More than a decade ago, when I had freshly started life in Bangalore after a stint in Delhi, I stumbled upon a former colleague from Delhi on Bangalore’s famous Brigade Road. We hadn’t kept in touch ever since I moved to Bangalore 3 months before and we caught up with assorted stuff about our Delhi life. This friend had another person walking with him on that road and he introduced himself to me. He seemed to be a salesman of some sort and I couldn’t quite figure out what he was selling. My former colleague went back to Delhi and we lost touch, but this salesman character called up a week later and even came home to showcase what he was selling.
I still could not understand what he was selling. He showed us (me and my wife) a couple of hard-bound books on making money through network marketing and even a well produced multimedia CD. According to him, the company he was working for sold these things via personal contacts and personal pitching, and this helped him get a commission on each sale. So, if I were to sum it up the way I understood it, he was selling written and audio visual material on effective network marketing and I recall telling my wife that this, at some level, seemed like selling milk to a cow. That horrendous analogy apart, one thing he told me remained in my memory – since this is network marketing, even my Delhi-based former colleague will get a commission if this guy sold something to me!
Cut to 2011.
Surekha Pillai, a very well known PR professional based out of Delhi, had an interesting PR assignment recently. It was to do with, as I understood it, promoting an interesting ritual in Kerala, called Athirathram. The ritual and its purpose fascinated me and I made a mental note to follow the updates on the ritual through her work. She eventually landed in Kerala when the ritual was slated to begin and shared tons of interesting tweets on the ritual and snapshots of Kerala life. Given my inherent interest in the whole thing, I loved every bit of her updates.
And then something strange happened.
Another tweeter, Ranjani Krishnakumar, questioned if Surekha’s tweets were part of the PR assignment. This is a massively interesting question. We had a long twitter discussion on it and took opposing sides – Ranjani argued that Surekha was using Twitter to promote a client while the disclaimer happened long before her Kerala trip (which Ranjani had missed, and I had noticed), while I felt that Surekha was just sharing her personal takes via Twitter given her personal interest in the topic too. It basically boiled down to trust – having followed Surekha for a reasonable period of time, I trusted her when she said that her personal Twitter stream was not part of the PR assignment. Ranjani did not trust this point of view.
There are two fascinating points to note, here.
One, social media has allowed us to build and nurture our own media vehicle. We, much like a micro-newspaper, have our own channel of communication (via a blog, tweets, Facebook or even LinkedIn) and also our own set of audiences. We still can’t put a finger on what this reach/audience is worth since they have chosen to read us based on something that interested them in the way or manner we write. A more commercial organization (like a print newspaper) may harness this audience by selling space to advertisers. Google does that too, online, using Adsense.
Two, the distinction between plugged material by a professional in the plugging business vs. everybody else. PR, at its barest and most basic form, is contextual plugging. A PR professional (or other such people who are in the line of promoting a client for a fee, including advertising) may have an inherent interest in that plugging, whether it is contractually agreed upon or not with the client. Given how we choose to use our online tools of communication between personal opinions and professional updates, the lines are severely blurring between what is plugged and what is not. The central question here is of course not about mere plugging, but about the tone of what we say that may or may not have been influenced by a commercial agreement. Tier 1 blogger Chris Brogan had to write this post explaining why and how he uses Amazon affiliate links in his posts about book reviews/mentions and brought it down to the credibility he had built over the years.
A third angle here involves celebrities. Now, celebrities do the same plugging using mainstream media and not necessarily personal media vehicles they may have built online. But consider tweets by someone like actress Gul Panag, on say, Finland. She has been made brand ambassador of the country for tourism and her tweets (albeit very limited) from Finland, during her honeymoon, may be part of the promotional package.
Now, in all these cases, I’m really not bothered about or questioning the intent or integrity of all the people concerned. Intent or integrity is a trust-related topic and when it comes to trust, it is one man’s (woman’s) word against another. You choose to trust, or distrust based on several factors – past experience with that person, your trusting/cynical nature and so on. That is really not the point of this post.
So, let me turn this topic away from people with a professional interest in plugging…to more normal people like accountants, day-traders, librarians, college students and so on. They do not have clients to talk about, but they may have a widely read/followed online vehicle that they have built over the years (about an year or two, if you look at Twitter alone!) that may be worth something to brands. Assume one such college student is planning a weekend trip to a hill station and upon hearing the tariff, he, being entrepreneurial and smart, offers a deal to the resort owner. The deal could be a 20% discount on the listed tariff in return for promoting the resort via an online review in his blog and a few promotional tweets. The college kid’s friends are not ideally expected to question tweets like, ‘Wow, what a lovely resort! Super view…I’m definitely coming here again, next year’.
If that sounds odd to you, it shouldn’t. When some of us complain or whine about poor quality materials/service via Twitter, some smart brands tend to do a bit of research to see the kind of reach such whining has and depending on the alleged online reach/influence of the person who whined, they give something to make up for the annoyance caused – perhaps a month’s free access to something…or a free dinner coupon. This good deed (good business sense) goes into the whiner’s (!) tweet too…which is precisely what the brand is looking for.
So, if a negative experience could be converted into an opportunity by a brand, why can’t consumers/customers initiate the same too, if their online communication outlet is worthy enough? It would obviously depend on how brands perceive this and how much value they see in this, but amidst all this mega plugging future, it’d be good to remember that all our personal online vehicles are usually built on trust. Erosion of trust takes just one incident, so it is ideal that we follow the basics of transparency and integrity that we expect from mainstream media.
In some sense, we are mainstream media, to our readers and followers.
Related read: My earlier post on this plugging business – To plug or not to plug and The plug thingy รข?? part 2. Scott Montied!
Pic courtesy Droidicus, via Flickr.