What's Grassroots Marketing? Round 1: BzzAgents & Creative Commons

Debate between Eric Rice (fellow marketer) & Suw Chairman on using WOM company BzzAgent for promoting a good cause, Creative Commons. (BTW, it's a pro bono campaign.) I'm mixed on BzzAgents. Ofttimes it's strategically in your favor to develop and have your own evangelists you can turn to again and again ala the Spread Firefox campaign.  (BTW, Shel reports Firefox is at 50M downloads.)

Yeah, yeah I know this is about tapping into a new audience of mainstream evangelists but you can do that yourself too (although judging by many comments on this 'controversy' it is as if marketing as a whole is distasteful).

Anyway, I'm musing on a completely different grassroots marketing approach myself, but if you're working in some capacity on this project - itself a good nonprofit cause - this is all very good backgrounder material.

See also: Larry Lessig's post, Creative Commons annoucement post. BzzAgent CEO Dave Balter comments on Larry's post. More commentary here and here.

Provocative quote from Suw: "Regardless of medium, this is still dressing up advertising as conversation."

And from Dave Balter: "The goal is to ensure that the future of marketing is about a two-way dialogue. About listening and engaging with the consumer, instead of targeting and capturing them."

Great comments from a BzzAgent: "I think the benefit of it is percisely that it will reach the people, as one previous commenter stated, who normally have conversations about sausages and shoes. These BzzAgents are going to be passing the word on to the teacher who lives down the street, to the small garage band their kid's a member of, the co-worker who's a hobbyist photographer, the lady selling watercolours at the crafts fair. The people who do watch shows like the OC and buy Audis and wear clothes from the GAP and buy the ipod because everyone else does. These are the people that the BzzAgents can reach, and reach quickly."

Good observation on two worldviews from BzzAgent employee, RobMango: "i dunno, but it seems that people are missing the fact that BzzAgent/CC-related online awareness and the public level awareness are different crowds. they barely at all overlap or interact. the blog crowd that's getting all into this are a small, almost metaphysically-grounded group of online self-prescribed critics and curious progressives. the crowd that comprises the BzzAgents is mostly the "real" world - people walking around and buying cakes and having birthday parties, singing the traditional happy birthday song that AOL owns the copyright for, who accept the terms of the world that they are given. that's the impression i get when i read BzzReports."

Snippet from Eric:

So here we are with something we believe in... something important. I've often mused about how the one thing blogging/decentralized media/and alllll this ideology we hold dear needs is a guerrilla campaign to get the word out.

To me, that's what BzzAgent is all about. It's a by-any-means-necessary-campaign-organization company. Some of the things they want to pimp, we'll believe in, and some we won't. This life is not black-and-white.

They can suggest I pimp coffeemakers, and I'll cheerfully tell them to sod off. But if they suggest I (and many many others) pimp Creative Commons? Hell yeah, sign me up and get me a flag and a badge.

Suw and I talked about this BzzAgent/Creative Commons thing for a long time over IM. One thing she said to me was, "I suppose what I dislike is the encroachment of orchestrated promotion on serendipitous discovery." I clearly see her point and I naturally disagree. She hails from a journalistic background, while I come from advertising and mass communications and design.

Suw sez (snippets only):

I think that getting BzzAgents to promote CC is doing a massive disservice not just to all the people who promoted CC because they believed in it, but also CC itself. In using fake 'word of mouth' promotion they devalue the work done by real supporters by polluting the blogosphere with fake buzz...

If Creative Commons want to promote their work, there are better ways of doing it than with BzzAgents. The whole point of the blogosphere is that it allows you to easily find those who are interested in the stuff you're interested in, so there's no reason why they couldn't reach out to individuals within the CC community and discuss with them how best to raise awareness...

Just rereading that first paragraph of the CC post makes my blood run cold. 'Grass roots marketing campaign'? 'Volunteer brand evangelists'?

In Larry's post, snippets from Suw's comments:

BzzAgents encourage people to modify their normal social interactions in order to promote a company in return for rewards. To me, this seems like 'conversational spam' and as a tactic it could backfire. People who get spammed and find out about it might take against CC because of the tactics used to bring their attention to it....

I understand that CC wants to increase adoption, but I do not think that an alliance with BzzAgent is a good way forward. The alliance with Flickr, to pick an example, is far more constructive and far more likely to introduce new people to the concepts behind CC. What other online communities could benefit from CC? What moves are being made to promote CC amongst, say, the film making community?

I would rather see CC reach out to their existing supporters and to formulate schemes which help supporters to promote CC in an honest, transparent manner. Equally, I think CC needs to help journalists out more too, make it easier for them not only to pick up the basic concepts but also find angles which will be appealing to their readers (the MP3 thing is so overdone it's not interesting anymore).

I think in this particular Creative Commons case it would help the campaign for evangelists to transparently and enthusiastically declare their volunteer evangelist status - anyone that volunteers their own time to promote something seems to give more credence to the project's worthiness. Heck, time is my most valuable resource. (In my book, BzzAgent's "rewards" are totally negligible - people do it because they want to. Precisely WHY they want to is a good question.)

Disclaimer: I am a BzzAgent for various reasons including the fact that I am a marketer and I felt I should have first-hand knowledge of what I speak of. Albeit a very poor one as I haven't Bzz'ed anything yet.

Comments

[Eric Rice]

Heh, I didn't know I was a "marketer". I'm betting CC and Bzz will separate this week. The Hive battling the Hive...

[Evelyn Rodriguez]

Eric, it's all relative. Yeah, you know a great deal about marketing. Anyway, I'm betting that folks will give the discussion more than a week to hash out constructively (see new post 5/3/05 on Crossroads Dispatches). Takes a few days just to get tempers to simmer down. Authentic conversations aren't reactive - but they are consciously responsive.

[Kelly Hulme]

Evelyn - thanks for the excellent overview. Its tough for either 'side' (however you want to define 'side'...we're all in this for the same goal..to help spread and keep improving Creative Commons) to take a step back; a third party perspective is really valuable.

[DFDF]

http://www.hugechoiceof.com/

[Grassroots Marketing]

Sadly, conversational spam does exist. In some cases companies will hire people to attend clubs just to promote their product.