Word of mouth: beyond bloggers

Last week, Karl Long wrote a blog post asking when, if and how it is appropriate for marketers to provide products to influential bloggers, and other citizen content creators, in the interest of soliciting feedback and sparking chatter.  He tagged a handful of marketing bloggers -- Armano, Coates, Collier, Holtz, Hobson, McConnell/Huba, Rubel and me -- and asked us to contribute our thoughts.

The gist of Karl's post lies in two sets of questions:

First, as bloggers, if we received product from a company "what would you do with it? How would you feel about it? Obligated? Bribed? Important? Valued?"

Second, "Beyond bloggers could you actually work with other kinds of communities, like Nikon did with Flickr? How about giving some devices to top contributors or the Elite on Yelp, helping them take pictures or do video reviews of restaurants? And what are you building here? Positive WOM? Finding some 'lead users'? Seeding the 1 percenters? "

David Armano did his usual bang-up job of tackling the first set of questions.  And since I mostly agree with his points, I'd like to devote my space here to the second set and look at the word of mouth marketing opportunity beyond bloggers.  So here you go:

Could you actually work with other kinds of communities, like Nikon did with Flickr?  This may actually represent a more significant marketing opportunity than blogosphere activation (which doesn't mean I wouldn't accept free products - bring 'em on) but the power of community sites is that they aggregate audiences of like mind and provide an easy forum through which word of mouth can spread with relative ease.  I believe that the best community-based marketing programs celebrate the members of that community and tap into their existing behaviors and passions -- presumably the 16 photographers that Nikon provided with digital cameras would have taken those photos anyway.  Nikon simply found a way to both highlight their work and meet brand objectives (show off the camera and the quality of images it takes), without compromising the community members (not directing them to shoot specific subjects, or asking them to review the camera or blatantly shill for the manufacturer.)

How about giving some devices to top contributors on Yelp?  Sure.  What's so great about this particular implementation is that the seeding program is more about putting useful technology (since Karl is writing about mobile devices in particular) into the hands of a community's influentials and giving them new ways to create the content that they would have created anyway.  Expand the view here, and this approach is really about providing key community members with value and enhancing their experience.  Value could take the form of product (as in Karl's Nokia example) or exposure (like this or this) or financial incentives (like this) or any number of other things that a deep-pocketed marketer could bring to the table.  And I think that any of these are fine, provided that the relationships between the marketer and the community members are clearly disclosed and don't compromise the integrity of the content creator.  (Ah, and in the interest of disclosure, some of the examples used in this post are Digitas programs.)

And what are you building here?  You're building any or all of the things that Karl suggests -- positive WOM, finding lead users and seeding the 1 percenters.  But most of all, I think community activations provide a perfect platform for "brand sampling," for showing the product in action and demonstrating its tangible benefits.  A relatively small subset of each community (the influentials or taste makers) gets to experience the benefits first hand.  But all community members get to experience those benefits vicariously, as they engage with the content created by their community's influentials.  Brand sampling can be an incredibly powerful marketing tool, but what makes it work so well within online communities is that, done right, the community members benefit as well.

As with blog outreach programs -- and as I've hinted in this post -- community outreach that is not authentic, transparent and consistent with WOMMA's various ethical codes is, simply put, "bad boogie."  We need to look no further than the recurring scuttlebutt over the "gaming" of digg's top users.  I wish this went without saying but as long as there's a system to game, some unscrupulous company will look for ways to game the system.   Don't do it.

Hope this helps, Karl.  And I am interested in hearing any additional thoughts you have.  Same goes for anyone else who reads this -- feel free to chime in.