David Byrne (Talking Heads) warns of the perils of paid word-of-mouth advertising

Link: DavidByrne.com — 2004 Tour Jour­nal.

A Con­sumer Soci­ety
An arti­cle in the Times Mag­a­zine sec­tion on a cou­ple of com­pa­nies who spe­cial­ize in word-of-mouth mar­ket­ing cam­paigns. These are cam­paigns, paid for by cor­po­rate clients, to raise the aware­ness and pro­file of a prod­uct by get­ting a small army of “agents” to drop a men­tion of the prod­uct into casual con­ver­sa­tion, carry it (in the case of a book) promi­nently dis­played on the sub­way, write reviews to Ama­zon, ask for the prod­uct at shops, all with­out reveal­ing that one is pro­mot­ing it.
It’s a Philip K Dick world. There are tens of thou­sands of these “agents” out there. Ordi­nary peo­ple, not nec­es­sar­ily trend­set­ters or celebri­ties, who are liv­ing breath­ing advertisements…and proud of it. We don’t know, for exam­ple, when some­one is merely being help­ful of infor­ma­tive, or even friendly, or when they have a hid­den agenda. When they’re slip­ping a bit of prod­uct place­ment into the con­ver­sa­tion and when they’re just engag­ing in the occa­sional men­tion of a book or brand as part of nor­mal every­day life. So, in this world, which is our world, no one is to be trusted. No one’s word, on this stuff at least, is to be taken at face value.

I agree whole­heart­edly. There’s noth­ing worse than to be mis­led by a friend or acquain­tance you trust. Word-of-mouth and viral mar­ket­ing works pre­cisely because the “prod­uct evan­ge­list” is not paid by the com­pany. In other words, the value propo­si­tion is so great that you will freely pro­mote it to your entourage.

Like­wise, neg­a­tive word-of-mouth pub­lic­ity, based on lousy ser­vice or poor prod­uct per­for­mance, is equally pow­er­ful because a per­son you trust warns you about using the ser­vice or product.

To their credit, the best known of these word-of-mouth mar­ket­ing com­pa­nies, BzzA­gent, has pub­lished a code of con­duct they expect their agents to fol­low. The first point clearly states agents should be “open”:

When Bzzing oth­ers, feel free to let them know that you’re involved
with BzzA­gent, and that you’ve cho­sen to vol­un­teer your time to share
your opin­ion. If you like a prod­uct or ser­vice, it doesn’t mat­ter where
you found out about it, so don’t feel as though you need to be
anony­mous or stealthy. Just be open and hon­est and let your opin­ion
count.

As a mar­ket­ing pro­fes­sional and a com­pany co-founder, I have often relied on word-of-mouth and viral mar­ket­ing to spread the word. But of the free kind.

For the record, I am not cur­rently and will never be a paid agent. I will rave about a prod­uct or ser­vice because I believe in it, not because I am paid to do so.

And I am not alone:

Doc Searls speaks out against BzzA­gent.

Jason Cala­ca­nis advo­cates using a “blog ethics” state­ment on B2C blogs:

[Blog name] obses­sively cov­ers the [indus­try name] indus­try. We aren’t paid to men­tion spe­cific prod­ucts. All adver­tis­ing will be clearly labeled as advertising.