Curation Nation Chapter 4 - by Steven Rosenbaum

7/29/2019 Curation Nation Chapter 4 - by Steven Rosenbaum

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S T E V E N R O S E N B A U MFOUNdER ANd CEO OF MAgNiFy.NET

“An indispensable guide to the brave new media world.”—AriAnnA Huffington, editor in cHief, The huffingTon PosT



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4

Consumer

Conversations

and Curation

I t’s easy to look at curation as a powerful change agent for

editorial enterprises such as magazines and newspapers, and that

is certainly the case. But it’s far more powerful than that. Brands,

which for so long were able to tell their story with the massive voice

of one-way advertising, now nd that consumer conversations

about their products are happening in big, public, uncontrolled

ways. They need to embrace curated content and at the same time

remain careful that they don’t unleash the wrath of customers who

may end up both empowered and unhappy.



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c u r a t i o n n a t i o n

In a world where brands no longer control their own story, a

single unhappy customer can create a restorm that galvanizesconsumers into an army of complaints. This kind of negative

engagement is a new thing for marketers, a kind of mass media

turned upside down.

But there’s power in passion, and passion doesn’t have to be

a positive thing. There’s the phenomenon of consumers who are

mad as hell and willing to blog about it. There are lessons in those

stories too.

D H

Jeff Jarvis is a journalist who’s found that he is no longer able to

use his former power as a columnist for Time magazine to get

CEOs to return phone calls. But way back in 2005, in the days

when the Web was still emerging as a consumer power platform,Jarvis was sold what he describes as a lemon computer from

Dell. What Jarvis knew was that you could put any corporate name

into Google and add the word sucks and you’d quickly get a listing

of all the complaints or issues that faced a brand or corporation.

So Jarvis penned a blog post titled “Dell lies. Dell sucks.” Serious

stuff. The result should be required reading for any brand mar-

keter trying to understand the power of the aggregated and curated

consumer.Here’s Jarvis’s post in its entirety.

June 21, 2005

Dell lies. Dell sucks

I just got a new Dell laptop and paid a fortune for the four-

year, in-home service.



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4 : c o n s u m e r c o n v e r s a t i o n s a n d c u r a t i o n

The machine is a lemon and the service is a lie.

I’m having all kinds of trouble with the hardware: over-

heats, network doesn’t work, maxes out on CPU usage.

It’s a lemon.

But what really irks me is that they say if they sent some-

one to my home—which I paid for—he wouldn’t have the

parts, so I might as well just send the machine in and lose

it for 7–10 days—plus the time going through this crap. So I

have this new machine and paid for them to FUCKING FIX

IT IN MY HOUS and they don’t and I lose it for two weeks.

D SUCKS. D IS. Put that in your Google and

smoke it, Dell.

What’s interesting, of course, is that this isn’t journalism or lit-

erature or even a well-constructed argument. It’s a rant. Short and

sweet. Anyone could have written it. But his blog, BuzzMachine,

had some trafc and some power, and so the post had impact.

What it did was get noticed by other unhappy Dell customers.

It got picked up by reporters who wanted to know what Dell was

doing about the problem. And it tested Dell’s ability to understand

the changing power and voice of consumers on the Web.

Between June 2005 and August 2005 Jarvis posted a number

of follow-ups.

Dell hell: Seller beware

July 1, 2005

The age of caveat emptor is over.

Now the time has come when it’s the seller who must be-

ware. Caveat venditor.



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A company can no longer get away with consistently of-

fering shoddy products or service or ignoring customers’

concerns and needs.

I tested Dell and they failed. Their customer service mech-

anism did not recognize a machine and service pattern

and customer that were a mess. They didn’t try to x it.

I could have stayed on the phone for hours and gone up

a tier at a time playing the customer having a psycho t

(ask anyone who has heard me go after customer service

people who don’t serve: I play the role well).

Instead, I chose to write about the saga here. I chose to

elicit the sympathy and conspiracy of fellow pissed-off

Dell customers. I chose to see whether Dell is listening.

They are not.

Their media people were not reading the media that mat-

ters—media written by their very own customers. This

page is already No. 5 in Google under Dell sucks. I gave

them time. They failed.

So then I emailed their media department and told them

to read this blog. I gave them a cheat sheet. They didn’t.

They failed.

Jarvis goes on at length about his attempts to x his computer

and teach Dell the power—and the danger—of the emerging con-

sumer as public Web publishers. Eventually he even suggests that

Dell literally hire him to come in and teach the company about

blogs and the customer voice. What is important about the Dell Hell

moment is that it was early, and unlike really angry customers who

want to destroy a brand, Jarvis was truly looking to present what



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academics (and Oprah Winfrey) call a teachable moment. His

warning shot that negative consumer sentiment can be gatheredand amplied was ignored, it appears. Jarvis bought an Apple

computer. And brand marketers continued to ignore consumers

at their peril.

In less than two years, Jarvis’s handful of personal blog posts

had been taken as a rallying cry and grown from a single consumer

rant into a full-edged platform of consumer unhappiness and

anger. Connected consumers had demands. This was a shocking

revelation, to say the least.

COMCAST MUST DI

On Thursday, October 4, 2007, the next shot in the growing shift

from passive consumers to engaged consumers was red. Bob

Gareld, a well-known media reporter on NPR and a magazinecolumnist registered the blog name ComcastMustDie.com. The

rst post read:

Actually, I have no deathwish for Comcast or any other

gigantic, blundering, greedy, arrogant corporate mon-

strosity, What I do have is the earnest desire for such

companies to change their ways. This site offers an op-

portunity—for you to vent your grievances (civilly, please)

and for Comcast to pay close attention . . .

Congratulations. You are no longer just an angry, mis-

treated customer. Nor, I hope, are you just part of an e-

mob. But you are a revolutionary, wresting control from

the oligarchs, and claiming it for the consumer. Your

power is enormous. Use it wisely.



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In a separate post, he explained why consumers are rising up

and what he felt Comcast had wrought.

Partly because you [Comcast] have behaved so arrogantly

till now, and partly because the world has changed around

you, you now must answer to a Greater Power.

Us.

Gareld had three main demands of Comcast:

1. You will recruit a standing panel of customers to con-

sult, brainstorm, complain and advise every step of the

way . . .

2. You will host a website soliciting customer feedback of

every kind . . .

3. Most importantly of all, you must recognize that none

of this should be a PR move you have made through

gritted teeth in extremis . . .

Gareld’s rant exploded as unhappy Comcast customers found

the site. It seems that while sucks is great search engine bait, Com-

cast must die was also very effective. You can search YouTube and

easily come across the promotional video that helped build the

buzz for ComcastMustDie.Gareld estimates that 10,000 visitors and 1,000 comments

were registered in the rst two months of the site’s operation. Gar-

eld explained the change this way: “The world has changed, in

that its customers are no longer passive victims of the corporate

agenda. We are stakeholders. We not only wish to have a say in how

things are done, we not only demand a say in how things are done,

we have the power to get our way.”



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On September 7, 2009, Gareld declared victory, posting on the

ComcastMustDie site, “ComcastMustDie.com has now evolved.This is partly because we have declared victory against Comcast,

a vast, greedy, blundering, tone-deaf corporate colossus which, in

less than two short years, has nally seen the light. But tone deaf

no more. To quote the abolitionist Wendell Phillips, ‘Eternal vigi-

lance is the price of liberty.’ Thank you, and congratulations.”

Comcast had rst ignored, then attacked, and nally engaged

in listening to its customers—even unhappy ones. It put a social

media team in place and began monitoring the Web and Twitter

for service issues.

ISTNOMICS

The irony of the Comcast tale is that Gareld had spent a large part

of his career as the columnist for Ad Age who reviewed advertising.

He was an advertising expert . When I sat down with him in 2009 atthe social media epicenter of the world—the South By Southwest

Interactive conference (SXSW), in Austin, Texas—Bob hadn’t lost

his faith in the power of the emerging consumer revolution. Far

from it.

“There’s stained underwear right up and down Madison Av-

enue,” he told me with a rueful grin. He went on to explain just

what’s wrong with conventional advertising: “Brands have hitherto

been able to dictate their entire stories. They’ve been able to craft itfrom beginning to end and put it on your television machine. What

they’re scared about is that they don’t have control of their own sto-

ries. And they have no control over what is being said about them.”

Example: Comcast.

No longer can advertisers control, which leaves them little they

can do except aggregate and organize. “They want more than cura-

tion. But curation’s the best they can hope for,” Gareld said.



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But fear not, he’s got a prescription: listenomics.

According to Gareld, listenomics is what happens when mar-keters, media, and all institutions that hitherto had dictated from

the top down—from the U.S. government to Proctor and Gamble—

learn the art and science of shutting up and paying attention to what

is being said among their various constituencies. After all, those

people on the receiving end are the real stakeholders, and now with

their online voice, they’re collaborators, participants, and members

of a community.

Gareld’s listenomics appears to have made more sense to

Comcast than Jarvis’s Dell Hell did to Dell: while Jarvis reports

little change in how Dell engages unhappy consumers, Comcast

quickly recognized Gareld’s aggregation of anger as a powerful

and potentially disruptive force. Comcast made changes based on

the consumer organizing of Gareld and his MustDie site. Com-

cast now has employed a real-time customer service Twitter team

under the handle @ComcastCares, which was launched by Com-cast customer service manager Frank Eliason.

ON-TO-ON CUSTOMR SRIC

Frank Eliason joined the customer care team at Comcast just a

month before the ComcastMustDie site went live. I reached out to

Frank, trying to understand how much of Comcast’s reaction was aresult of the Gareld corporate death threat. Was his job simply cri-

sis management? Eliason says no. As he describes it, he was hired

to manage customer service when a powerful blogger (Michael Ar-

rington from TechCrunch) tweeted about a tech issues. Comcast-

MustDie was just another source of unhappy customers for him

and his team to engage proactively.



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Eliason explained that one of the most successful things he

did at Comcast was to create an in-house newsletter to highlightcustomer issues for management. The voices of unhappy custom-

ers seemed to resonate more with management than Excel spread-

sheets did. Eliason is a Comcast loyalist, even though he has since

left the company. But he’s the rst to admit companies ignored

customer service for far too long. He told me, “Customer service

leaders for all companies have been weak for a long time. Over the

past 20 years the service industry has been focused on shortening

call times, becoming more efcient, et cetera. They never shared

the impact upward. Now it is the customers’ turn.”

But what about the lurking concern that one-on-one customer

service doesn’t scale? That Twitter can’t be made efcient? While

it’s fair to point out that bloggers like Michael Arrington may catch

the eye of a corporation, you get the sense that Comcast really does

start to learn about its customers by listening.

Eliason explains, “Using that argument, phones would neverscale and neither would e-mail or chat. Social media scales in a much

easier fashion than any of these other communications channels. First

of all you have a means to broadcast messages out which can reach

millions very quickly. Beyond that, you can easily queue up a tweet,

assign it to somebody, and have them respond. Most companies

do not have to get that sophisticated today, but the tools exist now.”

Eliason’s core message is “Keep it personal.”

PPSI FINDS SOCIA

MDIA RFRSHING

In the few years between Jarvis’s and Gareld’s rst salvos and now,

a handful of brand marketers have gured out that consumers are



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going to have their impressions and product issues aggregated and

curated, for better or for worse. While lots of brands have jumpedon the Twitter bandwagon, tweeting about various brand activities,

Pepsi has been perhaps the most active leader in inviting custom-

ers to participate in the brand and help shape both the products

and the marketing.

Pepsi has taken seriously the change that Gareld is shouting

from the rooftops. Bonin Bough, the director of digital and social

media at PepsiCo explains, “If you listen to what people have to say

and give voice to their perspectives, you can inspire people and em-

power their ideas.” This may not seem like the words of a soda and

snack food company, but Pepsi is putting its brand and its money

where its mouth is by pledging more than 20 million dollars to a

crowd-sourced grant program, with public voting determining who

gets the grants. Each month, Pepsi will award up to $1.3 million to

the winning ideas across six categories: Health, Arts and Culture,

Food and Shelter, The Planet, Neighborhoods, and Education. It’sa listening campaign that is meant to send a message to a new

generation of connected consumers. Frank Cooper, Pepsi’s chief

consumer engagement ofcer, explains the company’s social me-

dia initiatives this way: “We want to become a catalyst in the culture

rather than act like a big brand announcing something.” Cooper

does admit that this “goes against all the systems put in place that

were designed for mass marketing.” Pepsi’s Mountain Dew brand

is reaching out to its core customers, inviting them to participatein planning the brand, and even the events for the DEWmocracy,

as they call it .

DEWmocracy is engaging fans by having them campaign

and vote to determine which of three new Dew avors would be

rolled out by PepsiCo; the destinations, activities, and venues for

the DEWmocracy: The Flavor Campaign tour were also largely



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determined by fans. They were told that they would be calling the

shots on which cities were visited and on the specics of the ac-tivities that would take place in their areas, including helping to

choose venues. Fans also were invited to rally friends to participate

in creating content, including posting photos and video content on-

line, and to vote for their favorite avor. You can’t dispute the math:

Pepsi distributed 60,000 samples of avors, met 100,000 consum-

ers, and generated more than 1.5 million total impressions.

Cooper explains that the DEWmocracy campaign “started with

a simple question” that asks “What if we gave the power to our con-

sumers to lead product innovation?” Pepsi did just that. The result

was the creation of Mountain Dew Voltage. Cooper calls Voltage

“one of the most successful product launches in PepsiCo beverage

history.”

But Pepsi didn’t just focus on consumer content. The Pepsi Re-

fresh Project “looked to add value to a community or a real-life so-

cial network,” Cooper says. “We knew that our consumers wantedto play a central role in developing and promoting ideas that they

believed would move the world forward.”

Cooper sees a massive change in media and the potential of a

brand. “The Pepsi Refresh Project has expanded our consumers’

perception of what the Pepsi brand can be: Pepsi remains a fun

brand that leads culture,” he says. “However, it also has social re-

sponsibility, a sense of purpose, built into its behavior.”

Bough explains, “We collaborated with organizations that arededicated to making a positive difference in the world to design

and implement the Pepsi Refresh Project. Each month we accept

1,000 submissions, and all the ideas that comply with our ofcial

guidelines are then posted online for public vote. We’re doing our

part to bring transparency to the process by featuring a monthly

leader-board showing which ideas are getting the most votes.”



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Pepsi is working to make the process open, with both an advi-

sory board of nonprot leaders and a team of ambassadors rangingfrom start-up founders to activists to neighborhood advocates.

Bough says it’s about aligning the brand with positive social

change: “Our theory of social change is that new ideas are born

from optimism, a curious mind, and a creative spirit. We can make

a difference by equipping people with the means to bring their

ideas to life. And we believe social media and digital engagement

can fuel, extend, and inform these efforts.”

And it appears that some of the companies that rst were ex-

posed to the power of consumer voice online and didn’t pay atten-

tion are drinking the Kool-Aid. Jarvis says Dell got the message,

and years later Dell CEO Michael Dell told Jarvis, “No company can

exist anymore on the idea that it’s just three people.” The era of the

all-powerful CEO, CMO, and COO has been replaced by a crowd-

sourced aggregation of suggestions, feedback, and complaints.

TAKING CONTRO

OF TH BRAND

So what are the action items that this change from mass media to

consumer-controlled conversations can offer? Well, there is a shift

in how the buyers engage companies: no longer do they need to

accept the “take it or leave it” attitude of many companies they dobusiness with. Instead, they can say, “No, I think I’ll change it and

take control of the brand.” The tools to amplify consumer concerns

are only growing stronger, and there’s a business opportunity in

becoming a consumer evangelist for an aggregated community of

customers who haven’t had a voice before. So imagine you har-

ness the power of formerly powerless consumers and pick a topic,

brand, or endeavor to aggregate and curate.



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Take cruise ships, for example. Which tours are great? Which

ones are a rip-off? Is there one unhappy customer on board or aship full of disappointed travelers? Only human curation can lter

the noise and alert travelers. That’s a site that can be quickly au-

thentic and have a positive impact on travelers looking for curated

data.

Now, imagine curated human data brought down to your

neighborhood. Unvarnished human experience about local repair

companies, lawn services, plumbers, and chimney sweeps. Who’s

gathering and curating the raves and rants in your hometown?

Someone surely is doing so. The important thing to know here

is that curating brands or public gures doesn’t require you to get

permission. In fact, a truly authentic site or community may not

want to be authorized by the brand so that it can be both a passion-

ate fan community and a transparent truth teller if the brand or the

public gure does something that doesn’t sit well with the users.

While crowd-sourced data most certainly gives people powerand shifts the ability for consumers to speak with what Andrew

Blau calls “a massive megaphone,” crowd content without curation

tends to drive the thoughtful voices to the edges and amplies the

loudest and most outrageous voices. It doesn’t encourage civility,

accuracy, or thoughtful dialogue. But when you add a human edito-

rial layer, a curatorial perspective that organizes gathered content

and community participation, you get real results. Bob Gareld

wanted Comcast to hear unhappy customers, and he curated acommunity with such passion and visibility that Comcast had to

listen.

As curated consumer conversations take hold, there will not be

a brand, a service, or a company that won’t have an independently

curated ad-hoc watchdog group that will emerge to give feedback

and lter customer reaction to goods and services. There’s no

doubt that there will be plenty of the XYZ Company Sucks sites,



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but that’s not likely to be where the majority of customers will end

up. Instead, reasonable and balanced communities curated to beabout honest feedback and customer solutions will emerge as a

new and powerful force in consumer-and-brand interaction.

Curation is the future of consumer conversations.

Curation Nation Chapter 4 - by Steven Rosenbaum

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