George Silverman's Word-of-Mouth Marketing Blog

April Fools Day Marketing

April Fools’ Day is once more upon us, causing my annual reflection on human gullibility.

I still continue to get the usual large number of e-mail hoaxes passed along by otherwise intelligent friends who seem to be willing to believe almost anything, without taking the minute or two that it takes to check them out on an Internet rumor site.

I was interviewed yesterday by Fast Company about companies using April Fools’ Day pranks to generate word of mouth. I’m quoted in the article, but I thought it would be worth expanding my thoughts slightly here.

I see nothing wrong with a company like Google demonstrating their extraordinary inventiveness and company ethos with pranks. The principle here is that as long as the prank illustrates and enhances the brand, it’s fine. So, for instance, if you are trying to get across how inventive, funny and informal you are, it's perfectly appropriate. If you were, for instance, Snopes.com, the Internet rumor site, or museumofhoaxes.com and you were trying to demonstrate how gullible people are, again you would be on the right track.

in other words, you want to use word of mouth to enhance, demonstrate and amplify what is good about you, your product, company or service.

But here is another kind of word of mouth that is very popular these days that I want to discourage: doing things that encourage word of mouth just to get people to talk about your company or product, without it being linked to product benefits, or – better – superiority. For instance, when Microsoft introduced Vista, they had a contest for a seat on the first rocket to the moon. While this might have gotten them a lot of buzz, it did nothing to illustrate why Vista was superior, or to give anybody any reason to use it. At the same time they were doing this, Apple is introducing spectacular new features into their operating system that got people to talk about their operating system, not about extrinsic and irrelevant nonsense.

Encarta R.I.P. and good riddance

The story is told — probably apocryphally — of the child who pointed to a large set of very dusty books in the library and asked her what they were. The mother said they were a set of encyclopedias. He asked, incredulously, “They printed out the whole web site?!”

Microsoft has just announced that it will be ceasing publication of its encyclopedia, Encarta. Britannica is now becoming more participatory, accepting “suggestions” from its readers and allowing “Web publishers,” such as bloggers, free access to its pages.

Of course, all of this is due to the incredible word-of-mouth phenomenon known as Wikipedia. Some interesting insights into the Wikipedia phenomenon can be found here.

I found one paragraph in the above cited article particularly interesting and relevant to the current financial crisis:

Jimbo Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, first conceived of the notion of a free, user-content-driven encyclopedia after [reading] an essay on "The Use of Knowledge in Society" by Nobel Prize-winning Austrian economist F.A. Hayek. [Comment: The essay is brilliant. Hayek is one of the greatest economic thinkers of all time and is largely neglected today.] Hayek too was a proponent of "democracy," in the "power to the people" sense, but his prize-winning economic views were not in favor of monolithic, bureaucratic, social democratic systems. Rather, Hayek's work showed the superior efficiency of resource allocation by decentralized information analysis among many voluntary actors in the marketplace, each acting to bring about his or her own self-interested ends. Centrally planned bureaucracies cannot do what the market does because, "[t]he 'data' from which the economic calculus starts are never for the whole society 'given' to a single mind which could work out the implications and can never be so given." No one can know everything that is potentially relevant to everything else, and since no one can know everything, no one mind can rightfully be charged with efficiently allocating all scarce resources. It is only through the distributed information processing of the market, rather than the linear processing of any one entity, that an optimal result can be reached.

I wish the principles of Wikipedia were applied to our society. Oh, wait a minute, that would be laissez-faire capitalism and would mean an end to our current corporatism (democratic socialism). Look them up in Wikipedia!

In my opinion, the importance of Wikipedia and of the whole wiki phenomenon has been severely underestimated and underappreciated. It is a true division of labor and a meritocracy of clarity.