Controlling the Conversation: Green Noise

I talked the other day about why attempting to intimidate, discredit, bribe, and sue online critics can often backfire into the dreaded Streisand Effect. Today I want to look at a more subtle way in which companies are attempting to drown out the groundswell with paid content arising from organic sources with dollarized white noise, which I’m calling “green noise”.

Ghost blogging companies like IZEA, formerly Pay Per Post, are recruiting bloggers and Twitter users to spread “buzz,” with sponsored posts. IZEA claims that sponsorship is transparent with a #spon hash-tag on twitter and other disclosure on a blog post. Transparency is critical unless the blogger wants to lose his audience but the message loses credibility with the disclosure—it becomes traditional advertising, a company blasting its message at you, instead of an honest recommendation from a friend.

A quick visit to the Word of Mouth Marketing Association member page will reveal just how quickly word of mouth marketing is spreading with giant corporations and numerous ad agencies. When visiting the agencies sites, the details are typically vague, but the client list includes big names: Ford, EA, Microsoft, AT&T, even the hallowed Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition. Putting on my consumer hat, I am uncomfortable with biased content infiltrating social media and it reinforces my notion that I must be skeptical of anything I read on the internet. With my marketing hat on, it is an exciting opportunity, if accomplished ethically, to encourage a trendsetter to vouch for a product and motivate their network to try it. Again, disclosure is everything.

Lessons from social media have been largely drawn from the serious and public failures (for an obvious #fail see Motrin Moms, Wallmart’s Jim and Laura, or RyanAir), yet more valuable lessons might be drawn from the silent successes. Times when potential pr disasters were swallowed in green noise, when a mediocre product received five stars from paid or nudged reviewers. The difficulty is in finding the stories that didn’t take place.