Authenticity v. Control

There is an excellent article available online from the LA Times that details Jack in the Box's recent forays into the arena of social media. The company's Hang In There Jack campaign was launched on mainstream media (a Super Bowl ad of all things) and told the story of the company's fictional CEO (Jack) slipping into a coma after being struck by a bus. In the months since, consumers have been encouraged to discuss Jack's imminent death (or coming miraculous recovery!) on the campaign's microsite, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, etc. Basically, the whole gamut of Web 2.0 golden children. A few weeks ago, Jack was revived and helped usher in the company's total branding overhaul (which includes the spiffy new logo below).


The author compares JitB's results to the experiences of Skittles during their recent attempts to bring social media and their brand closer together. In each case, the brand's experienced a surge in traffic and generated content, though not always in a positive manner.

For example:

"Alexut from Utah wrote: 'Jack in the Box killed people. They have poor sanitary habits and spread disease across the nation. Plus it's disgusting food.'

And of course a thousand variations of "Jack sucks!," which is a less than optimum take-away from a marketer's perspective.

What's going on here? Call it the search for authenticity."

Both cases highlight the potential and the pitfalls of allowing your brand to be placed in the hands of the public. Sometimes, a marketer can successfully engage with consumers at a level that is more personal, and arguably more meaningful than ever before. And on the other hand, the brand can find itself the victim of online vandalism. It is an issue of control, and willingness to let go. Do you trust the public enough to take care of your brand, or do you need to censor their ability to interact with it?

The problem is that these sort of brand excursions are still a novelty. They attract the masses, yes, but (in many cases) not out of interest for the brand, rather out of the ability to be heard in a non-traditional space. When the novelty of the situation wears off- much like the growing stability of Wikipedia articles -then the trolls that bark out profanity on a candy website will move along to the next venue. The results, luckily, have drawn large enough numbers to encourage an uknown number of brands to follow the JitB and Skittle lead (right now, unseen by us, dozens of marketing teams are drafting replicant ideas), and this growing familarity brings both good and bad. Good, in that the trolls will either be less focused, or less amused by their own actions once these sorts of campaigns become more commonplace. And bad, when the ideas become dampened by me-toos and thus, less astoundingly effective in generating traffic volume.

You Have My Attention

Sometimes, they just write themselves:

"Print newspapers are declaring bankruptcy nationwide. High-profile blogs are proliferating. Media companies are exploring new production techniques and business models in a landscape that is increasingly dominated by the Internet. In the midst of this upheaval, it is difficult to know what is actually happening to the shape of our news. Beyond one-off anecdotes or painstaking manual content analysis, there are few ways to examine the emerging news ecosystem."

The above quote comes courtesy of Media Cloud, a new system that will allow a single user to sift through the vast seas of information being generated online around the world, and (hopefully) distill meaning from it all. The tools offered will allow you to see what topics are popping up the most in blog, t, who is talking about them and where the chatter is coming from. This is maybe the first big step towards the effective data mining of the new internet that I alluded to earlier.



While this system is still in the very early stages of its development, they do have a small trial worth taking a look at. It is going to be interesting to see how this story/device evolves over the coming year.

Collecting the Reins

So what is 'hype'? When a band has it, every blog that covers music seems to be talking about them. When a band doesn't, well, they receive only cursory lip service. At times, the concept of 'hype' has felt completely binary. On or off. 1 or 0. Hype or no hype. Pitchfork would tell their readers what was cool. Metacritic would tell their readers what the critics thought was cool. And the blogs would froth and bark their own opinions. It has been a gloriously functional mess for at least the last five years.

But for a band trying to make decisions about their future (read: do I quit teaching kindergarten in order to tour, or similar), hype was frustratingly hard to quantify. 'Do we even have fans in Raleigh? Will anyone come out to the show?' It is this doubt that Band Metrics aims to remove.

Read Write & Web's recent piece on the new application caught my attention with the sheer simplicity of the idea. For some bands, their entire existence amounts to a MySpace or Last.fm page. They can see the download counter going up, up, up, on their mp3's, but have no way of knowing just who is doing the downloading. Or what those people are saying about them on the blog/message boards. Or where those people live, what else they like, etc. It is analytics for the grassroots music business. And its a very cool idea.













The questions that remain, however: How many bands will be comfortable enough with the practicality of the service to buy in? Once the information is collected, how are bands going to leverage that information? How does one mobilize a following that exists purely on the web?