Chapter 4:
The New Media - Content Nation Challenges the Fundamentals of Marketing

In my first marketing class years ago our professor had a simple definition of marketing that still seems to work today: "Find a need and fill it." The development of all products and services and their presentation to people who could be a market for them is based around understanding who needs what and getting it to them. How do you find needs through social media and how do you fill them? On one level social media may not appear to change the fundamentals of marketing in any significant way. If you visit a popular social networking sites or look at a popular weblog you're likely to see advertising and other features which would seem to indicate that social media is not much more than an extension of traditional marketing methods via mass media, but social media is also offering the tools of marketing to millions of people worldwide who never before had access to tools that would help them to play a role in local and global markets - and in the process of doing so they are transforming how goods and services are being sold in both local and global markets.

Social Media as a Marketplace: Matching Supply and Demand

A market is a mechanism that enables someone offering a supply of goods and services to discover and act upon the demand for them, a concept which while simple has not always been easy to manage through most of human history. Restricting access to abundant supplies can drive higher demand and not being able to access abundant demand can hold down the value of goods and services. Electronic and print communications have enabled the supplies of goods and services to be matched to the demand for them as never before in the past few centuries. However, since historically only a handful of media organizations have controlled access to market information, the availability of information about markets did not necessarily change fundamentally how markets would work. Markets benefiting from publishing still relied on a handful of publishers and agents managing the flow of information about those markets, which in turn enabled the wealthiest organizations to be the prime influencers of supply and demand in those markets.

A Fisherman's Tale and a Search for Cheap Gas: Content Nation Empowering Economies

A simple example of how social media can change the balance of markets was highlighted by the Washington Post in a story on fishermen making their living off the coast of India. Traditionally, a small fishing boat in India would take its catch to the nearest port and have to accept whatever prices were offered by fish wholesalers for their catch; they had no easy way to know what the demand for their catch might be in a port before heading towards land. With the advent of mobile phones a fishing boat captain could contact other fishing boats and wholesalers in multiple ports to determine where the best demand might be for a catch before deciding to head for a specific port, or check prices elsewhere via mobile Web connections. With the mobile phone Indian fishermen have changed the balance of power in their markets from the middlemen with control of local supply and demand to fishing boat captains who are able to move from one market to another with ease based on their ability to collect their own information about those markets. In the process of doing so they have become members of Content Nation, using the power of highly affordable communications technologies to define a marketplace for themselves rather than having a others define it for them.

As much as a real-world market can benefit from sellers using social media so can buyers benefit from social media in the real world. GasBuddy.com is a Web site that enables members in the U.S. and Canada to learn about up-to-date prices for gasoline and diesel fuels at local filling stations that have been contributed by GasBuddy members. Using information from GasBuddy buyers can learn about markets in much the same way as the Indian fishermen can learn about them from a seller's perspective - and in doing so have the information to help them change how they act in their local markets. Sellers can also monitor GasBuddy, of course, and keep their prices in line with competitors, creating more efficient markets for both buyers and sellers - using information provided by people in the marketplace empowered by influential social media.

Content Nation Marketing Rule #1: Empowering anyone to understand supply and demand builds efficient economies that benefit the most people.

eBay: Creating a Global Market For Anything through Social Media

Affordable voice and Web-based communications make it possible for anyone almost any place on the planet to determine what a fair market price might be anywhere for many goods and services. The eBay network of ecommerce Web sites is a good example of how these basic concepts of marketing, media and online technology can be adapted to social media tools to accelerate the growth of markets more effectively. Founded in 1995, eBay grew rapidly to become the largest online marketplace for buyers and sellers, now serving in the neighborhood of 84 million people worldwide. EBay enabled most anyone to post an item for sale on their site and either to sell it for a fixed price indefinitely or to auction it off to the highest bidder. EBay could take a fee for the sale of an item but the ability to set up a storefront for, in essence, no money and to have built-in processing of transactions if desired was an attractive proposition to many people.

Millions of people soon flocked to eBay to sell used goods and collectibles from their homes, creating a global marketplace to realize values that would be difficult to obtain through selling items to people passing by one's home.  Buyers get to rate the quality of a transaction with a seller, enabling sellers to establish their reputation as trustworthy merchants to the world through the community's "word of mouth" endorsements. Services and books sprouted up to help everyday people become "eBay millionaires" by learning how to maximize the use of their services.

In many instances the claims of being able to make a living on eBay are hardly an illusion. There are numerous examples of people who really did start up successful businesses via eBay that made a million dollars or more. One of the keys to people making that kind of money has been the information made available from eBay's service to merchants that helps these merchants to analyze trends in both searching and purchasing. Services such as HammerTap make it easier for eBay merchants to analyze the trends found in eBay's information and to adjust their merchandise and pricing to take advantage of those trends. These are the kinds of sophisticated analysis tools that were formerly used only by major retail chains to adjust their marketing. Instead of those marketing tools being in the hands of just a few companies, now any person with an inclination can become their own marketing "guru" instead of being just a good salesperson in a local store.

Today small auctions and sales represent a declining percentage of eBay sales as established retailers and entrepreneurs trying to become "power sellers" move eBay towards larger merchants selling mass merchandise goods to mass markets. It's interesting to note that as eBay moves towards these mass markets it is finding that fewer people are visiting its Web site. To put it simply, it's hard to be both Wal-Mart and the town square marketplace, but the eBay model has established that anyone could make a market with any kind of goods in a global marketplace powered by Content Nation. Through social media anyone could build their own personal brand in an online marketplace that placed all comers on an equal footing in reaching a world that could purchase their merchandise. Most importantly, just about anything could become highly marketable merchandise through eBay, including items such as used or hand-crafted goods that many traditional retail outlets would be reluctant to sell. The traditional idea of a public market for anyone's potentially valuable goods had been revived and made accessible to anyone who demanded them in Content Nation.

Content Nation Marketing Rule #2: Maximize the ability to discover supply and demand and anyone can make a market for any goods and services.

Craigslist: Classifieds for Anyone, Everywhere Creates a New Marketplace for Local Economies

 The Craigslist community bulletin board service brought the concept of a global public marketplace driven by social media to a broader range of goods and services, and to a community focus. In 1995 founder Craig Newmark set out to make Craigslist a community bulletin board for the tech-savvy people of the San Francisco area. Since then Craig Newmark and his small group of programmers and support staff, which still includes Newmark, have expanded their service to support people in communities across hundreds of U.S. cities and in communities across 35 nations around the world who want to share classified ads, events listings and discussions on Craigslist's simple Web site. Ads on Craigslist are free for most people, except for companies posting jobs and real estate sellers in major markets. Like traditional newspaper classified ads, Craigslist does not get involved in any transaction and enables sellers to remain anonymous; the service is there as a forum for public communication.

The pages on Craigslist are very simple in design, almost anti-commercial, you might say. You'd think that such a facility would not have much commercial appeal at first glance, But Craigslist is one of the most popular Web sites today, with about 40 million visitors monthly looking at more than 10 billion page views and having doubled its audience in about a year for the more than 30 million new classified ads appearing on Craigslist each month. There is something about the homely Craigslist that people find to be very attractive. In large part that attractiveness is the concept that its listings are for the most part completely free and unfiltered content; it's just people reaching out to other people like themselves to sell goods and services, to meet one another or to announce things happening in their local communities or across any of the communities that Craigslist serves. Like the humble town squares that in some places still host market days when farmers and merchants bring goods to sell to their communities the looks of Craigslist aren't as important as the opportunity to meet up with other people in their community to exchange goods, services and chit-chat. In fact, the homely and neutral nature of Craigslist helps people to have a sense that there are no considerations in using the service other than those of the people using it.

Since Craigslist does not take a part in any transaction for goods and services advertised on its site the form of economic exchange between a buyer and a seller can take on any form - including bartering. In May of 2008 Craigslist had received listings for more than 130,000 bartering offers, creating a broader marketplace for transactions not requiring money. Because Craigslist can take advantage of the virtually limitless ability of the Web to store content, the marketplace conversations on Craigslist can scale to any size of community easily - and can scale across communities using search engines to locate goods and services. This can allow commerce of many kinds to scale accordingly.

Not surprisingly, Craigslist has been a real headache for newspaper publishers wanting to capitalize on classfied ad services. At some major newspaper chains classified advertising fell 14 to 20 percent during 2007, while Craigslist, the top-ranked online classified ad site, doubled its audience and grew its annual revenues by some estimates now approaching $100 million. This is still fairly small compared to the estimated total online market of $3.1 billion for online classified ads, but, given that Craigslist charges for only a fraction of the listings that are posted to its site while newspapers and other large online ad services charge for most of their listings, it's fair to say that the financial impact of Craigslist on the marketplace for classified ads goes far beyond its own revenues.

More importantly, Craigslist has succeeded in part by recognizing that, like the traditional town square marketplace, an online marketplace is a social function that brings together peers in a community as much as it is a commercial function that brings together merchants with consumers.  People build personal relationships with one another via social media, relationships that sometimes turn into commercial relationships, but which remain first and foremost personal, part of the fabric of a community. With more and more commerce in local communities being driven by large retail chain stores and more local newspapers owned by large newspaper chains, Craigslist is a reminder that communities acting on their own behalf can be their own very efficient drivers of commerce, when they have ready access to publishing tools.

Content Nation Marketing Rule #3: Sometimes the most effective marketplace is a community that communicates with one another effectively.

Social Media as Research: Building Market Knowledge Through Publishing-Driven Relationships

A marketplace of peers using social media is enabling more people than ever to be independent buyers and sellers in Content Nation. For many buyers and sellers, though, the question of what to buy and sell is one that takes research. In modern society, traditionally driven by mass-manufactured goods advertised through mass media, often buying decisions were influenced by brand advertising. Research is showing, though, that today's buyers are trusting the opinions of peers heavily in making buying decisions.

An eMarketer study of U.S. adults using the Web found that 91 percent of adults sought the advice of others before purchasing a product or service and that 58 percent of adults named recommendations from friends as their top influencer in buying decisions. Other eMarketer research showed that about 18 percent of today's Web users are influencing others by word-of-mouth recommendations, many of whom people using social media. While traditional sources of research such as magazines with product reviews magazines and online Web sites are still important to many people for learning about products and services, increasingly it's everyday people empowered with social media tools who are helping them to understand what's worth buying.

Consumer Product Reviews and Ratings: On-Demand Word-of-Mouth

It's hard to imagine that anyone would care enough about a cat litter spoon to share their thoughts about it with the world, but apparently there were twenty-six people using Amazon.com who cared enough about the ScoopWell Litter Scoop to write a product review about it. Millions of product reviews and ratings from consumers are on Amazon and other Web sites that enable people to examine people's opinions about household goods, restaurants, hotels and luxury items. This is social media in the context of a purchasing decision; in this instance, in a very valuable and influential context. Do I spend four dollars or eight dollars on a litter scoop? Twenty-six people writing about the eight dollar scoop can make all the difference in my purchasing decision. Something like a cat litter spoon is not something that people would likely see advertised outside of a very small set of publications, yet, thanks to the social media featurs of Amazon, this particular product can receive strong endorsements right at the point of purchase that advertising would be hard-pressed to generate in the mind of a consumer.

The eMarketer study on word-of-mouth advertising found that such product reviews and ratings were considered by consumers to be more valuable than the influence of radio advertising, web search engine ads, billboard advertising and web site banner ads. Thinking of the billions of dollars spent on such attempts to influence buyers the free influence offered by product reviews and ratings is valuable indeed. Most importantly, consumer reviews and ratings play a role at the point of purchase that friends, television ads and other powerful purchase influencers cannot offer. Consumer reviewers are friends of necessity, able to offer a personal touch that focuses a buyer on a community of like-minded people. Few of us could probably think of 26 people we know who could give us an informed opinion about litter spoons or other everyday items that we might be thinking about buying, much less be available when we were considering such a purchase. A 2008 study by the Edelman public relations firm found that 58 percent of people trusted "a person like me" as the most credible source of information about a company, ahead of a financial or industry expert, an academic professional, a doctor or a healthcare professional. In other words, when there's a community of like-minded people available to help someone form an opinion on a commercial venture, they are the most trusted source.

Quite a bit of marketing research has been built up around how a person's emotions influence a purchasing decision, much of which focuses on the idea of creating an allure about a product or service that will seduce a buyer into making a purchase. Author and researcher Vance Packard wrote in his 1957 book The Hidden Persuaders about how the "hidden needs" of a consumer - their inner desires and fears - can be manipulated through well-designed advertising and marketing techniques to persuade a person that they should purchase a product. While many emotions certainly factor into buying decisions there is one innner emotion that social media seems to bring to the fore: trust.

The world of advertising is one in which marketers struggle endlessly to second-guess where and how they might be able to influence a purchaser in the few moments that they may have via an unsolicited message, appealing to extreme emotions to gain a person's attention as they pass by or endure a message on the way to getting to what they really wanted or needed to do. In social media such appeals are not respected by and large. Instead the emotion of personal trust, of being able to assess the thoughts and feelings of like-minded people in an environment free of pressure or over-engineered allure, seems to drive decision making for purchasers using social media. That trust is extremely hard for sellers to engineer via traditional marketing methods and the alternative methods are enormously expensive.

Social Media Marketing Rule #4: Trusted peers are the most powerful tool for people researching sellers.

Everyday Enthusiasts: Add Them Up and Buzz Starts to Happen

Greg and Kat Baker are a couple of no particular fame who blog together on topics relating to their lives in North Carolina and elsewhere. Their posts are probably of personal interest to just a few people, but if you're interested in a Motorola RAZR mobile phone you may have found in a search of weblogs Greg's opinions that he posted recently on why he may be trading in his RAZR phone some time soon and what his thoughts are about which model to get next. Since Greg has posted his opinions without any thought as to their commercial value, you're likely to treat them as honest, unvarnished views of what life with a RAZR is about. If you know Greg personally, chances are his opinions will carry a fair amount of weight, if researchers are correct.

If you're Motorola and you're wondering what people think of your products, Greg's opinions in and of themselves may not be that valuable, but add Greg's opinions to the opinions of all of the other people using social media to talk about their products, and Greg's outlook on the Motorola RAZR becomes input for Motorola's research into consumer sentiment analysis and product planning. Traditionally, companies would research market opinion by conducting polls or persuading people to participate in a focus group meeting in which a professional interviewer would tease out their opinions on a company's products and services. The process of gathering and analyzing such information is expensive, time-consuming and does not always yield information that companies can act upon easily. Moreover, if market conditions change - a competitor introduces a new product or a problem with a product becomes known in the news - the careful work put into traditional market research may no longer reflect what people in the marketplace are thinking.

To make the most of opinions like Greg's on weblogs, forums and other social media web sites powerful search services have been created that harvest the influential insights that publishers have created to analyze the patterns found in their content to define patterns in the marketplace. Analysis services such as Dow Jones Insight, Attentio and Buzz Logic comb through hundreds of millions of pages of content from millions of social media enthusiasts who mention products and services offered by major companies. These services are able to surface key trends as to what companies, products and brands are being written about the most online, which of these has positive or negative sentiment associated with them, what key words or concepts are being associated with them and which people using social media are the most influential on a particular product or topic. Since the search engines used for these kinds of services are able to visit millions of web sites each day, these insights from the patterns found in social media and other online sources help these companies to understand market sentiment clearly and to act upon it strongly.

The search for sentiment and influence in social media through tools such as these can have an enormous potential payoff. Research promoted by Attentio indicates that 1 in 3 auto buyers use social media to help them make their purchasing decision. Fifty-one percent use it to help narrow their choice, 23% to confirm a choice and 15% to select a top choice. Understanding the marketplace, not just as a group of potential buyers but as a group of people who are the ones influencing buying decisions, takes researching markets out of the realm of looking at samples of a population and into the world of looking at a census of a population. It is, if you will, democratic input for product planning.

Content Nation Marketing Rule #5: When the buyers talk more loudly than the sellers, it's time to listen to them.

Building Conversations with Markets: Getting and Giving One-to-One Insight and Feedback

The suggestion box is a time-honored method to collect ideas, but rarely has it resulted in a meaningful amount of feedback from customers about the problems that they really want solved in their products and services. Social media works to change that by enabling institutions to hear directly from their customers and to interact with them as peers. One interesting example of how this can scale dramatically is Dell Computer's IdeaStorm portal, with which Dell has collected more than 9,000 product and service improvement ideas in little over a year, with over 630,000 vote-ups for good ideas and over 70,000 comments. Dell's staff interacts with members of IdeaStorm by adding their own comments to suggestions and providing feedback as to what Dell is considering doing with them. In blog recaps that come out every week or so Dell keeps the conversation with clients going by providing updates on how the feedback is being applied to their products and services. Many ideas and their feedback are used to make critical product decisions. In one recent week seven "Ideas in Action" were announced as in the process of being implemented. Using the tools of social media - community feedback, voting contributions up or down, engaging actively in community discussions, forums, providing regular feedback and updates in a very person-to-person conversational style - Dell gets both powerful market research at a fraction of the price of traditional methods and builds up product enthusiasm among its most vocal and influential front-line customers.

Content Nation Marketing Rule #6: If you say that you want to hear from your customers, be prepared to have a conversation with them. A lot of them.

Turning Product Testing into Product Evangelism: Johnson & Johnson Goes Toe to Toe with Customers at CafeMom

CafeMom, a social media portal that was one of the ten fastest growing web sites in 2007 according to Compete.com, is a very active social network of mothers who share photos, personal stories and discussions on everything from diapers to dentists to getting jobs in and out of the home. With a claimed six million monthly visitors CafeMom's fast growth is attracting both advertisers and marketers who want to get feedback from people who are both prime targets for their products and able to express themselves with openness and enthusiasm.

One of the companies attracted to CafeMom is health products giant Johnson & Johnson, which has seen CafeMom's audience grow quickly past the audience for its own Baby.com portal of expert information and ads. Johnson & Johnson formed a topic group on CafeMom focused on people volunteering to test its Aveeno line of skin products. Two hundred invited CafeMom members were sent samples of Aveeno products and asked to provide feedback on them via CafeMom in a members-only group. Many members responded enthusuastically with comments, before and after photos and enthusiastic endorsements, such as: '...aveeno products are fabulous...the best diaper rash cream ever is the aveeno brand...clears up a diaper rash in like two applications..love it !"  This is not only good product feedback but is using product testing as a way to build up an enthusiastic core group of online publishers who can be strong evangelists for a product and a brand in a community of influencers that will listen intently to their peers' recommendations. You could spend millions on television advertising to influence mothers, or you could start an online conversation with mothers who other mothers trust to be your influencers for you.

Content Nation Marketing Rule #7: If you're introducing a product that needs both testing and evangelists, use social media to build relationships with testers who can become evangelists.

The Big Sombrero: Social Media As an Equalizer for Mass and Niche Market Power

You've seen how social media helps millions of people to discover and create markets, how to build research from millions of personal publishers with opinions and how to tap them to get feedback on new and existing products and brands that companies bring to market. In ways both subtle and powerful using social media in the early stages of preparing a product for the marketplace challenges the fundamental idea of how many organizations have thought of marketing in the highly centralized organizations that have been the foundation of major companies in modern societies.

Henry Ford once said of the Model T, his first mass-manufactured automobile, ""The customer can have any color he wants so long as it's black." He held on to this conviction long after other manufacturers had begun to mass-produce more style-conscious cars, and in doing so almost brought his company to ruin.

With social media Henry Ford wouldn't have had to make that decision by the power of his will or his intuition: he could have gotten confirmation that people would accept a black Model T as long as it was affordable and did the job right - until they changed their minds - as much as people accepted white Apple iPods as long as they were affordable and did the job right. Intuition, personality and ego don't have to be the drivers of great products anymore: instead, great products can be created by great listeners and collaborators, people who are willing and able to put the buyer in control of specifying what is creating demand in the moment.

If the markets are becoming empowered through social media to identify, interpret and respond to demand from buyers rapidly and responsively, then perhaps there is a fundamental shift in how buyers and sellers experience success in the marketplace. If demand is shifting very rapidly for goods and services and people can respond to those demands quickly enough through social media to catch rapidly shifting demand profitably then some of the traditional benefits and profits of mass marketing and mass manufacturing are going to be challenged by those who can satisfy demands before they ever reach the scale of mass markets.

A few years ago Wired Magazine's Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson popularized the concept of "The Long Tail," based on the premise that the Web is able to create markets for mass-produced goods long after they were first mass-produced by finding new markets for them through search engines and buyer recommendations.  The obvious question raised by the "long tail" model in light of social media's power to create responses to the market's demands rapidly is why the ability to find powerful niche markets should be limited to recycled mass market goods and services.

The Web in general, and social media in particular, enables people to exploit highly profitable market opportunities long before they have been recognized and responded to by mass marketers. Some of the niche markets may go on to be developed into mass markets, but many of them will be quite profitable and well-defended throughout their life without resorting to mass marketing, in part because social media enables a high level of personal communication among market participants that mass marketers will be hard-pressed to challenge. Brand and product loyalty is one thing: when the brand is the consensus of well-networked people with a wealth of information at their disposal, then new concepts of barriers to entry will emerge to challenge mass marketing techniques. These strongly defensible niche markets can be thought of like the turned-up edges of a big sombrero, creating a larger market "shadow" beneath it than the mass market's crown in its middle. The strengths of niche markets supported by social media, unlike the "long tail" model, may in fact provide a strength that supports certain standard mass market products and services but which for the most part lives independent of those mass markets, and increasingly may drive mass markets.

Content Nation Marketing Rule #8: The ability of buyers and sellers to collaborate in the development of highly defensible market niches through social media may create more market value than mass markets.

Social Media as the Message: Marketing as Influencing a Conversation

The Big Sombrero market model offers enormous opportunities for all market participants, but it may be a tricky model to master if you're a company focused on traditional mass marketing. In some instances mass marketing techniques for communicating with social media participants work pretty well in social media: YouTube's advertising revenues are powered primarily by ads placed on the pages on which videos are displayed, revenues which are expected to climb up to $200 to $500 million by 2009 according to some financial analysts. Viral marketing techniques, long used on the Web to spread enthusiasm for products and services via email and other online communications, have been mastered by many marketing professionals to accelerate the sales of mass market goods and services. Spreading the word efficiently is the key to mass media marketing techniques and in some ways social media accommodates that model well, but a problem arises when you have to confront markets who are already communicating well with one another on any number of topics and on any number of levels. When social media has created its own conversation, how do marketers get invited to that conversation effectively without alienating its participants or threatening a brand product's reputation?

From Diet Coke and Mentos to Facebook: When Your Brand Misses a Worldwide Conversation

The year 2005 marked the beginning of the "Diet Coke and Mentos" online video craze, a phenomenon triggered by Steve Spangler, a popularizer of science who loves to use everyday materials to demonstrate scientific principles in books, live appearances and television shows. One of wikiaSpangler's most popular tricks was to show how Mentos mint candies when dropped into a soft drink bottle could release huge foamy fountains of carbon dioxide. The beverage of choice became Diet Coke, in part because its lack of sugar would make cleanup after his experiments less sticky, and because its ingredients seemed to result in a particularly foamy and spectacular display.

A demo by Spangler of a Mentos fountain on KUSA-TV in June of 2005 happened to coincide with the growing popularity of online social media services that collected videos created and uploaded mostly by everyday people. Homemade videos of people's own experiments with Diet Coke and Mentos fountains began to flourish online soon afterwards, with new experiments and new techniques bringing the phenomenon to an ever-higher level of drama and complextity. Thousands of personal publishers - more than 12,000 on YouTube alone - have tried their own hands at online videos of mentos-and-soda experiments, the most popular of which has been viewed by more than 8 million people.

As people made these videos the logos of Mentos mints and Diet Coke were shoved into close-up focus for millions of viewers - yet it was more than a year before the manufacturers of Diet Coke and Mentos began to take interest in a phenomenon not of its own making that had enormous viral marketing value. It was only after seeing a Mentos fountain spectacular by online video producers EepyBird featured on the David Letterman late-night television talk show that Mentos provided support for Diet Coke-and-Mentos displays. The marketing support from Mentos began to grow, with prominent sponsorship in live events in which hundreds of people attempted to set world records for simultaneous Mentos fountains (as of this writing the largest attempt to date was in Riga, Latvia, which involved 1,900 participants). Today the web site for Mentos displays prominent links to Mentos fountain videos by Eepybird and how-tos for Mentos fountain enthusiasts, and has played an enthusiastic active role in record-setting events long after their mass media exposure has died out. Coca-Cola was more aloof from the start of the phenomenon, refraining from direct endorsements or support. Coca-Cola tried to create their own Mentos fountain videos on their own web site as part of "The Coke Show." They flopped. Eventually, diet soda from rival Pepsi began to support live Mentos fountain events: The Diet-Coke-and-Mentos meme was dead. The world's leading brand walked away completely from the phenomenon and since has had tepid marketing and branding efforts via social media. 

The power of the Mentos fountain phenomenon to provide endorsement value was confirmed in 2007, when an online popularity poll sponsored by Time Magazine rated Steve Spangler the 18th most influential person of 2007, placing just ahead of Brad Pitt and Barack Obama. While the Time 100 was an unscientific poll which compiled popularity votes from  more than a million people, this was an overwhelming endorsement not only for Spangler personally, but as well for the citizen publishers of Content Nation who were inspired by Spangler. To have more influence in a popular barometer of cultural influence than one of Hollywood's most focused-upon media figures and a prominent candidate for President of The United States of America is an indication of how important it is for people who feel empowered by publishing to be a part of a global cultural phenomenon. More significantly, though, it's an indication of how powerful the potential is for Content Nation to confer or withhold its endorsement in an era in which social media is becoming the primary focus of so many people in a global marketplace.

The importance of the lessons that come out of the influence of this event cannot be underestimated.

• Three highly visible brand name products gained enormous global viral marketing endorsements that they never asked for and never initiated.
• The phenomenon was completely self-sustaining for the better part of two years. Marketing support was minimal - mostly only for EeepyBird produced videos and live events - and never influenced in a major way what people decided to do on their own.
• People did with these brand name products as they pleased - sometimes doing things that would make a typical corporate lawyer cringe if it were to be something that might have legal repercussions. Yet nothing untoward happened - and a powerful folk endorsement continued to spread.
• Coca-Cola looked at a new world of online branding controlled by their customers and flinched - and has been paying a strong price ever since. According to statistics at Compete.com, the number of people visiting the parent company Web site coca-cola.com was down sixteen percent since May 2007 while traffic to rival pepsi.com, which features links to popular online content and its own social media, is up more than 40 percent in the same period.

Mentos caught on to a genuine social media trend and learned how to embrace it as an active participant that was willing to let the message be what the social media publishers and audience wanted it to be. Coca-Cola wasn't prepared to recognize the authority and influence of social media and tried to control the message unsuccessfully.

Interestingly Coca-Cola and Pepsi find themselves in the emerging stages of yet another campaign for brand influence initiated by social media publishers. On the Facebook social networking web site some Facebook members from Canada and Australia have started opposing Facebook groups for Coke fans and Pepsi fans who want to take a side in the "Cola Wars." Members get awarded status recognition points for the number of Facebook members that they invite into the group of their choice. Members post comments, photos, videos, discussions and share their enthusiasm for one brand over another with friends on Facebook. As of this writing about 37,000 people have taken sides in this long-lasting brand rivalry in a little under three months, most within the last few weeks. Yet again, Content Nation decides to have fun with brands where and when it pleases them, and shares its enthusiasm as it chooses to.

Content Nation Marketing Rule #9: In social media viral marketing can create and mutate its own viruses at will - and turn brands into what influential personal publishers want them to be at will.

Be Careful What You Ask For: General Motors Gets Unexpected Feedback from Viral Videos

In 2006 automotive giant General Motors launched a contest for the best audience-created video featuring its large Chevy Tahoe truck model. Contestants could assemble videos using pre-filmed clips of their trucks in action and add music and text. It seemed like a good idea at the time, until the contestants arrived. What GM received was not glowing praises for their vehicles but people who used their toolkit to generate their own editorial statements about the Tahoe's size, lack of fuel economy and about its impact on the environment. Some of the videos included references to pro-environment web sites, turning GM's efforts into a promotion of the audience's favorite causes. Aware of the negative publicity that these videos attracted, GM took the contest web site off the Internet. Not only had Content Nation made a statement at GM's expense on their own web site: they also preserved their videos for viewing on web sites such as YouTube. Tens of thousands of people have viewed these videos, continuing the branding of large trucks as these potential buyers would have them be branded.

It appears that trying to control people's endorsements doesn't work too well in Content Nation: people need to speak honestly so that their endorsement power will be authentic in the eyes of an audience that has ready access to all opinions on branded products, as well as opinions on the authenticity of someone who endorses a product directly or indirectly. If you're looking to use the influence of people in social media you have to respect that influence at least as much as your own.

Content Nation Marketing Rule #10: If you ask for a conversation about your brand in social media you have to be ready to hear what you may not want to hear.

Learning How to Have Conversations: Becoming a True Peer in Social Media through Facebook

Learning how to have conversations with markets does not seem to come naturally to many companies used to traditional marketing techniques. Like someone who has been good at charming  a potential mate with smooth talk and good looks, being able to put some of the slick tools of mass marketing aside to engage in social media markets may seem a bit unnatural at first to those used to the appeal of traditional marketing methods. Social media doesn't ask a brand for a product to become unappealing to be successful: it only asks for it to be polite about joining a conversation and not to buy their way into a conversation. This doesn't mean that advertising doesn't have its place in social media: many social media portals make a place for advertising that works reasonably well for people wanting to get messages across. Choosing your mix of methods can be tricky and can depend on the rules and expectations of a given social media community.

The Facebook social networking community offers interesting examples of how a brand can succeed when it takes on a role as a peer-endorsed source of interesting content and community contacts, an opportunity that's underused by most marketers. Very few major brands maintain a Facebook presence actively yet, but some that do are beginning to understand how to use a social networking community. We looked briefly earlier at how fans of Coca-Cola and Pepsi set up popular and rapidly-growing groups on Facebook that attracted lots of enthusiasm for these brands, but with content created and selected by fans that may or may not fit either company's marketing themes. By contrast the official Coke and Pepsi pages on Facebook offer less raw content than the fan-generated "Cola War" pages, but still attract large numbers of Facebook members who declare themselves "fans" of these pages, and in doing so open themselves up for messages from these commercial page creators. In essence, fandom for a page creates an opt-in channel for marketing messages from the page creator. Think of how many marketers would have to labor to create such a willing audience for their marketing messages in other mediums; this is an extraordinarily powerful way to reach people who have a strong relationship with a brand or a product or service.

If that were all that Facebook did, it would be powerful enough, but in fact Facebook does quite a bit more. When a member becomes a fan of a Facebook page, Facebook will put a notification of their action on the Facebook home pages of their friends. So the personal endorsement of a page fan is automatically propagated to other members - automatic viral marketing, if you will. By some estimates the average Facebook member has links to 164 Facebook friends. This means that if I had 164 friends on Facebook and I had become a fan of a page then 164 other people would become aware of my endorsement of that page when they looked at their Facebook home page. If for the sake of argument none of the people who were fans of the Pepsi page on Facebook overlapped with the friends of all of the other people who were fans of that page then that would mean that about eight million people would be aware of people personally endorsing Pepsi's page.

While this is not a realistic estimate of the actual scope of fan endorsement due to overlapping networks of friends, even if the total unique impressions of unique endorsements were just a third or a quarter of the typical Facebook members' friends network, then there would still be millions receiving those impression endorsements. Moreover, for the friends that were overlapping with other endorsing members, those members would be viewing multiple endorsements for that page, and would be further persuaded to become fans of that page themselves. Facebook offers marketers the opportunity to put in a small text ad with a simple graphic and a link to a Facebook page in friend notification messages, which helps to accelerate the power of that endorsement to attract new members to that page, but it's the personal endorsement itself from one or many friends that provides the basic marketing power.

Facebook can also enable people to develop software that a member can add to their page easily that can help to build brand value and marketing relationships. Some applications, for example, have the ability to send messages that are graphic tokens of appreciation to friends, symbols such as a bottle of champagne, a birthday cake, and so on. A Facebook application exists that enables a member to send Coca-Cola symbols to friends, the more friends to whom to you send a Coke "gift," the more different kinds of Coke product symbols will be at your disposal. The data collected from this application can be used to analyze how product preferences match up to different types of member profiles. This is an interesting example of how altruism, the feeling that enables someone to give to others with no direct personal reward in return, can be combined with marketing goals such as brand endorsement and market research to enable a freely given endorsement to be personalized to a recipient.

The ability of marketers to gain a position as a trustworthy peer in Facebook happens in large part because pages created by a marketer have no major differences in their capabilities from those created by an everyday member of Facebook. This limits the power of marketers to have unique control over their audiences through adding unique features. Yet, in a sense, having the same technologies at their disposal as everyone else enables marketers to gain more authenticity, to be seen as a true peer with an audience among peers much as any other person may have. The power of scalability comes not from being able to buy attention but by being able to leverage the scale of a community's endorsements. By using the same power that other peers use to gain those endorsements marketers can become powerful and influential peers as they gain acceptance from other powerful and influential peers in a marketplace of relationships driven by social media.

Content Nation Marketing Rule #11: The power of personal endorsements in social media places the ultimate power of marketing in the hands of the markets and not the marketers.

Knowledge as a Marketing Tool: WikiAnswers Enables Experts to Build Relationships Through Sharing Expertise

WikiAnswers is an online community that enables people to post questions on the Web and to have those questions answered by people who want to share their knowledge on a particular topic. The answers to questions accumulate over time and become a resource that people can search, and that comes up in search engine results often when people type in a similar question. Like many social media communities WikiAnswers build up an enthusiastic core of people who answer questions of a wide variety of topics, but unlike some social media communities WikiAnswers encourages companies who provide products and services in a particular marketplace to answer questions as well.

Other people on WikiAnswers are still free to answer a question answered by a company representative, but in the meantime the companies that respond to these questions have an opportunity to provide information that will be seen as an answer coming from a peer source. This enhances the position of that company to be seen as a trustworthy source of information in a way that would be hard to convey through a corporate web site oriented towards traditional marketing or a company advertisement. In doing so companies gain access to the marketplace at a level of trust that costs little to support. The main commitment has to be to answering questions honestly in a way that will be respected by the peers in WikiAnswers. This is almost the inverse of the concept of traditional advertising, where words are chosen carefully to present a particular image of a company or a product. Simply giving direct and truthful answers to direct questions can be extremely beneficial to a company's brand value in the marketplace, if it's done in a community that explicity and implicitly accepts them as trustworthy peers.

Content Nation Marketing Rule #12: When you become a trusted source of information in a social media community that competes openly with a community's peers for influence and authority your brand gains marketable trustworthiness.

The Super-Enthusiast: Building a Brand Through Respected Social Media Peers

 When people understand and respect a person's personal brand good things can happen. A nice example of this can be seen in how some branded products work with enthusuiasts who publish social media about their favorite pursuits. An interesting example can be seen in the Oh Gosh! blog of London, which highlights tips on mixing bar drinks, reviews of famous and trendy bars and activities amongst the tipplers of Europe. In the process of doing so the Oh Gosh! blog drops many names and takes many photos, often including the names and brands of liquors and establishments in the process. While there's a commercial edge at times to Oh Gosh!, clearly it's a blog of, by and for mixed drink enthusiasts, with frank reviews of the fare in high-brow establishments (the famed Bar Hemingway in Paris drew a mixed review) along with photos of brand-sponsored events and their personal accounts. Enthusiasts like to use the power of their endorsement with some care, but for those upon whom favor falls cultivating relationships with bloggers covering niche markets can be a powerful level of endorsement from a blogger's personal brand that may motivate the trend-setters in that marketplace.

Content Nation Marketing Rule #13: In social media all brands are personal brands.

Me-dia: Social Media as a Place to Build Personal and Corporate Brand Messaging and Influence

Traditionally, companies spend lots of money and effort to get their senior managers in the media spotlight via press releases, interviews and presentations at conferences. These remain important marketing tools, but one of the most important developments in promoting the brand value of senior managers is using social media to enable them to speak directly to markets. We saw an example earlier of GM's Bob Lutz, a self-professed car nut who is seen as an influential media figure, posting items on the FastLane blog. Certainly, examples of Chief Executive Officers as bloggers now abound among prominent technology and content companies who are able to provide their companies with leverage in the conversations happening in those circles. Blogging as a tool to promote a business can work on any level of any industry seeking to build influence and to gain a personal marketing voice hard to deliver through traditional media channels.

An interesting example of how management blogs can help in a marketing effort for a company of any size comes from FirstRain CEO Penny Herscher, whose blog covers events in the financial industry as well as highlighting her up-and-coming company's information analysis products.  Penny manages an interesting mix of timely topics, weaving in information that's useful to potential clients but first and foremost being herself - an insightful and well-spoken business leader - as she shares her thoughts. Penny Herscher once relayed to me the story of a blog post that she had written that resulted in a phone call from one of FirstRain's prospective customers. By reading her blog post the prospect finally "got" what FirstRain's sales team was trying to get across to him about their services, and finally arranged a valuable sales call that would probably have been much harder to attain without her blogging efforts. Penny is careful to provide links to her profiles in the LinkedIn and Facebook social networking services to maximize the business networking effect that she can attain from her efforts.

Content Nation Marketing Rule #14: Sometimes your company's best personal brand is the person who drives the influential relationships that lead to sales.

Sponsored Social Media: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly

Social media's marketing power comes from its ability to have genuine relationships between trusted peers act as market influencers. Unfortunately, many marketers who turn to social media view it as a medium that they want to exploit as just another media channel that can carry a commercial message first and foremost instead of a personal message. In other words, these marketers try to use social media as just another way to craft a sponsored commercial message. Like the payola scandals of years past in commercial radio, in which music publishers concealed their compensation of radio station staffs to play specific songs, hidden sponsorship of someone's endorsement of a product can have very negative consequences. Most bloggers and producers of social media are careful to indicate when they have conflicts of interest that might interfere with their objectivity when speaking about a particular topic. Done the right way, as seen in some of the examples above, sponsoring social media can work when it's clear who owns and sponsors the content, and the people associating with that company or product actively endorse them. Sponsoring content in a way that represents a sponsor's intent honestly and openly can help them to gain the trust of their markets.

Unfortunately, this is not always what happens with social media. In the worst examples, companies sponsoring social media create content that's not only not legitimate peer communications but downright deceptive. Whatever the technique, the desire of marketers to try to purchase deceiving influence via social media is an indication that there is something fundamentally different about its power. In Content Nation, people endorse one another openly and willingly. In traditional marketing, everything is done to purchase influence regardless of the market's openness to their influence or its value in comparison to others.

The Good - Be Honest About What You're Doing, Even if It's a Bit Commercial

Sometimes a brand wants to have a bit more "oomph" in a social media setting, and sometimes that can work out well - when it's designed to have its branding separate from other community publishers. A good example of this is the "Channels" feature of YouTube, which enables publishers to have their own branded section of the site in which to display their videos and to add marketing messages. Major brands such as the National Basketball Association can showcase their own videos as well as other YouTube videos that they find interesting, helping to underscore their membership in a publishing community. The same NBA videos can be found elsewhere on YouTube, but their own collection is highlighted in the "Channels" category of the site. This allows a brand to participate more powerfully in social media while enabling it to remain a peer source of content.

Another good approach to sponsored content is social media that provides useful information for a community but which promotes regularly products and services that people can purchase. IndieSounds NY is a blog and newsletter produced by New York entrepreneur Pete Harris, who promotes local independent music acts and sales of their CDs from his Harris Radio web site. IndieSounds NY has content designed to appeal to people following the New York independent music scene in general, while including regularly links to new artists, songs and content on Harris Radio. This enables Pete Harris to enjoy the benefits of being able to blog about general events as a part of this particular community while being able to keep his original Harris Radio brand in ths spotlight.

Content Nation Marketing Rule #15: There's nothing wrong with being commercial in social media, as long as it's clear how you fit into your community.

The Bad - Blurring the Lines Between Community and Commercial Interests

While Web presences like IndieSounds NY and the NBA Channel on YouTube still have strong components of social media influence and leadership, marketers get into trouble when they try to combine commercial messages with community content too intimately. While many of these efforts don't result in bad content, they do tend to bend the purpose of social media more towards trying to influence the ranking of another commercial web site in search results from Google and other popular search engines. The Bath 747 weblog is an attractive blog with nice illustrations, popular topics with entries that are generally a short paragraph, each followed by a message to visit a web site that sells bath products. When you look more carefully at the blog entries, each one really doesn't say much of anything important about the topic - it's just words that can be found by a search engine to make it appear to the search engine software that this web site likes the bath product site it links to a lot. While not transparently deceptive, this is content that's written specifically by people who are paid to promote specific web sites.

Not quite as deceptive but still in a blurry zone for their value as social media are services such as Pay-Per-Post that pay people to blog about products and services and to offer their own opinions about them. Pay-Per-Post has a code of ethics that asks the bloggers writing for a fee on a product or service to disclose that they are being paid to offer their opinions on a specific product or service, so it's clear that their opinions are not coming out of their own enthusiasm or interest in a particular product or service. While the information in pay-per-post articles may be of a somewhat higher quality than in a sevice like Bath 747 designed to support a specific web site or company it's still a sponsored message with limited personal endorsement value. More importantly it is likely to have the same net effect as a dedicated sponsored weblog - content that will be digested by search engines for getting better placement in search results and a potentially false sense of "grass roots" enthusiasm for a product or service.

Content Nation Marketing Rule #16: Just because you're using social media technologies doesn't mean that you're creating social media - and some marketers don't really care.

The Ugly - The Corruption of Social Media Marketing With Spam, Astroturf and Misinformation

"Spam," the generation of mass quantities of low-quality marketing messages, is a problem throughout the Web in email inboxes - and unfortunately social media does not escape the efforts of spammers and other operatives who are intent on creating inaccurate or distorted information in social media. One of the most common attempts to hijack social media for spam are "splogs," weblogs that are like spam email messages offering no value in their content and not meaningful community but instead only just content to trick search engines and to possibly gain some ancillary revenues from ads on the site. Splogs gained quite a bit of attention several years ago when there were few defenses against them, but search engines and social media services have become far more sophisticated in recent years, greatly reducing the effective use of splogs. Similar services that injected spam into the comment sections of weblogs also flourish, with similar anti-spam services from most major social media services.

Of greater concern today are efforts to inject sponsored content into social media outlets that is supposed to appears as if it were created by people speaking independently. Sometimes referred to as "astroturf," this content is supposed to appear as if it's from "grass roots" opinion makers but is actually sponsored opinion. While a practice that's specifically discouraged by the U.S.-based Public Relations Society of America, PR experts are sometimes called upon to create astroturf on behalf of their clients. Sometimes, though, organizations and individuals create their own astroturf, believing that they will not be detected. In 2006, for example, Sony was taken to task by bloggers and consumers who discovered that a supposed enthusiast's weblog touting the virtues of their PlayStation electronic game product was actually created by a contractor for their marketing department as a part of an effort to drive up holiday sales of the device over rivals' machines. Sony issued a statement apologizing for the effort, but the damage was done. In spite of improved controls and the consistent rejection of such efforts by social media audiences, the temptation to twist social media to provide the illusion of endorsements from everyday people remains very powerful.

Content Nation Marketing Rule #17: It's not easy for many marketers to accept that their power in social media comes from the genuine support of everyday people.

Putting it Together: Marketing as Building Relationships with Peers

In many ways marketers large and small are learning how to use the power of social media to identify markets, research them and to communicate with them in market conversations that can lead to large rewards. Those who profit most from social media know how to use social media tools to build acceptance and enthusiasm amongst other influential social media publishers. They build their own "viruses," choosing their own paths through the marketplace. Smart marketers learn how to be a part of this crowd on their own terms. Flash and attractiveness are not penalized necessarily but insincerity and exploitation of people's reputations will carry a heavy price.

From this perspective marketing in Content Nation is a call to return to that basic premise of marketing: find people's real needs and fill them. With both buyers and sellers equipped with publishing tools that enable them to express their needs and their abilities to fill them more rapidly there is less opportunity in Content Nation to overwhelm people with products and services that aren't really what people need or want based on a marketer's ability to buy people's attention through publishing. That attention can be attained, but it must be earned daily in the court of personal and public opinion if their messages are to gain leadership and influence in the marketplace.

In the meantime those who are able to respond to niche markets more rapidly through a solid network of relationships cultivated using social media will help to drive both local and global economies to the Big Sombrero model, creating more value more rapidly for those who know how to converse with their markets most effectively and to benefit most directly from their endorsements. Content Nation will not kill mass marketing, but it will challenge it to think about how it can build relationships with markets based on leadership, influence and respect amongst peers rather than seduction. In doing so new products, services and companies will emerge that will challenge established brands to rethink how they serve the marketplace.

While we've seen some good examples of how social media succeeds for marketers when used properly, Content Nation challenges marketers to take an approach to markets that may not necessarily align with their traditional strengths. Smart marketers are learning to adapt rapidly to social media, but it's as a part of a landscape that sees social media challenging marketers on a more fundamental level. For if social media changes how we market things, how do people organize themselves as a work force to serve markets most effectively?