and watchdog groups discovered Walmart’s and Edelman’s involvement, both the retailer and its public relations firm were the target of significant scorn. Many marketing bloggers were particularly upset that Edelman, which had been an industry leader in defining appropriate Web 2.0 strategies, would make this misstep (Gogoi 2006b). While the blog and the couple’s interest had not been fabricated, the situation was a reminder that astroturfing includes not only blatant lies but also initiatives that fail to be completely transparent.
The ethical questions that corporate communicators and audience members both face are crucial and demonstrate the challenges of a hybrid world where goods and media texts move fluidly between the logics of commodity and gift economies. What types of tie-ins or relationships must be made public? Clearly, corporate communicators pretending to be audience members or brands paying fans who speak favorably without disclosing that relationship violate the implicit contract of spreadable media. But what of bloggers who are reviewing a product provided to them by a company or fans being rewarded for their commentaries or promotional work with access to creators? In reverse, were professional marketers participating in the fan activities around Mad Men examined in the introduction inauthentic as fans because of their dual identity as marketers, as Deep Focus intimated? Did they have an obligation to be up-front from the outset about their professional identities?
Numerous questions such as these have led to consistent appeals for governmental regulators to intervene. In the U.S., the Federal Trade Commission updated its guidelines to require disclosure of paid relationships in 2009, sparking discussion among marketers and bloggers alike. While most agreed on the general need for policing unscrupulous behaviors, some bloggers questioned how to handle many of the less clear issues that could lead to their violating guidelines unknowingly. Online journalists questioned whether overly restrictive rules could target too wide a swath of online commentary in the interest of prohibiting unscrupulous behaviors. And some industry leaders felt that government-mandated rules rather than industry guidelines and self-policing could lead to overly onerous restrictions that would create a chilling factor among marketers. Do the guidelines encourage companies to persist in a broadcast-era mentality for fear that collaborating with audiences could lead to legal vulnerability?
What’s certain is that media producers and brands are becoming increasingly cognizant of the potential for profit and promotion in embracing “spreadable media.” However, there exists a strong need for a more nuanced discussion of the economic implications behind Web 2.0. Already, prominent communities are finding themselves increasingly barraged by marketers looking to create a “viral phenomenon” or to generate word of mouth. The “mommy blogger” community, prominent Twitterers, and active fan discussion forums are now on the target lists of marketers and public relations professionals tasked with “reaching out to influencers.” While paid journalists are monetarily compensated for their time liaising with corporate communicators, many of these audience members maintain their blogs out of social rather than economic interests: because their contributions are valued within their communities. As more brands want to foster community and “join the discussion,” brand managers, internal marketers, and the agencies and industry associations need to become better informed about the implicit and sometimes explicit assumptions audiences make about corporate participation in these conversations. Likewise, fans, bloggers, gamers, Twitterers, and other online community participants need to develop a more nuanced understanding of the implications of their new entanglements with advertisers and producers.
We Don’t Need Influencers
While public relations professionals have accepted that they can no longer just think about journalists when hawking their wares, some now contend instead that there exist a few elite members of any given community who—if convinced of a brand’s message—can convince everyone else to follow suit. We argue throughout this book that content creators need to pay attention to the audience’s agency in circulating content; however, we are not claiming that so-called influencers are more apt to be effective at circulating content than the rest of us are. In fact, the influencer is one of the major myths of the Web 2.0 world. In The Tipping Point (2000), Malcolm Gladwell based his theory of the influencer on the now well-known “Small World Problem” study (Milgram 1967; Travers and Milgram 1969), in which, through multiple experiments, Nebraska and Kansas residents were asked to get a letter to someone in Boston by passing it through social contacts they thought would be closer to the eventual target. Famously, among those instances when the letter successfully transferred, it took an average of five exchanges to get it to its intended target, or “six degrees of separation,” as it has now popularly been labeled. In his use of these studies, Gladwell emphasized that the letter eventually reached its intended target through the same few friends in most cases and argued that these “influencers” were ultimately the ones who needed to be engaged to reach the target audience.
Since Gladwell made this argument, the “influencer” has been emphasized in countless marketing case studies discussing why the attention and endorsement of key audience members is crucial for success. The argument is that the best way to reach anyone in a community is to find the few prominent people who influence most of the members. In particular, the language of the “influencer” has been used often by public relations professionals to justify the importance of reaching beyond traditional journalists to bloggers.
However, Peter Dodds, Roby Muhamad, and Duncan Watts (2003) tested such thinking by asking more than 60,000 people to reach 18 “target persons” in 13 countries by forwarding an email along to an acquaintance who might know them. Their study found a median of five to seven steps for the message to reach one of its intended targets (reinforcing the “six degrees” concept), but they did not find any evidence of “influencers.” As summarized by Clive Thompson, “[Watts] found that ‘hubs’—highly connected people—weren’t crucial. Sure, they existed. But only 5% of the email messages passed through one of these superconnectors. The rest of the messages moved through society in much more democratic paths, zipping from one weakly connected individual to another, until they arrived at the target” (2008). This research shifts the question from how to reach “influencers” to what social structures best support the spread of media texts. Certainly, people exercise varying degrees of influence. We all take the recommendations of trusted sources over strangers, experts over neophytes. However, that influence typically is contextual and temporal, depending on the subject, the speaker’s credibility, and a variety of other factors. Sure, there are influencers, but who those influencers are may shift substantially from one situation to another.
It’s easy to see how this concept of the “influencer” became popular alongside notions of viral marketing: both assume there is some shortcut to building interest around one’s message. In the case of viral marketing, the myth is that something inserted into the content’s “DNA” will infect people and give them no choice but to spread its messages. In the case of “influencers,” the myth is that, if a marketer reaches a very small set of taste makers, those few will bring “the sheep” along. In short, brand developers and media producers are still trying to figure out any angle of “public relations” that doesn’t require much in the way of relating to the public.
In marketer Scott Gould’s (2010) writing on spreadability, he examines the tension between “scattering” and “gathering.” Using a farming metaphor, he argues that marketers have to scatter seeds through many potential relationships and then identify which relationships develop and are worth deepening:
We don’t know which relationships will end up returning the greatest to us, which tweets return the deals, which bits of marketing make the biggest difference—and trying to carefully plant our seeds rather than scatter them neglects all the potential relationships that we could have, that we’d never normally pick. […] The conundrum is this: how do we go from a volume approach to a value approach? How do we filter all that we scatter, and know what relationships or opportunities to begin investing in with greater value?
Here, Gould rejects the influencer theory; a marketer doesn’t know at the outset which audience members might embrace
