Industry-Community Dialog
In a recent incident published on Slashdot.org, ScienceBlogs’ move to consider PepsiCo’s nutrition blog for inclusion resulted in a public uproar that was quickly picked up by Guiardian. Was there a better way to handle this? Maybe. But here, I’ll try to give my view on how this could have been handled by PepsiCo (and others who try to do the same thing).
Before I go on to comment the above event, let me give you some background: my view of what blogs are, on which I base my argument.
Disclaimer
This text is not about honesty. I don’t believe in honesty as most people see it simply because the subject of honesty — truth — does not exist as such. Truth only exists to some extent, after which it dissolves in an intricate system of beliefs. In this article, I’ll try to draw a line between truth and beliefs and offer some techniques that can leverage this line for corporate advantage. You may find such attitude disgusting or outright immoral. If you do, I ask you to please leave this blog, or engage in a constructive debate using the commenting system below the post.
Individual effort
First of all, what most companies don’t seem to recognize is that blogs are written by individuals. The main power of blogs is not the branding on the blog, or banners, or other lesser advertising techniques. Those need to be buried in the past where they rightfully belong. Being content-oriented, Web requires advertisers to resort to content production rather than advertising materials known to most advertisers. Some people like to call the new way of doing advertising PR, and I guess that’s all right. Anyhow, individual’s charisma is the thing that keeps the readers interested. And the charisma is not communicated through branding or ads, but through the quality of content.
Quality of content can roughly be divided into two components: style and information.
Content style
Style (as in writing style, and overall presentation of content) establishes trust, and tells you more about the writer’s perceived character. I say perceived because in reality, who knows who they really are. I’m guessing, though, that most bloggers do not bother faking their character, so we can safely trust the image we see before us most of the time. But the point is, Web is anonymous and the style controllable. This means a company can usually control the perceived character of the blogger, and it’s a good thing for them. Oh, and I think it’s becoming obvious at this point that ‘a blogger’ doesn’t necessarily need to be a single person.
Information
Information is the second thing people will be looking on a blog. There are two types of information. HOWTO-style information and others. The distinction is based on the fact that HOWTO information is usually present reproducible activities (if it’s genuine anyway). A HOWTO is something you can carry out based on the information you’ve read, seen, or otherwise consumed. They don’t have to be limited to classic tutorials or instructional video. Anything that calls for reproducible action is a HOWTO. You’ll see later why this is crucial.
The other types of information do not deal with activities that can be reproduce, and thus verified. These include news (something that happened, and you weren’t there), opinions, theory (I’ll discuss them in more depth below), stories, works of art… You get it.
One special case is a theory. Theories can be verified at some point. That point is the grey area between HOWTO and other types of information. It basically depends on the audience. For example, you can say wild shit like ‘Two or more cans of soda can be bad for your health. But a single can a day is known to increase your reproductive capabilities in the long term.’ For an average Joe with a GED, this might sound feasible, especially if the overal style of the blog is suggestive of a trustworthy author. The catch is: this is just in theory. How do you even verify it? In the ‘long term’? So someone that’s not Joe GED might actually decide to do the right thing and not take the above sentence for granted. So a theory can, in theory, belong to either group. :)
Information and trust
For HOWTO information, it’s a simple matter of making things easily reproducible. People tend to trust bloggers that make it easy for them to reproduce their actions. This raises the perceived honesty (s/he told me everything he knows about the topic so I can easily do this or that), and trustworthiness as a result. The satisfaction of being able to do what the blog taught you is also a big plus for the blogger. Again, this is highly dependent on the target audience.
The other types of information people just take for granted. Why? Because you cannot possibly verify them. Trustworthiness of information that is to be taken for granted is based on reader’s beliefs and experience (and nothing more). If someone you trust says something on his blog, you will accept that as true, unless you already ‘know’ it’s not because 10 other people you trust said otherwise. Or, if you believe that cranes are black, you will not accept a blog post that talks about white feathers on a crane. If you’re then shown the photos of the white crane, you’ll accept that or not depending on the blog’s style. And so on. Of course, it’s much more complex than this, but the bottom line is, readers decide if something is true or not.
The thin line between theory and HOWTOs is that if the subject of a theory is not reproducible, it has better chance of being treated as other types of information, and being taken for granted, than a HOWTO. A HOWTO might simply be dismissed as bad information, or the reader might diminish her/his own self-esteem to justify the blogger (her/his instructions are too advanced for me right now, I’ll have to lear a lot and come back to this one), but it will not be assumed to be correct, simply because the blogger posted it.
Back to PepsiCo case
So the first mistake PepsiCo made is that it failed to create a blog run by an individual. That would have helped a lot. They should have either assigned their R&D scientist to do some blogging, or hired a PR manager that would be smart enough to figure out that such a scientist doesn’t have to be real at all. An imaginary scientist is as real as any other on the Web (as long as you don’t have a whistle-blower in your company that is).
The next step would be to establish trust. This can be done in a number of ways, but here’s two.
Write HOWTOs so people can verify your information. Don’t forget to make it easy. For example, you can write an article about a diet that has measurable perceived health benefits. Blood pressure measurement is accessible to most people, so it’s easy to verify the result using blood pressure. Weight is another parameter that average consumer can measure. This might not work on nutritionists, since they know what you’re talking about, but it will work for most people, and the trust you gain will compensate for an odd nutritionist that may decide to say a word or two about your post. Of course, with R&D staff on the team, I’m sure PepsiCo might come up with much brighter ideas (I hope).
Another way to gain trust is to simply repeat what people already know. But not in a dumb way. If you just say stuff that people are saying on the streets, you’ll get a so-what effect, and be dismissed as a parrot-wannabe. An article that repeats what people know must also enhance that knowledge in a way that makes the ones that know about it look good. Give the readers a pet on the back for knowing such things, so to speak. A pet on a back places you in a position of authority (because only someone better than you can ever give you a meaningful pet on the back), and also makes readers feel good about themselves (so they are more likely to start trusting you).
A variant of the latter technique is to validate people’s wishes. This is a bit trickier and requires a bit more research (focus groups, surveys). It basically means that you find out what people wish were true, but somehow ‘know’ it isn’t, and ‘prove’ their gut feeling was right. If someone ‘knows’ your product is bad for her/his health because 10 trustworthy people said so, but likes your product at the same time, and would like to hear the 10 people were all wrong, you can device a verifiable method that proves this, and the consumer will happily accept it. As we already said above, convincing people is about living up to their beliefs and expectations (based on experience). In order for this to work, the methods you offer people must hook into their belief system, or it will be dismissed even if it’s scientifically correct. On the other hand, a method that successfully hooks into individual’s belief system will stand even if it’s scientifically incorrect.
So, how do you go from the above to PepsiCo? You don’t need to. It is not necessary to tie all this to PepsiCo at any point. Mentioning the company on the blog might seem like a cool way to short circuit the Internet and lead people straight to you. But not so fast! It may also hurt the blog’s reputation as we’ve seen happening in the ScienceBlog incident. The blog must establish trust before you can even imagine doing such a reckless thing. The way a blog can be used is to present information that would naturally lead to PepsiCo products. For example, you can teach people to determine product’s characteristics (the ones that are favorable for your products, of course), and then show them the ‘ideal numbers’ that just happen to be your numbers. This way, your blog becomes an independent entity that you can kill off in case of emergency, while avoiding your company’s reputation to tarnish the trust between readers and the blogger, and all that while maintaining full control over the blog’s output.
Of course, once the blog has gained sufficient trust, you can safely lift the curtains and show the Oz behind the scene. Claim the beloved blog and say: “I did this!”
