The latest mini-corporate scandal-in-the-making is CEO’s who participate anonymously in online message boards, lauding their own companies and disparaging competitors, all while pretending to be someone else with no vested interest in the company’s fortunes. The Whole Foods CEO started the trend (of getting caught, at least).
It’s fun to wag our fingers and chastise leaders who should know better, and we ALL agree this wasn’t smart, especially the bits about trying to influence investment in your own company vs. in a competitor.
But what it really points out is a lack of transparency in word of mouth (WOM) marketing–a tool that more and more companies are relying on and looking at as scientific. At the end of the day, people will take advantage of any open system no matter how much hand-wringing the WOM community does about ethics and best practices. WOM is valuable, and for now it still works. As long as that’s true, there will be people manipulating it for their own means, just like everything else in human history.
Most savvy internet users know that when they’re reading reviews on Amazon.com, a decent proportion of them come from BzzzAgent, a company that pays readers to review certain books that want to create a word of mouth buzz. When you read reviews on iTunes, how many of them came from the marketing department of the band’s record label? And when you read a Yahoo! investment message board lauding one stock over another, did it really come from your average Joe investor (as seems to be the case) or from an anonymous board member, CEO, or shareholding employee pretending to have no unusual interest in the subject at hand?
The point is that you don’t know and you can’t know. Reading opinions on a message board isn’t like chatting with your neighbors at a cookout, where you can see who is saying what and have at least some vague sense of any ulterior motives when they pick or pan some book or restaurant or cell phone or stock.
Internet users need to take all anonymous WOM recommendations they read with a huge grain of salt, and marketers need to prepare for the day when these kinds of tactics won’t work anymore because people are on to the fact that they’re essentially being gamed.
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