Digital Influence Mapping Project

The New Social Media & WOMM Ethics Challenges #3 - Fake Social Media

This post is part of a series exploring new issues of social media and word of mouth marketing ethics driven by WOMMA's Living Ethics Project stewarded by Paul Rand. The goal is to end up with the best, most up-to-date ethics guidelines for word of mouth marketers - the next iteration of WOMMA's Ethics Code.

Fake product reviews? Not so good. This past week, the computer products company, Belkin, was revealed to have solicited positive reviews for $.65 a pop via  Amazon's Mechanical Turk marketplace ("access to an on-demand, scalable workforce!"). Apparently this was the work of an overzealous and poorly-trained individual. As social media and word of mouth practices gain momentum within cmpanies, there will be new ethics transgressions that can really hurt the brand and their customers.

Things have changed in the world of "fakeness" in social media. At one time creating a brand page in Myspace or a character blog was consdiered heinously "fake" and impliictly against the unwritten code of soical media. Now everybody and his brother has brand pages all over MySpace, Facebook or thinks twice about having David Ogilvy Twitter care of the creatives behind the TV show "MadMen."

Why is "Fake" even relevant?
There are two big reasons in my book why we even use the word "fake": disclosure and authenticity. I suspect one is an ethical issue  and the other is more about best practices.

Disclosure
There are very few marketers (I am hoping) who would consciously create a blog where the author was not who they say they are unless it was done as a crystal clear parody or character blog. Although there are surprises every day like TV Asahi out of Japan. On a recent quiz show: 

"The anchorperson introduced six blog websites as examples of information collected via the Internet, which were presented as possible clues to the questions in the show.TV-Asahi acknowledged the suspicion that the blog sites introduced in the program were fake, and it apologized for the fraud."

Most of the doozies in this category like the All I Want For Xmas fake blog, are from 2006 or before. It would take a particularly clueless or poorly advised brand a lot to make that mistake in 2009.

So when marketers pose as average citizens or are a little muddy about their connection to a brand when they comment on blogs or YouTube videos or in message boards - that, my friends, does not live up to the promise of "discloure" in WOMMA's Honesty ROI. I continue to see marketers do this. I have seen ad agencies (in 2008!) follow an ill-advised attempt at creating a viral video - itself disclosed as from the brand or an obvious marketing effort  - with comments applauding the video that obviously came from the creators themselves eager to slap themsleves secretly  on the back. They are attempting to make outsiders think that other people like them think the video is "cool." That is not proper disclosure and is unethical. These are the easy calls.
 

So what if a brand wants to make a video whose source is mysterious? Their strategy is to create some mystery around who created the video. They plan on coming clean somewhere down the road. Maybe when they declare themselves the source in phase 2 of their master plan to apply advertising to the social media "channel" (not the most effective use of social media) or when the crowd of millions of forensice scientists "out them." For those days or weeks when people will think that the video is authentically from someone like them, there is deception. The marketer would say its all in good fun and that people enjoy the mystery and entertainment of the deception. Like a rollercoaster, people will not really be hurled into space and will always return to the coaster shed to wobble off, satisfied with their ride.

What about the brand that leaves the mystery and deception hanging like Australian menswear company, The Witchery, did with this Naked Communications-created video? Paul Rand posted about this last week on the WOMMA ethics blog. They mimicked a consumer generated video (too slickly yet plenty will be duped). they added fake response videos, and God knows how many of the 1000+ responses came form the marketers.

They even have the character, Heidi, commenting in the initial string of comments - about the product! No discloure to this day although there is some speculation online that the brand has walked away from the campaign due to the anger it incited (browse through the comments). Is this ethical? It seems to not come close to the disclosure mark. And they have left it hanging far too long for the "it was all in good fun" excuse.

Authenticity
In the case of the fake videos intended to be revealed in the course of the campaign, they may not be clear cases of ethics lapses so much as ignoring one of the great attributes of social media - athenticity. Are customers served best via social media by the brands they enjoy through branded entertainment or open discussion, utility, or some other more interaction where everyone knows who everyone is and we are building real relationships?

When marketers do not embrace the benefits of authenticity - which can be interpreted in so many productive ways - they are leaving tremendous opportunity and value on the table.I am not sure this is a question of ethics as much as it is best-practices. My strong suggestion to brands is to train for both within your organization.   
 
What do you think about these issues? Join in here or at the WOMMA Ethics blog. By the end of January, WOMMA plans to review all conversations about the issues and update the WOMMA ethics policies for today's marketing challenges. This will give brands a firm foundation for their own ethics guidelines in 2009.

Wki Scanner: How can you put the genie back in the bottle?

Ever since Virgil Griffith released his Wiki Scanner utility, the genie has been let out of the bottle and there is no way to get it back.

If you haven't been following the story, it's simple. His utility will reveal all of the edits to particular wikipedia pages including reporting who made those edits. I am not capable of analyzing his software and the accuracy of the results. Here is how Wired describes some of the voodoo behind what he has done:

"Griffith thus downloaded the entire encyclopedia, isolating the XML-based records of anonymous changes and IP addresses. He then correlated those IP addresses with public net-address lookup services such as ARIN, as well as private domain-name data provided by IP2Location.com.

The result: A database of 34.4 million edits, performed by 2.6 million organizations or individuals ranging from the CIA to Microsoft to Congressional offices, now linked to the edits they or someone at their organization's net address has made. "

Wiki scanner results pages like this one are showing up in search results. I am not sure that that is all that significant but it does make me wonder if there will be some unintended consequences of this tool (Virgil did intend to reveal controversies).

Taking the system at it's word, there will be a series of interesting reveals over the next few months. As Wiki Scanner is applied to corporate, government and hot topic issue entries, we will see how some organizations have been editing these entries to their advantage - beyond all reason. I am guessing that there will be lots of entries like this which may soften the blow for any one company.

It is already happening. The Australian Government is accused of making changes of critical content. From Yahoo News:

"A spokesman for the prime minister said Howard had never asked staff to remove unfavourable comments from the website, which allows anyone to make contributions.

But according to a report in the Sydney Morning Herald, scores of edits were made by employees at the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet -- including the removal of a reference to Treasurer Peter Costello as "Captain Smirk"."

6 Suggestions for the best defense:

1. Don't delete content in entries
2. Don't add anything but facts and whenever possible make third-party reference links
3. If you have found yourself caught up in this then stop immediately (I know - that's a lame way of saying that if your organization was malicisouly changing information - stop doing that.)
4. Don't deny that your group did it
5. Create a "Wikipedia Best-Practice Guidelines" and release it organization-wide like you did a few years ago with your blogging guidelines.
6. If you add content, have an academic guide you - not to hide where the entry came from but to guide you to write for an encyclopedia.

Notice I did not say - "never contribute to your own Wikipedia entry". I believe that would be Jimmy Wales' suggestion. I think that's nuts. Who knows more about a subject than those who live and breathe it everyday. If you can just stick to the facts, shut off your 'spin' gene, allow for disagreement and dialogue, you will end up stronger for it.

My colleague, Michael Darragh, out of our Shanghai office has a very thoughtful post including 5 Tips. 

Wiki Guidelines

Wikis. What are they good for? Absoultely something.

Everyone knows Wikipedia, a brand in the making. Most people know Channel 9, Microsoft's forum for "niners" and the developers who love them complete with their own wiki. Some folks know about industry or topic-specific wikis that I have mentioned before.

What is Wiki?

Here is the fundamental description:

"Wiki is a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser. Wiki supports hyperlinks and has a simple text syntax for creating new pages and crosslinks between internal pages on the fly.

Wiki is unusual among group communication mechanisms in that it allows the organization of contributions to be edited in addition to the content itself.

Like many simple concepts, "open editing" has some profound and subtle effects on Wiki usage. Allowing everyday users to create and edit any page in a Web site is exciting in that it encourages democratic use of the Web and promotes content composition by nontechnical users."

When is a wiki a good idea as a tool for a company trying to engage their customers/constituents? Why choose a wiki over a group blog, a multi-featured extranet, or even a message board forum? In some ways, wikis are an alternative to formal, highly structured extranets. The basic premise beneath the wiki is that community members (can be defined by both shared affinity and explicit permissions) can publish and organize content and resources.  So for a B2B world where a software company wants to maintain strong relationships with developers, it seems like a great platform.

Could a consumer food company create a foodwiki? Probably easier to see it happening with the Food Network or Whole Foods than with a specific food manufacturer like Unilever or Perdue. Most examples of wikis are not put out there by big brands. Rather they are topic or affinity sites put together by users. But brands could sponsor a brand-relevant wiki.

Here are the 7 simple suggestions to consider as you employ Wikis:

1. Wikis work when there is a large group of enthusiast or highly-motivated users such as an industry or professional group who are brought together around a focused, shared interest. e.g. Industry pros, academics, fans.

2. Wikis can serve as an alternative knowledge base-style intranet/extranet for a smaller working team. It is a great platform to accrue documents and build a shared knowledge base over a long period of time for a distributed team. However, the lack of structure doesn't really help project-based workflow.

3. Wikis benefit from some type of "stewardship" - some dedicated entity (person) who tries to clean up after users/post-ers and make sure the resource maintains some type of integrity. Some type of clear "rules of the road" help other users understand what motivates this type of oversight.

4. Having a group of stewards or moderators helps not just to straighten up but to jump start content creation.

5. You may need to qualify contributors to help drive relevant and quality content. You can "qualify" contributors before offering access so long as these qualifications are clear and fair (e.g. a wiki on law may require contributors to be lawyers)

6. Don't expect to exert too much control on a public wiki. I noticed on newPRWiki, a contributor tried to restrict edit capabilities for some select pages to an ill-defined subgroup. The larger community rebelled and the edit function was re-opened to all.

7. The technology of  a wiki doesn't define the community. You can build it and "they" - whomever they are - may not come. So just because PBwiki makes it this simple to set up a wiki, doesn't mean you should.

Wiki watch going on now:

The eastwikkers are in the middle (literally) of their 33 wikis in 33 days reviews. Here are some of the more interesting selections so far:

• Library Success - a wiki of best practices for librarians
• Science of Spectroscopy wiki - an offshoot of a NASA-sponsored site on the study of spectroscopy: the use of light to study matter.
• The New PRWiki - I use this one.
• This Might Be A Wiki: a spectacular approach to fan sites, this time for They Might Be Giants - a band with enthusaist followers that walked the Earth ever since I patrolled the Lower East Side in NYC.
• Wikilaw: exactly what it sounds like but check out the cool infographic "how it works" on the main page.