User-Generated Content and WOM Challenge Industry

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Citizen journalism and word-of-mouth marketing are exploding. Medill's 2020 Intersection asked Medill professors Clarke Caywood (Sector Head, Public Relations and Corporate Communications) and David Abrahamson (Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence) for their take on the impact to journalists and marketers. Their answers might surprise you.

How has citizen journalism or word-of-mouth marketing impacted you and your work? Add a comment to share with The Intersection!

Intersection Question (IQ): CNN has launched I-Reports, a way viewers can feed video, audio and pictures to its web site. Meanwhile Proctor & Gamble has created Vocalpoint, a network of more than 600,000 American mothers whom market its products through word-of-mouth interactions. Consumers are increasingly becoming the content drivers for news and marketing. How do communications changes like these affect the role of the traditional journalist or marketer in today's information-cluttered society?

The two-way nature of the conversation is a profound change. It is, however, only the tip of the iceberg, part of a wider array of technological changes that over the next 15 years may change the nature, mission and perhaps even the very raison d'être of journalism. Nevertheless, the two-way aspect of the conversation is a critical element. Its effect on such parameters as the speed of the discourse and the multiplicity of platforms is completely reshuffling the deck. It is something we will have to find ways to deal with on the editorial side.

A content site called Grouper sold for $65 million. Google has acquired YouTube for 1.65 billion. It's a new phenomenon. Think about the opportunities that exist out there for entrepreneurs who see opportunities in these uncontrollable variables. I see the contribution of marketing and business to provide more and more content, which provide content for consumption by readers, viewers and consumers. Business, not just publishers, will be providing content. I predict that the content provider for news consumption will be more and more provided by traditional business sources, and less and less by traditional journalism sources. I'm not so afraid of the ethical and social implications of this. The issue will be more about content and less about technology.

IQ: What about the issue of screening or filtering for quality control? Marketers like to know their message is being delivered clearly and accurately. And in the case of journalism, there is a process designed to guarantee that what the public sees is "news." Can third parties be trusted to deliver content that is reliable?

Marketers do not pattern their business around control as much as we think historically. Over the last decade, marketers have given control over to the listener, the viewer. It's really about the consumer's desire to hear information so marketers need to give up some of that control to get the information out. Control is not the thing. We're now looking at a richness of information from a variety of sources. Marketers need to identify these sources. This country has distaste for anonymous sources. Journalism won't need to give up its value system. In fact, I think business will move over to journalism's value system.

The filter function -- what might be called the evaluative imperative -- will continue, but there is a big change facing journalism, which I would characterize as a move away from top-down, from-the-few-to-the-many control. Journalists are accustomed to deciding what their readers need and then giving it to them. In the future there will be a much greater reliance on what the reader wants. Since its emergence in the 1830s in a form we would recognize today, journalism has had to wrestle with the issue of sensationalism. The question has long been: How can the journalist avoid pandering so that the public has access to more important and valuable information? I suspect that the real challenge over the next 15 years, however, will be somewhat different. With all the new sources of information and all the new participants in the information arena, the journalist will, above all else, have to add value. Perhaps Clarke is correct. Perhaps businesses and their marketers -- which is to say non-disinterested entities -- will provide are great deal of unmediated data in the future without journalists being involved at all. Businesses might be able to provide it quicker and more efficiently, and the consumer will be willing to accept it in that form.

But there is another question to be asked: How good has the filter actually been? Let's consider the effects of blogging for a moment. It is very possible that media historians will look back on this current period and truly celebrate blogs -- if for no other reason than they have brought a new and much-needed accountability to journalism. It is quite easy to think of a recent example where bloggers have acted as a positive check and balance on the mainstream media. I am fairly certain that this new agent of accountability -- an element in the new two-way conversation -- will prove in the long run to be a large benefit to the journalism. And if the era of the mono-directional conversation is coming to an end, journalists will have to get better at what we do, which is another way of saying that we will have to add value. If you pursue the idea of the two-way discourse to its logical end, the changes will be profound. The passive consumer/customer -- what media critic Jay Rosen refers to as "the people formerly known as the audience" -- will be a thing of the past.

For younger generations, it's about them making choices of who or what to interact with or talk to. Some visit big-name web sites, some are far subtler. Our vision of source is very limited by comparison, I have three adult children in their 20s and their news and information sources are unlimited and they are able to make choices of what to believe. In this world, the New York Times will be one of many credible sources, rather than just a main one.

One way to interpret this is that the true subject at hand is actually individual empowerment. In the traditional model, the newspaper's editorial page would tell us what our personal and public priorities should be. I suspect that in the future people will make their own choices, not only about their personal preferences but also about the common good.

Consumers today won't accept the traditional model. They have much sharper ideas about policy and mediation and review. I used to buy a range of magazines to get extreme points of view and tried to find where I stood in the middle of all that. That's pretty old-fashioned. I was trying to figure out left, right, middle. Today there are more choices and people can make more intelligent decisions, and have far more to say.

Speaking of magazines brings up another aspect of the coming changes: the concept of "journalistic distance." This is the social, cultural, emotional, even psychic distance between the journalist and her audience. In the future, the distance will decrease. In many magazines and other kinds of long-form journalism, the journalistic distance has always been foreshortened. The magazine journalist, rather than being a remote Lippmann-esque character providing what he believes the reader needs, has long been more of a colleague to the reader. With pursuits and enthusiasms in common, they are often fellow citizens in a community of shared interest. My guess is that practitioners in other platforms will find their journalistic distance diminished as well.

IQ: With the rise of citizen journalism and word-of-mouth marketing, are there possibilities for more manipulation in both journalism and marketing, which could lead to negative results?

We have to remain watchful. Over the next 15 years, however, I would anticipate less manipulation, largely the result of greater transparency. Uncounted thousands of people will be watching and evaluating in the public realm the performance of journalists. As a result, with an increase in accountability the level of safeguarding will be higher than in the past. And history tells us that the diffusion of power usually means a morally improved outcome.

If you are a populist and progressive like I am, being from Wisconsin, you have a confidence in the voter and customer that there will be benefits to more participation over time. Often laws are "Thou shall not ...". The violators are always a little ahead of the regulators. The same thing is true in the commercial world. You can have someone come in and buy something and commercialize it, and someone out there will push it to the next level of populism. I don't have a fear that commercialization is part of the political opportunity. The spirit of it is that the commercial system is part of our progressivity. Opportunities to learn about different topics. When we talk about the intent and small groups dedicated to topics, traditional journalism and magazines have satisfied that. We used to send marketing students down to the bus station to view the range of magazines. Flying. Automotive. You name it. It was an example of the super-segmentation of the marketplace 30 years ago. That's nothing compared to the market segmentation today. No one could create enough magazines to satisfy these audiences, except on the Internet where the barriers to entry are virtually nil. Barriers to entry to start a magazine or newspaper have been traditional sources of funding. In the main, people now can enter into the conversation with virtually no cost, just their time. I think that is key to unlocking the greater human potentiality. If you unlock everyone's ability to speak - sometimes foolishly - you open up all our opportunity to hear new ideas as countries like ours will have to compete with countries like China.

IQ: Will information sharing between people change if we are all in some way a potential journalist or marketer in the new two-way communications model?

Communications will be enhanced. There is a dark side of human nature that is evident on the Internet, but that will be overcome when you look at the wider range of opportunity. People worried at the beginning that porn sites would dominate the Internet. But other sites are outgrowing sexual sites and there's a richer mix of choices. This is an outlet for other interests, and that gives me confidence. There's debate about content from business. People are concerned about corporate-provided content that is not mediated and is not esteemed by journalists. If you look at broadcast news, a lot of information is just not that controversial. There are stories about how to convince four-year-olds to let their mothers redecorate their rooms. The vast majority of stories don't have an edge. There's just a fantastic amount of information about how businesses make products or how services are provided.

In some publications we are seeing that there is a deliberate bifurcation of information. The newsmagazines, for example, now provide two kinds of information -- their online presence deals with the timely facts, the data, while the weekly print product focuses more on the interpretive function. It makes sense because, even though the magazines are advancing their print on-sale dates, more and more print readers will already have possession of the facts, will already know what has happened. It will be a matter of the publisher selecting the most informationally appropriate vehicle: Daily updated web versus weekly print, for data versus analysis, respectively.

The future of the journalism and marketing functions will be more blended, not blurred. Blurring implies there's a clouding or misunderstanding. Instead, it's a question of determining what's high priority and what's low priority. I see in the future less criticism of journalism for running pabulum, because if you want to find that it will be on the Internet because it doesn't deserve to be in a newspaper. We're moving in a direction where journalism and public relations don't have to give up their value system, I see businesses moving more toward these transparent value systems. The public will have more choices and we need to be aware of that.

Posted on February 1, 2007 1:37 PM | Permalink

Comments

The company for which I am marketing officer is a not-for-profit, financial services association founded in 1868. "What is old is now new again," is the theme of this comment.

Word-of-mouth has always played a huge role in our organization in that our policyholders (customers) are grouped in voluntary chapters. They - by the the very nature of their "cause-related" activities - have become spokespersons for our association.

In effect, our customers are grouped together in marketing units that help promote what we are just by the very nature of them doing good works for their communities.

It sounds almost revolutionary and cutting edge but it a formula that has been around - as I mentioned above - since 1868.

Posted by: Joe Gadbois | February 22, 2007 4:27 PM

Three words are missing from the Abrahamson/Caywood view of journalism's future.

They are: Reporting, writing and editing.

Posted by: robert mulholland | February 23, 2007 3:24 PM

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