Meet Ben Popken. You've probably never heard of him, but I recommend you learn what he's all about. He and others like him are rewriting the rules of journalism and, with it, the practice of media relations. Ben sits atop the editorial pyramid at the blog The Consumerist. In conventional media terms, that pyramid isn't very big – only seven people – but Consumerist's reach far outweighs its small staff. The site gets 15 million unique visitors per month, a number that has roughly doubled in the past year. Perhaps more importantly, it's closely watched by mainstream media outlets. For example, The New York Times has referenced Consumerist 381 times, The Wall Street Journal 114 times and BusinessWeek 37 times. Consumerist gets picked up on the popular social bookmarking site Digg.com constantly -- 34,000 citations and counting. Popken was recently featured in a cover story in BusinessWeek and just wrote a 2,300-word article for Reader's Digest. All without a day of formal journalism training.
That's right, no journalism background; at least not as that concept is traditionally defined. Prior to joining Consumerist two years ago, Popken's professional career had consisted of a variety of entrepreneurial sales ventures and odd jobs. He worked as a delivery man not long before joining Consumerist. He only got the job because the previous editor's mother read his blog.
What's even more interesting than his background is the way his staff reports the news. Consumerist gets about 100 e-mails a day from consumers talking about their horrible encounters with businesses of all kinds. Big box retailers, banks, cell phone providers, cable companies and airlines are popular targets. Editors read and respond to each and every e-mail and write up about 30 of those submissions each day for the site. They also monitor a variety of news services looking for important stories that affect consumers.
The New Journalism?
Consumerist editors do little fact-checking. They don't have time with the volume of material they process. If something is wrong, they expect readers to quickly correct it. This direct reader input is the heart and soul of the Consumerist model, which Popken describes as "to empower consumers by informing and entertaining them about the top consumer issues of the day. We give them a voice by directly publishing their tips and e-mails and then following up on them as warranted."
A lot of journalists shudder when they read words like these. No editorial oversight? No verification of facts? It sounds like an invitation to disaster. But so far it's worked. Consumerist gets the occasional legal threat, but it's never amounted to much. And its laser focus on reader interests has won it a fanatical following. Have you ever sent a letter to a newspaper about a story you read and failed to get a response? At The Consumerist, you are the story.
With his site having already passed the venerable Consumer Reports in traffic, by some accounts, you'd think marketers would be beating down the door trying to get Popken's opinion. Yet surprisingly, he told me he gets few invitations to speak or consult. Some companies that the blog has repeatedly spotlighted have taken proactive measures. Sprint, for example, set up a dedicated support line for Consumerist readers, but only after the site published direct phone numbers for many of its executives.
With no formal journalism training, no editorial oversight and none of the trappings of conventional media, Ben Popken is becoming one of the most powerful voices in consumer journalism. And what's funny is that if you ask him about the secret of Consumerist's success, he uses the same words that any good editor uses: "The secret is to be reader-centric in a fundamental way. The content is driven by the readers and reacted to by the readers. We're really just a curator of consumer-generated content."
Get used to this. It's the online journalism model of the future.
Labels: blogculture, consumer_generated_media, journalism
¶ 9:04 AM 0 Comments Links to this post
Citizen marketers: respect them, engage with them and make them your fans because they’re defining the message about your company and your products. That was the message from Jackie Huba, co-author of Citizen Marketers and Church of the Customer Blog, who addressed the Social Media Cluster of the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council this morning.
Jackie offered lots of examples of how individuals are influencing markets through blogs and online video. Here are my lightly edited notes from the meeting.
Who are citizen marketers? The content they create is actually branding for the companies they talk about. One reason we use this term “citizen” is that we see a link between this new media and the Bill of Rights. There’s a freedom to speak and a freedom to assemble.
Fernando Sosa and Thomas Hilditch of
Cell Block Tango is a homebrew video that’s had over four million views.
The MyBarackObama.com blog came out when Obama announced his presidential candidacy and 70,000 people signed up in a week. There are 2,400 self-selected groups but it was created by people, not the campaign.
Podcasting is another phenomenon that not taking off as quickly, but research is finding that heavy radio listeners are listening to traditional radio less. NPR gets over 2 million downloads a week. With podcasts, there can be comment around the content. Now people can collaborate around the content and have a discussion. You can’t do that with radio.
George Masters – in November, 2004 he was a vocational school teacher in
Brian Finkelstein posted a video of a sleeping Comcast tech on YouTube and six days later, the Times picked it up. The Comcast tech was fired, but the big question for Comcast is why was the guy on hold for 90 minutes in the first place?. Go to Google today and type “Comcast technician” and the entire first results page is about the video.
Let the seller beware. If you have a bad product or service, the consumer has the microphone.
Mike Kaltschnee of HackingNetflix.com tried to get on Netflix’s press list and received a brush-off response, which he posted on his blog. When Netflix realized how influential he was, the company did a 180 and how treats him as it would a member of the mainstream media.
Jim Romanesco runs StarbucksGossip.com (subtitle: Monitoring American’s favorite drug dealer). He’s a Poynter institute journalist who does a lot of work at Starbucks. He’s actually scooping the media on some things. When Starbucks recently had some bad earnings, the company blamed it on new products that were increasing wait times. He posted about this and store managers began to contact him to say they had told the company eight months ago that this was going to happen.
Jackie spoke about a category of publishers she calls “the fanatics:”
SlaveToTarget.com is a blog by a 28-year-old mother all about Target. She writes about great new products and generates sales. People actually go out and buy the products that she recommends. Target ignores her. Why?
Rabid fans of the soft drink Surge launched a website called SaveSurge.org to try to rally support for a campaign to bring back Surge. They called themselves soda activists. They weren’t successful, but Coke did start to test a product called Vault. People were contacting the authors saying that Vault was a lot like Surge, so the group started VaultKicks.com to encourage Coke to go national. Coke eventually complied. Today, if you type “vault soda” in Google, nearly all of the links are to SaveSurge and VaultKicks fan sites.
There’s another category she calls “the facilitators:”
Paul Mullett runs mini2.com, a site for Cooper Mini enthusiasts. Last July, a mystery ad started running, inviting people to visit the site at
So who are these people?
We found that these people perceive these activities as “productive leisure.” For them, it’s a fun outlet to communicate with other people who love what they love. It’s a bridge from what they do in real life to their passion.
You might think that this is a lot of content. But there’s something we call the 1% rule: most of the content is created by only 1% of the visitors.
Microsoft’s Channel 9 is mostly created by people within Microsoft. They have 4.5 million visitors a month and only 11,000 contributors.
QuickBooks community has 100,000 monthly visitors but only 900 people who create any content.
It may be only 1%, but that 1% is very powerful.
How do you take advantage of this trend?
Reach out to your fans. Last week, TurboTax partnered with Vanilla Ice to get people to create raps about taxes. People are actually doing it!
Another successful example is Converse, which asked people to create videos about their Chucks sneakers and upload them to conversegallery.com. They got 1,800 submissions and Web traffic rose 66%. Sales doubled in the months after the videos ran.
She cites the Chevy Apprentice campaign as an example of a viral campaign that didn’t work. Environmentalists hijacked the campaign and it spread into mainstream media. GM’s problem was that they didn’t reach out to people who loved the product. They just enabled people to be nasty. Reach out to your evangelists, the people who love what you do. Try the contest.
Invite co-creation. When Shakira’s latest album didn’t sell well, her record company took one of the songs – Hips Don’t Lie - and asked people on her fan site to contribute videos of themselves dancing to the song. They got thousands of submissions and the song became a hit. Was the video the reason? Probably not, but it was a great marketing campaign to use fans to be part of what was going on.
Create communities. Discovery Channel has a little-known division called Discovery Education that targets professional educators. You can download images and video to bring a PowerPoint to life. Teachers love it and Discovery Education has 70% market penetration in schools. But awareness among teachers was low. So Discovery Channel decided to invite educators to join a program – the Discovery Education Network – that gave teachers the opportunity to come to a program to learn more about how to educate with these tools.
Discovery also launched the Discovery Educator Network where anyone could register, get a blog, join a discussion group, exchange presentations and materials. They’re attracting people who love what they’re doing.
Q&A
Any comment on Viacom’s decision to sue YouTube/Google?
These clips are the new 30-second ads. CBS is one of the top channels on YouTube. Some big media companies get it and others don’t. CBS gets it.
There seems to be a total breakdown in use and abuse of a brand. What are the implications?
There are some rules that protect consumers from using brands, such as parodies. iPodMyBaby had to change their name to iPopMyBaby. If you go to my blog, you’ll find some brands who are sending cease-and-desist letters to fans. One movie company got the bloggers to actually take down a blog. It’s a confusing time right now.
How did you write a book with your significant other?
Ben has a journalism background and I have a marketing background, so it worked great. He did a lot of the background and I interviewed a lot of the citizen marketers.
What do you do if you’re a regulated company?
A lot of this hasn’t been sorted out. I was talking to a company last week whose lawyers were very concerned about starting a blog. One side argued that the blog was a personal opinion but others were saying it was company communications. There are a lot of CEO bloggers but can’t think of any in regulated industries.
How about ROI?
A lot of it has to do with word of mouth. Fred Reichheld has done a lot of work to say what percentage of a customer base would recommend the product to others. He comes up with a score he calls the net promoter score that measures the value of loyal customers. A lot of people are doing this just because they need to learn about it. I would measure subscribers to your content, people who want to hear about you every day.
How do you get the budget?
We’re seeing a lot of companies not budgeting for this. That’s one reason we see so much interest in contests; the money comes from the promotions budget. A lot of companies are discovering that the value of the campaigns is traffic to their websites.
What’s the next big thing?
I have no idea! How do you predict the next YouTube? All I can say is that the next big thing will relate to participation.
Labels: consumer_generated_media, social_media, viral_marketing
¶ 10:29 AM 2 Comments Links to this post
The innovation I'm waiting for is when a major news site starts inviting readers to actually contribute to the reporting process. That doesn't mean deputizing citizens as adjunct reporters, but could involve them contributing background and first-person sidebars. I still think mainstream media could learn something from Wikipedia.org and its much weaker companion Wikinews.org. Wikinews, in particular, is a fascinating idea, but the site doesn't have enough traffic or contributors to really work. Could a site with USAToday's throw weight make a companion news wiki successful? Somebody's to figure it out one of these days.
Labels: consumer_generated_media, journalism, mainstream_media
¶ 8:45 AM 1 Comments Links to this post
Be sure to scroll to the end of Gumbel's essay for a nice list of viral phenomena from 2006.
Labels: consumer_generated_media, viral_marketing
¶ 8:25 AM 0 Comments Links to this post
