers (concepts we explore throughout the rest of this book). In other cases, these “free” offers generate benefits by attempting to enlist those who accept them as grassroots intermediaries or else encouraging those users to create content themselves and thus to attract greater audiences to expand the reach of a platform or brand. YouTube might offer its web platform to users at no cost, but the efforts of users to create social value through the site generates page views and data which are the basis for YouTube’s advertising and licensing relationships. As a result, these exchanges create implicit social contracts not just within the user community but between the community and the platform—contracts that, when violated, can generate a sense of being cheated, much as workers would object to having their wages changed on payday.
Toward Transparent Marketing
As companies come to terms with an online environment that records, amplifies, and proliferates the audience’s collective interpretation and appropriation of their marketing materials, and as companies try to make sense of how their material spreads in environments governed by peer-to-peer logics, those companies are spending more energy trying to engage their audiences directly. Consider, for instance, the public relations field. As noted in the introduction, “public relations” was once a term used for customer service; however, for most of the twentieth century, PR primarily stood for “press relations,” as companies sought to influence “the masses” through the intermediaries of professional journalists. Today, however, people tasked with promoting a brand are increasingly trying to bring the “public” back to public relations.
This doesn’t mean that traditional media is no longer a significant focus, since they remain a crucial and prominent amplifier in a spreadable media environment. However, suddenly, the importance of recommendations from “the average person” have become a renewed priority, and word of mouth, the original form of marketing, is treated as a new phenomenon due to one major distinction: online communication creates a textual trail of the conversations audiences have about a brand or media property which may be archived indefinitely for all to see.
If brands and media properties admit that the word-of-mouth recommendations of fellow audience members hold the greatest opportunity for influencing others, many questions remain. What implicit contracts exist between brands and those recommenders? What moral codes and guidelines should brands respect when encouraging, soliciting, or reacting to comments from those audiences they wish to reach? What types of compensation, if any, do audience members deserve for their promotional labor when they provide a testimonial for their favorite television show or company? Do some forms of compensation compromise the integrity of all involved? After all, as Hyde notes, a thin line separates gifts from bribes, but the distinction carries enormous moral implications (1983, 237).
North Carolina State University marketing professor Stacy Wood has conducted extensive research on the value people place on recommendations from everyday people and their potential impact on brands. In a world where audiences are bombarded by thousands of messages daily and where they have become incredibly suspicious of the authenticity and credibility of marketing messages in response, word-of-mouth recommendations are an incredibly important source of credible information. Brand managers and marketers have begun to capitalize on this, encouraging customers to write testimonials or to produce content recommending products. This encouragement needs to be carefully applied, however: Wood’s research suggests that, when customers are provided rewards for writing about their experiences, they often exaggerate, resulting in less genuine testimonials that no one (even the recommenders themselves) trusts. As Wood elaborates further in our enhanced book,
Firms must be careful to create a testimonial-giving space that is clearly not linked to prizes or other financial benefits, a space that highlights the voluntary nature of testimonial contributions. In this way, the facilitation of consumer engagement and testimonials must occur in the social economy (moral/gift) rather than in a traditional commodity-based economy. This acts as a signal of credibility, not only to the testimonial writer but also to other consumers who read the resulting testimonies.
As marketing disciplines tackle how best to encourage participation while still sounding bona fide, two buzzwords have consistently appeared in popular literature surrounding Web 2.0: “transparency” and “authenticity.” Both of these words have deep histories in various disciplines. In current Web 2.0 business rhetoric, “transparency” refers to the degree to which brands and audience members alike are forthcoming about their ties to one another, ensuring that potential customers have access to all the information needed to assess the credibility of a recommendation. Meanwhile, in the recent parlance of marketing, “authenticity” represents the overall assessment of the credibility of a brand or audience member. Here, the test of authenticity asks, Is the messenger being fully transparent? Is this piece of content or recommendation consistent with what is known about and expected from the messenger? And does the messenger genuinely have the knowledge, experience, and credentials necessary to back up the message?
Both these concepts are crucial to the moral economy presented in this chapter. Taken together, they help to establish “trust” among participants in an economic transaction, and they remain crucial as producers/advertisers and their audiences renegotiate relations managed by the logics of the gift economy. As companies seek to sustain and encourage supportive word of mouth, however, their transparency and authenticity is often brought into question.
In the past few years, corporate communicators have repeatedly been caught speaking as if they were unpaid customers or fan reviewers. Such practices are labeled “astroturf”—that is, fake grassroots. Few examples of astroturfing angered people more than a 2006 campaign from Zipatoni for Sony centered on “All I Want for Xmas Is a PSP,” a site portrayed as the creation of two teenage fans to convince their parents to buy them a Sony PlayStation Portable gaming system for Christmas. When gamers discovered that the videos from the blog were hosted on Zipatoni’s servers, the site was outed as astroturf. This discovery made the site “viral” (at least in the sense that it made those who came into contact with it sick), as myriad gamers saw the situation as an example of Sony’s disrespect for the gaming community. Marketers profiled the site as a “worst practice” example; watchdog groups highlighted the campaign as an example of the need for greater regulation of corporate marketing; and journalists and bloggers used the story (as we do here) to highlight missteps made by major companies (Snow 2006).
However, many examples of astroturfing are not so blatant. Take another now-canonical “lesson learned” from the public relations world: public relations firm Edelman’s collaboration with Walmart in supporting the website “Wal-Marting Across America.” A couple bought an RV and planned to blog about a trip around the country to visit their respective children. In the process, they realized that Walmart parking lots allowed for the free parking of RVs and decided their experiences could provide a unique look at the country. Since the blog series would fundamentally be about their experiences at Walmarts, however, the couple decided to contact Working Families for Walmart, an organization started by Edelman on the company’s behalf, to ensure they had the right to move forward with the project (Gogoi 2006a). Edelman and Walmart not only gave permission; they offered to support the couple, providing another RV and funding a much wider journey than originally planned.
While the impetus behind the resulting blog was truly
