Copy Brighter

This week I've been doing some work for a national brand that is suffering from a serious reputation crisis. Some customers think that they are misleading, and they have said their piece on high-ranking blogs and watchdog sites. The company execs are shaking in their loafers, incredibly humbled at how much power a couple of TypePad bloggers and home-spun websites with crappy graphics have. The illusion that they could do anything they wanted while keeping total control over their brand evaporated pretty darn quick. Last night, I came across an example of how not to handle a reputation problem online from Video Professor:

The video tutorial publisher recently sued a bunch of anonymous online commenters who said they got ripped off on a consumer watchdog forum. For instance, a disgruntled user named "Bob" writes:

"After clicking on two offers for a trial I realized that I didn't want any part of this scam and tried to cancel. I thought this was the last I would hear from these people. They billed my credit card later for charges I never approved. I canceled with them and I'm still being billed. This is fraud and I want to see a class action lawsuit to put them out of business. They ought to put that guy in jail, not on TV. He is a crook."

First lesson, beware whenever you see the asterisk qualifier next to the word "Free." Next, go check out the mixed-bag of Google search results for Video Professor. If you believe the numerous online reviews, Video Professor engaged in some rather unsavory bait-and-switch and billing practices. If you believe the company, then they are the victim of a massive, malicious and carefully-cloaked anonymous slander campaign. You be the judge. The local paper found the company's lawsuit questionable and wrote about it last week. Soon the story got picked up tech blogs. Then it got posted to Digg, got made popular there, and it got filtered onto all kinds of news aggregators and other social sites. People started linking to the articles en masse, making the reputation wounds all the deeper, more permanent and more visible. Here's What NOT to Do, When Managing Your Online Reputation:

• Don't initially contact the offending site in writing to beg, bribe or threaten them into removing negative info. It's too easy to post it all up on the Web for everyone to see. Try contacting them by telephone, if possible.
• Beware of making a Wikipedia listing if the grievances against your client are substantial. It's very easy and common for people to add "criticism" subsection that anyone can contribute to, like in this article on Video Professor.
• Don't lash back at the criticism and make yourself look like an "evil jerk." If you do decide to respond, wait till you feel calm and do it with exceeding humility and tact.
• Resist the temptation towards the old-school tactic of threatening and filing lawsuits, as this often backfires. Many Diggers and bloggers embrace the culture of rage, and throughly enjoy dishing out vigilante justice on corporate villains and outing political and legal absurdities. It's their favorite way to flex power and "Save the world" with a few clicks of a keyboard. Just ask the man who sued the dry cleaners for $54,000,000 for ruining his pants.
• Beware of posting fake reviews or shilling. Experienced Web surfers and social media vigilantes will be able to spot you a mile away. If you must flog or post glowing reviews about yourself, at least give yourself a primer with Andy's excellent post on Fake Review Optimization (FRO).
• Don't try to cheat if you can't take the heat. You're sure to get busted on sites like Yelp, Rip Off Report, or Reddit (if you're a politician). Yeah, it's hard to make a living, especially as an entrepreneur, and the temptation to cut corners or employ sketchy business models is always there. People got away with all kinds of schemes and scams in the 70's, 80's or even 90's - when the flow of information was asymmetrical - but they don't work in the social media era! Ask Scientology.

Some of the A-list bloggers have written "comprehensive" guides to online reputation management, but I found them to be rather basic. The best single article I've found is Planet Ocean's excellent Online Reputation Management Guide. I've seen a lot of good results from making subdomains (like Microsoft) with good content on them, and I've seen profile pages on high-ranking social media sites with juicy links pointing at them (or hell, even 200 comment spams from .gov and .edu blogs) at get miraculous rankings. Perhaps the simplest and best advice on online reputation management comes from MC Hammer. In the social media era, buzz travels very fast and you can't be "too legit" enough. If you consistently make people mad, you really need to stop and examine your business practices. Then, do whatever you can to quickly make amends and douse the flames (see Apple's letter after the iPhone price dive). If you've done wrong (even inadvertently), swallow your pride and issue some apologies or refunds - it will probably be much cheaper than the damage negative buzz will do to your brand. Don't stoke up the sparks and turn them into fires, like Video Professor did. Cuz' the hammer can come down hard, and then it will really cost you.

Chorus "Too legit... Too legit to quit (hey...hey...) Too legit...too legit... Too legit to quit...(hey...) Too legit... Too legit to quit (too legit...) too legit... too legit to quit..""

As marketers successfully propagate the message that it's hip to be green, many people are fine with that as long as they don't have to do much – or give up anything , like the instant convenience of bottled water. Bottled water, which the Economist calls "one of the great mysteries of modern capitalism," gives us such instant gratification that we don't even have to turn a faucet, take a second to fill up our glass or wash out our water bottle. Marketers sell it to us with the wholesome image of pure Swiss meadow springwater, but it has repeatedly been shown that most bottled water is tap water. And a lot of tap water is safer than bottled water. Bottled water is the instant titty, a refreshing polyethylene coconut with no tree to climb nor hard shell to crack. But the convenience comes at a price: it takes a lot of fossil fuel to make it, and it burns a ton of gas to ship it to us. And when we're done with it, it becomes a giant plastic turd that we leave behind on the planet forever. To assuage our growing feelings of guilt, marketers need a gimmick to keep the illusion. So, now they sell it in an "eco shape" that uses a little less plastic for a "better environment." And we can feel good once again as we toss away the thick plastic wrapper (with pictures of pristine alpine lakes that some of the bottles will inevitably end up in.) In developing countries like India, which have few landfills and no public recycling centers at all, bottled water has become a status symbol. It's seen the same light as expensive champagne... as the drink of foreigners and movie stars. Upwardly mobile young Indians clamor to be seen swigging from a Bisleri bottle, just like a American who teen takes a proud, postured drag off his tenth Marlboro in public. As a result, polyethylene bottles are conspicuously and permanently littering the lands in the developing world. Especially in the places visited by backpackers and tourists. When you travel overseas, don't leave you green values at home and believe the lazy myth that "it's better to drink bottled water". Investing in a lightweight high-tech purifier is infinitely more chic and impressive. Regardless of what the companies would like us to believe, using up lots of plastic water bottles (when safe tap water or filters are readily available) is "eco" in no way, shape or form.

Social media sites offer a wellspring of fresh, interesting content because they allow human users to vote on stories. In some ways social media is less susceptible to manipulation than traditional search engine algorithms, which mechanically look at signals like keywords and links to estimate quality and relevance.

The dark side of this human editorial touch is that it can enable small "gangs" of users to control the top stories and effectively squash content on topics they don't like.

The Digg Bury Brigade

On Digg, people normally "digg" stories that they like. There is a "bury" button tucked below the description that allows people to vote against a story.

Once you bury a a story, it becomes faded and translucent on your screen:

The "Bury Brigade" is a theoretical, unorganized mob of trigger-happy Diggers who take pleasure in stomping on any content that goes against their personal politics or tastes. They are notorious for burying commercially-oriented stories, SEO-related pieces, or self-submissions from people trying to use Digg as a marketing tool (without enough panache to fool the them into falling blindly for it).

Often they will mark a story with a comment like "Buried as lame" to incite others to do the same:

Any user can bury a story for any reason, but it takes many buries to kill a story. Once a story gets on the home page, it becomes very visible so some get buried within minutes or an hour. Once a story is buried, it is permanently erased from the home page and users have to go into the search function to find it. It can be heartbreaking to see great content get sacked because a vocal minority of critics disliked it - but it happens.

How many buries does it take to kill a Digg story? No one except the Digg engineers know the formula exactly. If a story provokes the "bury" reflex in enough people, and the swarm of Diggs isn't strong enough to overpower it, it will disappear from the home page. It also appears that the Digg staff moderates and manually buries some stories.

Here you can find a list of the buried stories that got kicked off Digg today.

If you look through this list of buried stories, you'll find:

• fake stories and pics, iffy rumors, and misleading headlines
• recycled content from Reddit and Del.icio.us that is old news to the linkerati
• commercial, video game-related marketing "stories"
• dumb, lowbrow pics and videos
• crude inside jokes that were dugg by a group of friends
• good content that was too revealing, opinionated or a "spoiler"
• explicit information on piracy, warez or illegal activities

While buries are deathly feared by linkbaiters and viral marketers, it's important to note that the Bury Brigade can sometimes serve as respectable vigilantes who keep Digg from getting overrun by commercial garbage.

Avoid the wrath of the Bury Brigade by submitting great content with accurate headlines, and take all possible steps to make your story appear legitimate, professional and non-promotional. Submit from a trusted account, and set-up a mini site on a new domain to host linkbait if your main URL is tarnished or unsuitable.

The Reddit Downmod Squad

On Reddit users "upmod" stories they like with an up arrow, and "downmod" ones they dislike with the down arrow.

The Reddit "Downmod Squad" is particularly vicious. Whereas Digg users tend to only vote down stories they particularly dislike or find offensive, Redditors downmod and pop stories like bubble wrap. The frequent downmodding is partially due to the way the user interface was designed (downmodding is just as visible as upmodding), and it's partially due to the passions and politics of the crowd that currently controls the site.

All day long, and particularly during the weekdays, there seems to be virtual posse of Redditors who ride the "New" section and downmod all stories - except for the ones that strongly appeal to them.. The Downmod Squad works the home page ("Hot") and the upcoming page ("New") like a game of checkers - voting up everything they like and stomping on everything else. Trying to get some upward traction for a story that falls outside their favorite topics is like swimming against a vicious riptide.

Members of the Downmod Squad frequently vote down content based on the title alone, without even looking at (or, God forbid, reading) the story.

What kind of content survives on Reddit?

At the time of this writing, Reddit is afflicted by a unique form of bipolar schizophrenic myopia. It's held in place by a peculiar dichotomy of users:

1. a strong faction of liberal pessimists and political whistleblowers.
2. a mass of happy-go-lucky, lowbrow [pic] and [comic] loving YouTube transplants

Don't believe me? Here's from the top 30 stories on Reddit today:

And here's a sampler of some recent "hee haw" stories:

The YouTube refugees will upmod anything amusing that takes very little mental effort to enjoy (i.e., not the rich, thought-provoking articles that Reddit was once famous for).

The extreme political faction tends to stomp on anything not related to political scandal, police brutality, corporate conspiracy, atheism or agnosticism, prison, legal irony, foreign policy disaster or global doomsday prophecy – regardless of the quality or subject matter.

Their motto: "If it doesn't confirm my views about how horribly messed up this country has become, it's out of here."

How can you get your content past the Downmod Squad?

If you submit during the busy weekday, you need to craft your headline as to to not stick out and and draw the wrath of either camp. And some people undoubtedly ask couple of friends to give it a little bump of votes so it can be visible long enough for more moderate users to vote on it. (This never used to be necessary - all it took was a great story and magnetic headline and you'd fly - but the climate is growing more ruthless and intolerant by the day.)

An even better strategy is to submit on late nights or on the weekends when the site moves slower and things have more of a chance to gain traction.

The downside to off-peak submission is that your content will only been seen by a fraction of the people who would see it on the busier weekdays. My experiments reveal that a mildly-popular (say, peaking at #12 in "Hot") story that spent several hours on the front page of Reddit on the weekend day will send between 4,000 to 6,000 unique visitors, and leave you with a handful of mid-to-low-quality backlinks.

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As it says in the Cluetrain Manifesto: markets are conversations. If you go to a marketplace and listen in on all the different dialogues... you'll be surprised how much you learn about sales and consumer psychology.

And marketing – the art of gracefully entering into the conversation and making a good impression. If you want to want to be a highly-effective marketer, it's best to listen before you speak. The late, great copywriting guru Eugene Schwartz warned:

"You can never lose touch with the people of this country. No matter how successful or potent you are, if you don't spend at least two hours a week finding out where your market is today... you are finished. You'll have a career of three blazing years and be finished... Rule Number One: be the best listener you ever met."

As a green marketer who cares about the Earth as well as my bottom line, my goal is to penetrate far beyond the hip, environmentally conscious consumers who already "get it." To make a big impact, I've got to strike a chord with the biggest polluters, wasters, consumers, legislators and developers. You can't get so wrapped up in green values and causes that you lose touch with the reality of where most people are at... Nor can you preach or make people feel guilty about consumption or waste - or you will quickly lose them and leave them with a yucky feeling about you and your message. You've got to find out where people are at now and connect with them there. To gather intelligence, I like to put on my "undercover marketing detective" hat and ask random people about global warming, energy, pollution. And I listen. Deeply. After my workout at the local YMCA, there's usually several naked guys sweating it out in the sauna. Some read wrinkled newspapers. Some drape moist towels over their head. And they talk things over. I find there's something about sweltering heat and lack of clothing that makes the male ego mostly evaporate.

Whenever the there's a lull in the conversation and the moment feels right, I'll drop the bomb by bringing up global warming. I've found an 180-degree room is an excellent location for an impromptu focus group on the subject.

"So what do you guys think about that whole global warming theory? Is there anything to it?" I'll meekly ask.

As the sweat oozes out of their pores and drips onto the benches (that once belonged to Scandinavian old-growth forest), the guys come up with some compelling insights.

I'll find out that one guy loves fishing but is concerned that the waters are getting polluted and fished out. That's what green means to him; it's his emotional trigger and frame of reference.

And there are thousands just like him. And if I can speak to them in their own words, I might be able to reel them in.

I listen to a garbage man who is concerned about how much waste is being generated, but is dismayed at the level of consciousness of some of his "redneck" coworkers. I hear Bush bashing and praises of "that Al Gore movie." I hear hardcore doomsday prophecies from people who think Earth will get destroyed by a nuclear Armageddon in Word War III - the Oil War - within 20 years max.

I hear out some people who believe climate change is a massive hoax.

And I listen - deeply. I resist the temptation to speak or interject my opinion. I just focus on them and pretend like they are enlightened and I am not – while I take lots of mental notes.

The more I understand how people really think, the more powerful of a marketer I'll be.

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You find a great story. You submit it to Digg, cross your fingers and hope for the best.

But when you check on it the next day, you are disappointed to find that it only got 3 Diggs.

The Secret of Digg

New users often wonder how some people manage to get hundreds and thousands of diggs, day after day.

It's simple: top Digg users have established social networks of friends on the site who vote on their stories.

You can build a strong Digg network, too... without gaming the system or begging people for votes. This article will explain how you can organically develop a network of friends who will help you and exponentially increase your chance of hitting the Digg home page.

All it takes is about 30 minutes a day and a desire to digg lots of interesting stories.

Getting Started

After you've signed up for a Digg account, you need to learn your way around. Spend a couple of days just playing and exploring the site. Digg stories that interest you, and take a close look at the submitter's profile and statistics.

Does this person digg a lot of stories? Submit a lot of stories? Do they have a lot of friends? Do their stories get made popular?

Before you try to make friends, you need to spruce up your own personal profile first. Click on the "profile" selection at the very top center of your screen.

First, upload an icon. If you don't have a picture, you are a complete nobody on Digg. Your icon is one of the few things that will make you stand out and help people to remember you - so be creative. The display size is small so keep it simple and 100kb or less.

Then, at the top left of the screen, select "Manage Profiles" or "EDIT."

Make sure your name, location and IM username are entered. Adding a link back to your personal blog or website will give your profile a lot of credibility. Once your profile is completely filled out, you are already way ahead of about 90% of the Digg population.

Next, go learn about the different news categories. Digg is a tech-focused news site, so there isn't a category for every kind of story. Get familiar with the upcoming stories sections, where new stories germinate before some of them are "made popular" and voted onto the home page. Practice searching and sortng through the results (by most diggs, most commented, cloudview, etc.)

Building Up Your Network

Making friends on Digg is a bit oblique; the personalities behind the tiny icons may seem elusive, inaccessible or downright weird at first. Unlike MySpace or Facebook, there's no easy way to contact people, browse their photo albums or break the ice first. You mostly look at a user's statistics, and then scrutinize what kind of stories they Digg and submit and then form your opinion from there.

You can instantly add anybody as a friend, even site founder Kevin Rose or the #1 digger Mr. BabyMan. Once you've added a friend, it means that you can see their story submissions and diggs easily and vote on them, too. But adding a friend won't directly help your content on the home page. You need a two-way, reciprocal friendship. You want people to add you as a friend so they can see your stories.

You don't want just any Digg user to befriend you, either. 99 out of 100 Diggers don't participate much and are worthless for helping promote your content. You're on the lookout for active and savvy diggers, like yourself.

Beware: many of the Top 100 Diggers are slammed – some spend 15 hours a day hustling RSS feeds and digging a massive stack of stories – so they are less likely to pay attention to a new user like you.

A Hardcore Digg User's Stats:

Look for someone moderately active who seems likely to enjoy and digg your content. Their stats, their friends list, and previously submitted stories will gives you clues about whether you should make the effort to hook up with them.

An ideal Digg friend:

• Checks in and uses the site daily
• Diggs a lot of stories
• Checks for stories that their friends submit and diggs them regularly
• Submits stories that you will enjoy following and voting on
• Doesn't submit way too many stories
• Doesn't have 50 zillion friends

A More "Approachable" Digg User's Profile Stats:

A good place to make new friends is on the upcoming section of the news categories that interest you most. Click on "Upcoming Stories," sort them by "Most Diggs" and see if there are any stories that interest you. If it's a cool story and interesting description, then most likely a cool person submitted it. Scope out their profile and if they fit most of the above criteria, try adding them as a friend.

Follow and Digg Your Friends' Stories - Every Day

After you've added a few active Digg friends, then you need to start digging their content . Click on your profile (1), then on the friends tab (2) and then submitted (3).

Or if you are on the home page, you can just click the "Friends' Activity in 48 Hours" panel:

Now you'll see a list of the stories that your friends submitted. Check in at least once a day and digg ALL your friends' good stories. Go all the way down the list and don't leave anyone out. (If you don't like their taste in stories, you need to to pick a more compatible friend... just like in real life.)

After a while, the active users will notice that you're voting on their stories. And soon enough some of them will surely befriend you, and start to Digg your stories, too.

More Tips on Building a Powerful Digg Network:

• More friends is not necessarily better. The more friends you have, the more votes it will take for your story to hit the home page. Better to have 20 active friends than 400 deadbeats.

• Digg has a feature that will try to block you from adding friends too quickly. To get around it, just Digg about 10 or 20 stories, and then go back and see if it will let you add another friend. Digging stories is seen as a natural activity pattern that can reset the limit.

• Frequently check the "See Who Befriended You" section of your friends list. Look closely on the profiles of the people who have added you as a friend. If they look like a legitimate (i.e., not an icon of a hot babe with an account created yesterday) active user, try adding them and see if they start to digg your stories. If they don't, you can always dump them in a few weeks.

• Prune your friends list every few months. Get rid of deadbeats who aren't socially interacting with you or following your content. Search for new people who will take an interest in digging your stories. You can find out who diggs your stories by looking at "Who Dugg or Blogged This?" button at the bottom of your story descriptions. Better yet, use this tool to find out who is digging your stories. Check them out and see if you'd want to befriend them.

• Get the right people to notice you by leaving sincere, intelligent, personal comments on their stories. If their story doesn't make the home page, they are likely to check who voted on it and read all the comments.

• Your reputation on Digg depends primarily on the quality of the stories you submit. It's okay to submit a piece of content you wrote every once and a while, but be sure to mix it in with a healthy ratio of other great content that the community will enjoy. If you submit spam or crap, Digg will restrict your account and users will quickly blackball you.

The Sweet Taste of Success

So, finally, you've paid your dues. You've been active for a few weeks and you've dugg hundreds or thousands of fun stories. Now you find people are automatically reading and digging stories that you submit. You're nurtured a genuine, symbiotic connection with some of your friends and you start to understand their quirks and personalities.

At this point, instead of submitting a story and getting 2 diggs, you'll get at least 10 or 20. Because you're hooked up. And you know people. You're finally grooving with the social aspect of "social media."

Once you your story gets a bump of more than 15 or so diggs, it has a fighting chance. Your story becomes visible in the "Upcoming Stories" section, and if the content is truly compelling then it will make the home page.

When it breaks on through to the other side, you'll finally get a hit of the Digg Crack – the massive emotional rush of creating national news and reading the hundreds of comments and reactions to your story. It's one of the strongest buzzes that that you can get while sitting in front of the computer.

And it's not rocket science or voodoo magic... it just takes participation. So, what are you waiting for? Flick open your Firefox tabs and start digging!

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Oh, those wily Viagra spammers!

Their no-holds-barred marketing campaigns have provided cheap pills and thrills for the young and old who most desperately need some. But they have also managed to forever associate Pfizer's breakthrough drug brand with spam. A few months back, rogue Viagra dealers were penetrating top of the SERP's by parasite hosting on .edu sites. They would hack a last-updated-in-'97 Native American languages forum, bribe a library assistant with a month's salary, or offer a frathouse a truckload of magic blue pills in order to get their hands on a linkjuice-engorged .edu page that they could redirect to their "pharmacy" site. Google seems to have cleaned most of the .edu parasite pages out of the top Viagra rankings, so they've moved on to deeper strongholds. Popular social media sites like Digg and Reddit host a constant stream of fresh content and traffic, so they enjoy enviably high PageRank. Most of the spamming on these sites is people submitting commercial stories and trying to make them popular in hopes of a brief burst of traffic and some backlinks. The lowest rung of social media spammer is the newbie who submits blatantly commercial headlines without knowing any better. For their effort, they get a worthless link and they might even get a click or two for before the story gets voted out.

The slightly more sophisticated spammer tries to actually get votes and make their "story" popular:

The user Katbo (according to his profile has zero Diggs, zero friends, two submission and two made popular!) most likely got his press release to the home page by purchasing random Diggs from a blackhat pay-for-votes service, orchestrating sock-puppet accounts, or by soliciting friends to vote via e-mail. Recently I came across a more effective, outside-the-box approach of spamming by using Digg and Reddit for parasite hosting. Here's from the page one SERP at Google for "buy Viagra":

By creating a keyword targeted page or profile on a strong, legitimate social media domain and pointing several hundred spammy backlinks at it, they were able to pump their link up to the top of Google for an uber-competitive query. Schwing! Some impressive (but short term) performance enhancement. Read the rest of this entry »

"Do what you love and the money will follow" can be pretty bad advice for some people. One of the most common mistakes that inexperienced marketers make is to follow their vision without researching the scope of the mass desire for it. Master copywriter Eugene Schwartz writes emphatically:

"...(You) cannot create desire for a product. You can only take the hopes, dreams, fears and desires that already exist in the hearts of millions of people, and focus those already-existing desires onto a particular product.... Actually, it would be impossible for any one advertiser to spend enough money to actually create this mass desire. He can only exploit it. And he dies when he tries to run against it."

Alternative energy and sustainable technology are unique because they will have urgent and nearly universal appeal. According to most scientists, the Earth is undergoing climate change while running out of fossil fuels. If any of our most basic consumer comforts - like cool indoor temperatures, cheap gas prices or unlimited shower water – were to become even the slightest bit interrupted or scarce... people are going to wake up. Fast. A ravenous, insatiable desire for technologies and products will suddenly be ignited. Unlike smaller niche markets like yoga, healing arts, or organic foods - which appeal to certain tastes and personalities - nearly everyone will be needing sustainable energy and products.

Centuries of collective marketplace wisdom says that people are reluctant to shell out for prevention. But once something they are deeply attached to becomes scarce or inconvenient, they will be desperate for alternatives. And consumers are currently very attached to cheap gas, cranking up the AC, and taking long hot showers. It's not that green companies should run as a hedge fund to profit from crisis... but rather, they should not underestimate the potential demand for what they are developing now. We must be prepared to leverage the imminent explosion of mass desire and honorably fulfill it. Read the rest of this entry »