Hand-Held Makers Woo 'Influencers' For Cheap Marketing

[Jason Dunn]

<a href="http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB1017613036318831800,00.html">http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB1017613036318831800,00.html</a><br /><br />Articles like this are very gratifying to see. When Microsoft began to reach out to some of the influentials (like MVPs) in late 1999, I knew they were on to something big. Most companies ignore influentials - hell, most companies ignore their <b>customers</b>. It takes a certain type of person to engage someone who uses your product, and be prepared for the onslaught of both praise and complaints that it entails - Derek Brown was that guy back in 1999. He's been at it for a few years now, and recruited team members like Beth Goza to carry the torch, yet this article talks about enthusiast marketing as if it's a "new, new thing". To most companies, I suppose it is.<br /><br />I wonder if they realize how powerful the opinions of these influentials are? I'm still looking for a new digital camera, yet if I see a camera I'm interested in getting a poor review over at <a href="http://www.dpreview.com">DPREVIEW</a>, I won't touch it with a ten foot pole. I had my heart set on an Olympus E-20 until I read the review and saw that <a href="http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/olympuse20/page17.asp">Olympus hadn't addressed the issues</a> that the first review brought up. So Olympus loses a sale - do they understand that?<br /><br />"With tough times in Silicon Valley, many makers of hand-held devices, facing cuts in their marketing and advertising budgets, are trying to woo people like Ms. Strietelmeier, one of about 50 around the country known by the industry as "influencers." <br /><br />These folks run Web sites that review hand-held products or manage fan clubs devoted to the devices. Many consumers turn first to these influencers' recommendations before purchasing a hand-held computer. As a result, the makers are turning to them as a creative -- and cheap -- marketing strategy." Source: <a href="http://www.pocketpcpassion.com">Pocket PC Passion</a><br /><br />On another note, I must be perceived by the media as being really unfriendly or scary - I never get contacted for things like this. :-)

[/dev/niall]

On another note, I must be perceived by the media as being really unfriendly or scary - I never get contacted for things like this. :-)

"Daddy, there's a monster in my closet!"

"Nonsense pumpkin, that's not a monster, it's Jason Dunn. Brush your teeth and he'll go away."

[CoffeeKid]

It's not just in the PPC fields or high tech fields either Jason.

For instance, we do "detailed product reviews" over at the CoffeeGeek site. An example of a recent one is:

http://www.coffeegeek.com/detailed/innovagrinder/

I can tell you that these reviews generate a massive amount of leads when the review is good - the review we did for the Maestro Grinder increased sales, according to the manufacturer, by about 25% in the month it was "featured" on our site.

The Innova one isn't so good (it has motor issues), and the importer is none too happy with us right now - he's claimed he's had cancellations in the tune of about $20,000 in orders (a lot for him).

My response to him? Fix the motor, but he doesn't see this as an option. (kind of like how Oly should have dealt with the "issues" in their e-10, e20 digicam, but didn't).

It's not only our Detailed Reviews - our First Looks have a major impact as well. The First Look for a Maz Mini grinder (seen here: http://www.coffeegeek.com/news/minimazzer ) caused a complete sell out of inventory for the product supplier (to us) within a week, and pre orders covering his next two shipments (this was over the 3 weeks it was "featured" on the front page of our site).

We modeled our Detailed Reviews loosely on Phil's dpreview engine, though he's the official "god" of reviews - I don't think we could EVER get as comprehensive as Phil has.

Bottom line, and bringing it back on topic is this: Influencers do matter, but we aren't like some magazine or tv show or "official, authorized" review source. In fact, I don't take any payments for doing Detailed Reviews or First Looks. I am pretty sure that many of the other "influencers" online don't take much in the way of payment either. Consumer Reports does. Many other "review" based pubs do as well. But in the end Influencers weild a LOT of power, I think, because we are seen as the most objective of all potential review sources. The lack of payment for the service (and it is a service - a typical "detailed review" eats up about 100+ hours of labour for us - I can't imagine what Phil's time is like!!!) shows our readers we have nothing to gain, nothing to lose from posting a good or bad review. We post honest, hard hitting reviews, so if a product does score well, the supplier / manufacturer / importer benefits.

Many see this as a landmine field though, and I recognize this. In our Detailed Review legalese, we do state that while suppliers cannot influence the editorial content of a review, they can correct factual errors, and have the right to outright "veto" a review - it never gets published. In those cases, they do have to pay a "fine" of sorts, to cover our costs and time in what is ultimately a lost piece of major content for our website. So far, only one company has done this to us - veto'ed what I thought was a pretty positive product review.

Lastly, I am in a quandry over the subject of fees. The process is long, and eats up a ton of my "free" hours (I still have a day job). But I've set a quality level for ourselves, and cannot go below it. Still, to maintain our objectivity (and perceived objectivity), charging no fees is something we have to try to stick to. So how to make money?

One thing that REALLY irks me is that the suppliers feel they have the right to use our photographs without even asking us. That is where I try to make some money back - selling the photographs for reseller use (often there are no quality photos available in these high end coffee and espresso machine markets), selling "reprints" of the reviews in a printed format and layout, etc. But if we can get them to honour our copyrights and pay for the use of these things outside of our website, I feel the Detailed Review process we've created (thanks to modelling it on sites like dpreview.com) can become self-sufficient.

Hell, it's a landmine field for us too :)

[Paragon]

I think sites like this one , Pocket PC Passion, Brighthand, PDABuzz, and a few others have real potential for developers if used correctly. So far that potential has only been scratched. Look at the counter at pPCp, today it sits at 6.5 million that is influence.

Jason, your topic the other day " I have a dream" is a great example of the potential. If I was that guy at Microsoft wanting to know what direction to go I would definitely know that subfolders is worth looking at.

A developer will spend thousands if not millions of dollars on market research. If nothing else these sites can be great perliminary market gages. One could easily be sitting around a board room table in the morning discussing the viablity of a product, from there they could post a question or pole on a site like this and before the marketing agency can return your call you could have a fair idea if it is worth persueing or not.

I know very early on Dale Coffing conducted surveys on different aspects of the PPC. I'm sure they must have been very informative to developers, if they chose to take a look.

I wonder how many products are on the market now that were first hatched through discussions at Brighthand. Someone posting a basic idea and by the end of the thread there is a good solid foundation to build a product on.

As for real influence, would you rather be influenced by someone 'flexing' the numbers, or buy the people who use your product everyday in many ways. Some the developer never intended or envisioned.

I have always been disappointed by the amount of participation by developers on the discussion boards I hope that is going to change.

Dave

[Chris Spera]

and I love it.

I do agree that it has some quirks that I would have loved to have seen addressed by some sort of bios or other fix; but i guess that's just not going to happen. The review is right on about the buffer and write times.

In retrospect, I still would have bought this camera (i bought it at almost $1500 February 2001.). It was the most advanced out there at the time, and had the largest picture size available at 4mp.

I've advised a few people on which digital camera to buy; and I have to say at one point you're just going to have to choose one and jump in with both feet. With technology changes coming so quickly, and with so many different offerings, if you wait, you may end up waiting forever...

[CoffeeKid]

In retrospect, I still would have bought this camera (i bought it at almost $1500 February 2001.). It was the most advanced out there at the time, and had the largest picture size available at 4mp.

I've advised a few people on which digital camera to buy; and I have to say at one point you're just going to have to choose one and jump in with both feet. With technology changes coming so quickly, and with so many different offerings, if you wait, you may end up waiting forever...


I totally agree.

Also, no matter how good Julie or Dale or Phil Askey or anyone is at reviewing a product, in the end, it's basically one person's "opinion" on the device. The very sentiment YMMV (your mileage may vary) is so very much true here. The idea and function of an influencer (a word I didn't even know about till that WSJ article) is a sound one, and the intent in most cases is to provide as detailed and as honest an evaluation as possible, and it's almost part of the job to not only point out negative aspects, but to find them, to provide balance. A negative aspect a reviewer finds may have zero role in the day to day use of a product for joe typical user.

One would hope that Joe Typical is savvy enough to understand this, and also understand that in high tech, today's bleeding edge is literally tomorrow's has been.

Also note, I almost bought that E20 as well, and in the end, finances, not Phil's review, turned me off. But I did use Phil's review to entice me, and while the negatives he found were negatives to me as well, overall, I still had the "tech lust" for this camera. Justification of the price point was another matter... :)

[Jason Dunn]

...we do state that while suppliers cannot influence the editorial content of a review, they can correct factual errors, and have the right to outright "veto" a review - it never gets published. In those cases, they do have to pay a "fine" of sorts, to cover our costs and time in what is ultimately a lost piece of major content for our website. So far, only one company has done this to us - veto'ed what I thought was a pretty positive product review.


Zoinks! Doesn't that blow wide, gaping holes in your credibility? If I went to your site and couldn't find a review of your product because the maker killed the review...I'm not sure that I could trust you to bring me the "bad news" as well as the good news. Nothing personal here, I'm just wondering about how your readers perceive that. Do you tell them when a company kills a review? That might say a lot to them about the product. :-)


Lastly, I am in a quandry over the subject of fees. The process is long, and eats up a ton of my "free" hours (I still have a day job). But I've set a quality level for ourselves, and cannot go below it. Still, to maintain our objectivity (and perceived objectivity), charging no fees is something we have to try to stick to. So how to make money?


This is a killer for me as well. I've had some big financial changes of my own happen lately (for the worse), and I'm not really allowed to talk about them yet. So in the meantime I'm trying to improve the site and write reviews, but there's no real business model to do so. The only thing I've found that works even slightly is selling banner ads, but there's not a lot of money to be made there either. And of course, when you write a poor review about a product, it's not like that company is going to buy banner ads from you &lt;sigh>. Online content is still a painful thing to do for pretty much everyone. :cry:

[Rob Alexander]

Also, no matter how good Julie or Dale or Phil Askey or anyone is at reviewing a product, in the end, it's basically one person's "opinion" on the device.


Part of the strength of these is not just the one person's opinion, but that detailed review combined with the real world experiences of actual users. Like you guys, I used Phil's reviews before buying my digital camera, but I didn't stop there. After reading through several reviews and finding the one I thought I wanted, I then went to the discussion forum for that brand and listened to the joys and tragedies of those who had already purchased that model. And it was not only about knowing what weanesses a particular model had, but about how big a deal those things were in real life and what workarounds people had found to cope with them. No reviewer can provide that intangible user experience.

Others in this thread have touched on that aspect. People are becoming more aware of the opportunity to learn about a product on the Net before making a puchasing decision. The combination of 'influencers' and open forum discussions will be increasingly important to companies as more and more people make decisions that way.

On Jason's lack of junket offers, I might offer the observation that the people named in the article are all people 1) who are trying to balance their perspectives (e.g. Gadgeteer) or 2) who are staunch supporters of a completing product (e.g. MS pursuing Palm people). No one comes here for a balanced comparison of the Palm versus PPC buying decision. It's clearly a PPC site that does not pretend to be objective, so the first one doesn't apply. It's possible that Palmsource might come along one day and ask Jason to see why he's missing the boat, but they don't have much of a budget for that. MS, who has the budget, has no need to do that as this board clearly already does that job.

[CoffeeKid]

Zoinks! Doesn't that blow wide, gaping holes in your credibility? If I went to your site and couldn't find a review of your product because the maker killed the review...I'm not sure that I could trust you to bring me the "bad news" as well as the good news. Nothing personal here, I'm just wondering about how your readers perceive that. Do you tell them when a company kills a review? That might say a lot to them about the product. :-)

I don't see how it will hurt my "credibility": I'm not putting something on the website that is written the way the supplier wants it to be read.

Early on, I found some big time resistance to suppling me machines to review, if I did not give the supplier any "say" in the article. I had to give some concession to them, and editorial control was not one of them... the veto idea was pitched to me by another fellow who could be labled an "influencer" (not with coffee or pda or camera equipment - with another area of specialty alltogether), and I liked the balance that gives.

By withholding content, one could argue that is editorial control, and in a way it is. But it does not get words into a published review that are influenced by the supplier, if you know what I mean?

On the subject of bad news vs. good, almost every detailed review we've done has some negative news about the items reviewed; some more than others. Plus we have a consumer reviews section, with sometimes as many as 40 or more posted reviews for the item, and that supplies a good balance as well.

[CoffeeKid]

This is a killer for me as well. I've had some big financial changes of my own happen lately (for the worse), and I'm not really allowed to talk about them yet. So in the meantime I'm trying to improve the site and write reviews, but there's no real business model to do so. The only thing I've found that works even slightly is selling banner ads, but there's not a lot of money to be made there either. And of course, when you write a poor review about a product, it's not like that company is going to buy banner ads from you &lt;sigh>. Online content is still a painful thing to do for pretty much everyone. :cry:


Lemme commiserate with you some more on this one Jason... finding a balance is what it is all about.

I have found that if I separate the Detailed Reviews entirely from the rest of the site's advertising, in terms of establishing that Detailed Reviews are a "service", but banner ads, side ads, etc are an "advertisement", and *never* ever combining the two in discussions with clients (eg: "sorry, we handle advertisements and reviews as two separate elements, we never combine them, I can discuss them with you individually...") helps. I'm still learning it big time. Chris Pirillo has been a pretty good help for me, esp. last fall when I hit him up for tons of questions. But I've also studied other "influencer" style sites, the more pro ones, and seen how they did it. The much more "pro" ones have an obvious bias towards providing a good review in return for adspace, so it's a real tricky thing.

I think the moment you actually charge for the reviews, then it becomes like an advertisement, and you cross some sort of line. If you always make it free (but make them pick up 100% of the expenses), plus the products can be contest'ed off or something it strikes a decent balance. So far, that's what most of our suppliers have done.

Here's an ironic story. We posted that Detailed Review recently that the supplier was generally happy with (though he was upset that we continually "harped" on one negative aspect). A few days after, he called in a very upset mode, demanding we pull the review, even hinting at lawyer involvement. I tried my best to calm him down but established the review, once published, stays as is. I did calm him down, but the call ended very stiff, very formal.

Two days later, he placed an order for about $400 worth of adspace.

Go figure :)

[Scott R]

Great discussion. Trying to track down what the editorial standards are among mainstream magazines, etc. is hard to come by. Generally, a manufacturer supplies a product on loan for the review. The advantage to the reviewer is that they don't have to buy the products they review (which, if this was the general model, simply wouldn't work for one team of reviewers - but could still work for a collabarative review magazine/site where anyone who owned a product could submit a review). After a certain period of time (2 months or so), the reviewer is supposed to send the product back to the manufacturer. Interestingly, from what I've read, many manufacturers don't have measures in place to ensure that the product comes back. The more credible magazines have strict guidelines in place for their reviewers so as to ensure that the reviewers do, indeed, send the product back. This, of course, is to remove the bias that may come from a reviewer getting a free, expensive, toy to keep. Now, if the value of the item is relatively low, these rules may not apply, and the reviewer may get to keep the item. From what I understand, in the case of a lot of software, this is often the case. Sadly, most magazines (and web sites) don't clearly document what their policies are.

Now, what I've been seeing with Microsoft is very concerning to me. There's the MVP idea, which offers some sort of material reward (free software here or there) and inside contacts, access to beta software, etc. which, in many cases, is even more desirable for geeks. We all know about the PPC coming out party in which several well known Palm site owners received a couple of free PPCs and other software and accessories. On the gadgeteer site recently they reviewed one of the Toshiba PPCs. In their article they clearly stated that this was given to them to keep by Microsoft. There's also the recent CeBits conference where it appears as though Microsoft footed the bill for several folks to fly out and stay at a hotel out there. We can argue all day about whether or not these things hinder objectivity. More than that, I'm concerned about the fact the people involved don't clearly state what was and was not paid for and by whom. I have mixed feelings about whether or not the gadgeteer girls had any business accepting these free PPCs from MS, but the fact that they disclosed it helps their credibility a great deal.

Lastly, I think there's a misconception among the people who accept the freebies that objectivity is completely within their control. They believe that they have the "will power" to accept the freebies while maintaining complete objectivity. When someone questions whether or not they should be accepting freebies (or MS - or whomever - should be giving out freebies), they polarize this into an accusation of being "bought". The truth is that bias can present itself in much more subtle and "well-meaning" ways. Unless you create a specific set of policies, clearly document them for readers (and manufacturers), and adhere to them, you open yourself up to these issues.

Scott

[CoffeeKid]

I've just been rereading this thread, and I just wanted to say, I apologize if I come across in any way as some sort of 'expert' at all of this. I'm most definitely not. I'm in serious learning mode, changing our site's policies almost with every deal (not in an attempt to screw over any previous clients, but based on what I've learned and what people "expect" in these kinds of dealings).

This whole arena of "influencer" is a really tough nut to crack, and I don't think there's any books or one-set of guidelines to follow. It's almost a fly by the seat of your pants kinda thing.