Pirillo has a massive audience across all his ventures, and consistently providing quality content for all those communities keeps him hopping. So he’s a great example of why the judo philosophy is so vital for companies that want to generate word-of-mouth buzz across the Internet.

By simply tapping into his vast audience and expertise, a company can spread its message to millions of potential customers at once. But no company will get through his virtual door without offering him something in return.

“They’re asking me for my time, my expertise, my audience,” he says. “You’re asking me to do a lot and most of it does nothing for my readers.”

We’ve worked on a few campaigns with Chris, including a couple we put together for HP. It’s hard to pass up an audience that large, and we know we need to bring something to the table to make it worth his while. But we can’t and don’t reserve this approach for big fish like Chris Pirillo or Xavier Lanier, who founded the Notebooks.com family of Web sites.

For a company that adopts the judo philosophy, this fundamental give-and-take becomes a key piece of any online marketing campaign. Successful companies will craft campaigns where the effort needed to participate produces results that are as valuable for the influencers as they are for the brand.

“Rarely does one size fit all,” Lanier says. “It’s kind of like herding cats with bloggers. They all have their own approach, and there’s not one way to approach an audience across different geographies and demographics. So instead of coming to us and saying, ‘We want you to promote our company,’ it’s important for companies to offer value to the whole community, not just the blogger as the community leader.”

Let’s be clear, though: None of this is meant to suggest a pay-per-post approach. Providing value to the entire community means giving influencers like Pirillo, Lanier and others the content they need to engage their communities and help them drive traffic. It means providing appropriate access to products and people so they can credibly and transparently talk about our clients’ brands. It means giving something that benefits them as much as it benefits the company.

And it means giving them the flexibility to present all that content – whether a giveaway, a review or a piece of technical analysis – in the way that best fits their audience. After all, the influencers have already proven their ability to reach your market and get its members to act or buy. Why would you want to get in the way of that and risk removing or losing their endorsement?

When we do it right, the influencers will promote our clients’ brands because doing so helps them drive traffic to their site. It’s why we go out of our way to build personal relationships with influencers across the Web. We try to help them as much as any of our clients, and in turn they help us.

In fact, taking an active interest in their success means that not only do we create an interpersonal relationship that we can lean on in the event it’s necessary to do so, but gaining access to companies and brands helps improve their influence, making both them and us that much more effective with each successive engagement. Take a minute to search for our names via your favorite search engine and you’ll see what other people say about us to see that this is true. We’re proud of the comments influencers have gone out of their way to post about us, and we built personal relationships with hundreds of key influencers to make that happen.

We also work hard to craft marketing campaigns that will benefit them as much as they benefit our clients. We came to them from the start with our hands and heads open, asking them to tell us what would work best. By approaching them as friends with a desire to help, instead of as targets that we intend to exploit, we’re able tap into their influence in a way that delivers maximum results for all, with a minimum of effort.

We place this judo philosophy at the core of everything we do. Instead of overpowering an opponent, the judo master will use his foe’s momentum against him. Rather than waste all our effort trying to force a client’s message out across the blogosphere, we work with site publishers to leverage their existing influence and reach the millions of potential customers they talk with every day.

We even took the same approach as we researched this book. Who better to educate us about the sport than Neil Ohlenkamp, an expert teacher in Southern California who founded and runs one of the most popular judo-related sites on the web. Do a search for the term “judo,” and Ohlenkamp’s site is perched among the top results, higher than the associations that govern the sport.

Ohlenkamp said he started the site on a lark, as a way to help teach more people about the sport he loved. In the years since, the site has become the perfect allegory for his passion. Ohlenkamp tapped the power of the Internet and social media, and did it in a way that allowed him to spread the word on judo further and to more people than most of the country’s top judo associations.

Just as a judo expert uses the momentum of his or her opponent, Ohlenkamp used the Internet and social media to reach a broader audience via less effort. We do the same. It’s possible for a social-media marketing campaign can to ride the existing flow already available online – one just has to understand the dynamic at its core to be able to do so. (The same is true of judo.) People are talking about your brand right now, today, and you can tap into that momentum to help amplify your message when done right.

Companies that learn how to best work with these key influential voices will produce consistently stronger results from their online marketing campaigns while consistently spending less. It takes a mindset focused on mutual benefit. It requires the right strategies, processes and tools.

And when it all comes together, it can produce spectacular results. But for all the right intentions, none of this works without an understanding how word-of-mouth is evolving, and how social media is taking it in new directions.

This is an excerpt from “Social Media Judo” by Ivy Worldwide’s Chris Aarons, Geoff Nelson and Nick White (with Dan Zehr). The book applies the ancient martial art of Judo to the practice of word-of-mouth marketing. Get your copy at Amazon.

Twitter, we barely knew you

dd:
“It’s the scoop, stupid! Dumb call, Gartner.

twitter has made obsolete the AP and the UPI wires by beating them to the punch on breaking realtime news. That’s why there is so much hype on TV news because Twitter is free and beats the super expensive wire services to the scoop.

twitter is just getting started. people don’t get it. the brevity of the message encourages the zeitgeist. you can get a real sense of what is happening now. with smarter twitter clients and helper sites, it will become much more useful for topical information – far surpassing the utility of facebook which is very distracting and does not have good channel architecture by enforced reciprocal relationships.”

Christopher Laurance:
“The demise of Twitter or lack of, is irrelevant. What Twitter has done is provide the change in the news wires, reporting and content creation and aggregation.

Murdoch wants to charge for content, but the content isn’t created by Murdoch’s group, its created by the tweets and folks providing the news/content.

Economically, we are about to see the death of the dinosaur-ad revenue and paid content in any form, merely because we now longer need “reviews” of the news, which is what a reporter has become.”

Juanita:
“Twitter touches a different audience… with a different need. Everyone is comparing Twitter to Facebook. This is the problem. The only thing they have in common is the fact that they are called social networks. I think Twitter is here to stay – an…d i hope they do. Live feeds. Great for companies’ CEO’s and so on. Its like having role models of different spheres… and being on top of their immediate thoughts. I love knowing what books Robert Kyosaki is reading and where Paris Hilton hangs out. Who cares if I like them or not. The fact is I choose what (adverts) I want to see. This is not media dictating to me, this is me dictating to my own media. AWESOME.”

Brian Olson:
“I serve on the board of a non-profit agency, right now we’re in the middle of giving out school supplies to kids in need.

Our media team scored coverage on two stations… by….are you ready?

TWITTER”

Jerry:
“Twitter is nothing like the rest of the Social Media tools. Facebook is for college students, MySpace – high school, Linked In – B2B, Twitter – CELL PHONES.

Notice the distinction. The other 3 are about groups. Twitter is about the medium. “The medium is the message”. And in this case the fact that twitter users provide “right now” updates about everything we care about in the “now” makes it so different and unique that the Gartner clowns can’t see it.

I say good! Stick your head in the mud. Those of us who “get it”, Use it. And soon enough everyone will get it.

Go Twitter!”

Banning sex offenders from the web

Ross Ellis:
“Does it make it right if your daughter or son is on one of these social network sites and they are approached by a sexual predator?

Sexual predators prey on kids anywhere they can. If MySpace is shut down to them, they’ll keep on searching until they find what they want. There are so many kids and teens on FaceBook, Twitter, and a few on LinkedIn. Kids are everywhee on the Web and so are predators.

If this is what it takes to keep kids safe on the Internet – great! We’re not going to get rid of the Internet, but we can get rid of these offenders who harm our children.

Ross Ellis
Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Love Our Children USA”

Brian Anderson:
‘“Sexual predators prey on kids anywhere they can.”
Agreed! Let’s ban them from libraries, supermarkets, swimming pools, churches, town centres and anywhere else where kids may be encountered.
… or how about just making it a felony for them to approach kids *anywhere* instead?”

cactusfrgo:
“not all sex afenders are repeat afenders! so if you made a stupid decision when you were young learned from it and then never committed a crime the rest of your life. You are pernimently shamed everywhere you go~ can’t get a well paying job can’t get a girlfriend have kids or even use the internet. Kids should learn that talking to strangers on social networks is dangerous and that they shouldn’t do that but that doesn’t mean someone who was arrested when 14 for sending a naked pic to their boyfriend should be unable to communicate on socail networks for life!”

Done right, email prospects flourish

Brett Flitton:
“Co-registration leads can be some of the best converting leads – and at a decent cost. In the early days the co-registration reputation was tarnished because of bad practices and terrible lead quality but it has definitely improved. It is definitely worth a try and testing with a couple different lead sources.”

Floggers and fakevertisers becoming friendless

Aaron Finn:
“Great article. We have been having this very discussion internally at AdReady. I think Classmates.com fits your “Happy Medium” scenario. They were a VC funded company, building a website that drove value, while using scalable marketing techniques that drove significant revenue. They will spend millions on marketing in a year and generate hundreds of millions of dollars in subscription revenue.

I think this oppotunity is available to thousands of businesses. And I think getting marketers into this Happy Medium is one of the things that will allow display advertising to outgrow search advertising in the next 5 years.

Take for example (this completely made up scenario) where an advertiser, say Jenny Craig, marketed their blog and their monthly subscription using some of the same (within reason) best practices these other diet affiliates have been doing. My guess is that ad would perform signicantly better than the average Jenny Craig ad and Yahoo! would be extremely excited to have them as a long-term advertiser.

If we as marketers can continue to identify best practices (no matter who the advertiser), keep an open mind when testing, believe in the data the tests produce and sincerely optimize to real goals we will be able to create campaigns at scale in display.”

Facebook’s next step in crushing Twitter

AK Works:
“Is Twitter really a growth area? If teenagers and the upcoming youngsters don’t use it will Twitter go the way of Myspace and begin to decline? Or will it continue to exist but be marginalized?”

Media Planner:
“Twitter is the most overhyped site of all time. It is no different than the facebook status. Since every person in hollywood tweats now it has created the illusion that everyone in the US tweats. I have been asked multiple times by clients if we have a twitter strategy. I have even signed up for an account on Twitter to investigate further, only to be sent spam from some local hookup site trying to get me to follow them and go to their site. I don’t see why anyone tweets. People don’t care what you are doing at every moment of everyday.”

Fef:
“AK Wrote:
“If teenagers and the upcoming youngsters don’t use it will Twitter go the way of Myspace and begin to decline?”

MySpace has the teens and it declined. Fb got the older audience as did Twitter. Does a site need younger teen audience to grow?”

The FTC and online advertising

Heather:
“Edward,
good move by FTC. it’s okay though because it seems they’ve seen the right way to protect the interests of consumers. Not many people are comfortable with the idea of serving ads based on their online behavior.According to a survey conducted by TRUSTe, half of all consumers are uncomfortable with advertisers using their browsing history to serve them relevant ads.”

Email marketing decision squashes ‘litigation mill’ entrepeneur

Karin Gamble:
“And they said that common sense isn’t common any more! What a wonderful thing to see in behalf of free enterprise, and those who try to comply with the CanSpam Act.

I’m sure Gordon wore his pinkie out , hitting the delete key, in the comfort of his home.

Maybe Gordon can now take his act on the road in real life charging all the companies that put up billboards – or wait! Garage sale signs….

color me pleased.”

WoM expected to overtake traditional media

Emily:
“I know it may be effective, but WoM tactics are creepy. I feel inclined not to talk about any product, since there’s probably some puppethand directing the conversation. Perhaps it’s a reminder to look into any product personally and speak from experience only.”

Advertising for broadway shows has largely relied on strong word of mouth, reviews and comforting connections to popular movies, such as the Lion King. While shows have long had websites and interactive components, some now are also including web videos on YouTube, hoping for them to catch on with younger demographics.

I also found the stated difference in the Times article between viral marketing and word of mouth interesting, “… spread word of mouth among Internet users, a concept known as viral marketing.” Viral seems to be managed by the seller, the other the potential buyer. But I could be splitting hairs.

– Express your opinion, comment below.

The ridiculously named Empirical Generalizations in Advertising Conference brought some of the best researchers together, and here are some of the interesting tidbits:

“Consumers who delete cookies from their computers can skew advertising data,” said Gian Fulgoni, Chairman, comScore, Inc. “If a cookie has been deleted you think you are reaching a new machine when you are really just delivering additional exposure. This results in an overstatement of up to 2.5 times in unique visitors and an understatement of frequency.”

—-
“Even with no clicks or minimal clicks, online display ads can generate substantial lift in site visitation, trademark search queries and lift in both online and offline sales. The only reason we have the focus on clicks is that they can be measured. The Internet measures came out of the minds of technical people, not advertising people,” says Robert Gunther.

——-
Ed Keller, CEO of the The Keller Fay Group, said approximately 20 percent of word of mouth is stimulated by advertising.
“While people talk about online impressions, there are 3.5 billion brand impressions created every day through word of mouth,” said Keller.

——-
When more advertising is aired, audiences recall more ads in both “low clutter” and “high clutter” conditions, said Erica Riebe of Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science.

— Express your opinion, comment below.

Boston officials thought the devices to be a bomb threat and Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick said that “I think we are all relieved that the devices found so far are hoax devices”. The devise were actually magnetic lights that have been part of a campaign across 10 cities, including Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Seattle, Portland, Oregon, Austin, Texas, San Francisco, and Philadelphia.

Time Warner’s Turner Broadcasting made an official statement about the incident stating, “They are part of an outdoor marketing campaign in 10 cities. They have been in place for two to three weeks… We regret that they were mistakenly thought to pose any danger.” Despite the apology, Boston mayor, Thomas Menino states that the incident is serious and could face serious punishment, even jail time. Others like Emily LaGrassa, a spokeswoman for Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley state that “at this time, our office is involved with an investigation with other federal and state authorities to determine if any criminal charges should be filed and, if so, against whom.”

Subway services were temporarily interrupted along with the closing of three main bridges connecting Cambridge, Mass., to Boston, Storrow Drive, I-93 and the Massachusetts Turnpike. Charles River had also been blocked for precautionary measures.

Today, Peter Berdovsky and Sean Stevens, the pair behind the publicity stunt, were released on $2,500 cash bond after each pleaded not guilty to placing a hoax device and disorderly conduct for a device found yesterday. They waved and smiled as they greeted people in court, according to MSNBC.

Few advocates give concrete reasons to practice ethical marketing beyond the fact that “it’s the right thing to do.” While treating your customers and prospective customers with respect certainly is the right thing to do, I’d like to add another compelling argument in favor of ethical marketing: it works.

You’ll get the higher quality, more sustainable results from word-of-mouth marketing initiatives when you follow ethical marketing guidelines. Using less-than-savory practices may yield a temporary “pop” in performance or awareness, but soon enough the sun shines through and you’ve burned those folks that are the lifeblood of your brand — people who recommend your products, services or content to others. This isn’t a question of good karma — it’s a consequence of the way the word-of-mouth channel works.

Ethical marketing

So what exactly is “ethical marketing” in word-of-mouth? What are the rules? How do they apply to customer evangelism, employee bloggers, tell-a-friend forms, and the 40 or more other types of marketing practices that fall under the umbrella of word-of-mouth marketing?

At its core, ethical marketing comes down to two things: be honest about the product or service and be honest about your stake in it.

The first half is simple enough: just apply the same FTC rules that you follow in your other marketing efforts. Don’t lie about your product. And avoid the temptation to use tactics that are technically legal, but misleading. Word-of-mouth lives or dies on whether consumers feel good or bad about you and your product, not whether they have legal recourse if they feel maligned.

More of the scandals in word-of-mouth marketing are related to honesty about your stake as a marketer in the product or service. Marketers who would never consider misrepresenting a product’s features or price in a print ad suddenly think it’s a good idea to pose as “independent” bloggers — and are invariably exposed and embarrassed.

Being honest about involvement with a brand or product actually increases your effectiveness as an advocate. Dr. Walter Carl, a leading researcher in word-of-mouth marketing, found that disclosure increased pass-along rates by as much as 70%* — a data point supported by our experience here at PopularMedia, Inc. Failing to disclose your involvement, however, can lead to massive consumer backlash — directly impacting your bottom line.

Why ethics matter more in word-of-mouth

In traditional marketing, you make your appeals directly to individual consumers through advertising, direct mail, or other channels. In this context, conversations between consumers have a comparatively small effect. As a result, if an individual consumer has a negative experience, it primarily impacts only that individual’s potential lifetime value — small stakes in a large market. Unfortunately, this can lead to a “take the money and run” attitude under which consumers are treated as disposable.

Word-of-mouth marketing is different. Marketing messages are spread through established peer-to-peer networks. Violate consumer trust at any point, and you could lose your chance to reach and convert an entire branch of any given network: not just one person, but dozens, hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands — even millions of people. This effect is immediate and enduring, meaning the decisions you make today will measurably impact your performance now and for a long time into the future.

How word-of-mouth spreads

The most important thing to remember is that word-of-mouth doesn’t spread randomly from person to person. If it did, you could bypass unhappy consumers and still reach their friends through other mutual acquaintances. After all, there is extensive overlap in social networks ¬— it seems like there should be as many different ways to get a message from person A to person B as the two people have friends in common.

By that metric, viral performance appears to be proportional to the number of “agents” you have, as long as each talks to as many people as possible with the hope that those people will pass the message along — and buy your product — at a given rate.

However, striking patterns emerge when you start to measure pass-along, conversion, and other key metrics — what we refer to internally and with our customers as viral performance indicators (VPIs) — for the “receivers” as well as the “senders” of your messages.

A graph of word-of-mouth conversations will resemble a complex web. Each person is represented as a point or “node”, connected to a number of other points by conversations or shared messages about your brand or product. But when you highlight only the successful conversations — the small percent that actually drive action and pass-along — your graph suddenly looks less like a web and more like a branching tree, with bursts of action connected by a small number of key individuals.

The company wants to enhance the Meredith Publishing Group (MPG) B2B division with services that help companies communicate with their customers. Genex and New Media Strategies both have been around since the late 90s, and handle major name-brand clients like Honda, Citigroup, ABC, Coke and Unilever.

Meredith itself handles accounts for companies like DaimlerChrysler and DIRECTV.

“Adding Genex and New Media Strategies to our group further deepens our ability to help our clients build their brands with a wide variety of creative and effective marketing solutions,” said MPG president Jack Griffin in a statement. “These capabilities now include interactive strategies, innovative website development, word-of-mouth and Web 2.0 marketing programs, online media, and experiential events.”

Last year, Meredith bought interactive firm O’Grady Meyers to bolster its interactive marketing abilities in consumer packaged goods industry. “This deal sends a strong and clear signal that word-of-mouth is no longer niche,” added New Media Strategies CEO Pete Snyder.

We make heavy use of social psychology at PopularMedia, so we thought we’d compile a greatly oversimplified list of techniques you might consider using to boost performance on your next viral campaign. We’ll focus more on web-based viral programs in this piece, but many of these techniques can enhance your offline word-of-mouth campaigns.

WHEN TO ASK

Cognitive Load Management
Don’t ask people to do multiple things at once. If you ask for a referral when someone’s in the middle of placing an order, you risk losing the referral and the order. Ask your customers or prospects to share something with their friends in a timely, relevant way. Do it when people are ready to think about telling their friends about you. We’ve found that the most opportune way to engage users in a referral initiative is by prompting for referrals after they have successfully completed a task, before they switch to a new one.

Automaticity
Auto-ma-what? Every day, you perform tasks without really thinking about them — this capacity is known as “automaticity” and it gives us the ability to multitask. It also means that the more familiar a new task feels, the easier it is for us to perform it, and the more likely we are to complete it.

In all process-driven user experiences, engineers and designers should strive to maximize automaticity. Don’t make people wonder what’s coming next: just give them enough context to clue them into where the process is going and where they are, and they’ll follow your lead. If people have to make choices, make them as simple as possible. When you invite your users to share your product, service or offer with friends, doing so should be the easiest and most automatic thing to do.

Reciprocity
You catch more bees with honey, as the saying goes (why you would want to catch bees is an unrelated but fascinating topic). Delight your customers and they’ll be more willing to do you a favor. Like it or not, gifts create a social obligation to do something nice back, so consider working this technique into a viral program. Give your customers something special they can share with their friends — and their friends can share with their friends — and you’ll create plenty of good will. Give your customers the ability to create an unexpected “thinking of you” moment, a link to amusing content, or an invitation to a special insider’s network.

Rationalization
We’re not as rational as we like to think. In most cases we act first, then come up with a plausible reason for our behavior. If we run into conflict between what we believe and how we act, we’ll generally modify our beliefs to create an exception that maintains this rational self-image.

A great time to ask for referrals, then, is immediately post-transaction. If I like your product enough to spend money on it, I’ll reason that I must like it enough to tell my friends about it. If I’m unwilling to show it to my friends, then I’ll start feeling like I’ve just wasted my money — and I don’t want to feel that way. Telling my friends about my great purchase reassures me that it was a good decision.

Buzz is the elusive goal of any marketing program. More recently the notion of ‘viral’ marketing is bandied about. These are related ideas and are a valid goal for any well thought out marketing plan. However, as I’ll discuss below, many clients and agencies are missing the point — mistaking the means for the ends. The means are a well thought-out marketing program that might include a viral component. The end is the ever-elusive and often ill-defined buzz.

Unfortunately, many agencies take the easy way out. In the rush to come up with something ‘edgy,’ they offer their clients stunt marketing programs guised as viral campaigns.

How do you know the difference? Ask yourself does the campaign have anything at all to do with what your company actually does? In his blog, The Head Lemur described what he calls the ‘Clown Suit Rule.’ If there’s a guy in a clown suit in front of a store, it usually means the store is about to close down. The exception of course is if the store is a clown suit store, but you get the idea.

He was referring to the zero percent and at-cost financing the auto industry was offering last year, but he could have been talking about any attempt to capture attention the quick and easy way without a well-thought-out plan.

Of course, there are stunts, and then there are stunts. There are plenty of examples of agencies wasting piles of their client’s money on ill-considered adventures — sending interns to stand at the window at the Today Show carrying a sign with the client’s logo or baking the world’s largest cake and taking it on tour to a shopping mall near you. But there are also perfectly good examples of agencies and clients doing something eye-catching and clever that gets to the heart of the client’s business and creates a bond with their customers. This is where we get into the world of viral marketing.

Examples of this range from the “Sent from my Blackberry” or “Get Hotmail” messages appended to emails to the complementary snacks, headphones and satellite television on jetBlue flights. These are subtle, barely noticeable but over time you find you want to get your own Blackberry or you realize that other airlines just don’t stack up to the level of service you’ve come to expect.

Good viral campaigns make you stop and look. They sneak up on you. You have an ‘aha’ moment of realization. Stunts make you look, but you quickly forget. Viral campaigns make you wonder who’s behind them. Stunts often have nothing at all to do with the company paying for them.

Smart viral campaigns take advantage of the intimate connection between a brand and the community. It gets ordinary people blabbering like fanboys about their new Mac or their flight on jetBlue. That’s buzz. Buzz is not a marketing program. You can’t buy it or have your agency create it for you. You have to earn it.

Now with all of this, you might wonder where to start. A good beginning is Alex Wipperfurth’s excellent book, “Brand Hijack: Marketing without Marketing”. Wipperfurth shows how marketing can truly engage with customers, instead of shout at them. He gives some real world examples of brands building long term buzz as opposed to short term hype. The book is a must read for any smart marketer.

Remember the clown suit I mentioned at the beginning of this article? While driving in Cape Cod last month we passed a lobster shack with a guy in a giant lobster suit standing in front, waving at the cars as they passed by on Route 6A. Now lobster is lobster. There’s no difference from one Cape Cod lobster to shack to another but our kids are still talking about the giant lobster they saw on their vacation. Want to bet we go back next year?

Snakes got a lot of play in the blogosphere in regards to its name and the fact that it starred Samuel L. Jackson. Folks online loved the title, which pretty much sums up the movie, and the studio saw fit to incorporate a lot of ideas from fans, including movies, fans, and the line of dialogue ” motherf—— snakes on a motherf—— plane.” But while I still think that the kind of viral PR Snakes got before its release produces a lot of bang for the buck, the uninspiring box office results showed that there may have been too much of a reliance on online hype.

In an interview with Reuters, Brandon Gray of BoxOfficeMojo.com attributed Snakes on a Plane’s poor box office sales to the title. He said it was too straightforward and gave away too much about the movie. Catharine P. Taylor of AdFreak added that it may have been simply because people get creeped out by snakes. I think there are two main reasong, both more related to the limited reach of this kind of online marketing and the studio’s over-reliance on it than on any problem inherent in the film (which was full of cheese, BTW).

The Clustered Blogosphere
One problem with the kind of viral promotion that Snakes got was that hype for the movie only reached people who are in a small corner of the blogosphere. The blogosphere is not one great democratic community that some people seem to think it is. I’ve noticed that bloggers tend to congregate in groups around different interests. Before the movie was released, a blogger plugged in to a group that’s throwing out a lot of links and such about Snakes on a Plane would have gotten an earful about how great the movie would be, and how cool it would be to hear Samuel L. drop the f-bomb.

A New Line marketing person who went online to see what people on the Internet are saying about the movie would probably have done a Google search for “Snakes on a Plane” and gotten a whole list of blogs and websites that all link to each other, showing a healthy and growing online conversation. Or that marketing person might have been a part of a movie community where people were already talking about Snakes on a Plane. Either way, the mistaken impression would be that the movie is getting a lot of publicity from a lot of different people. In reality, the movie was only getting a lot of publicity among a lot of the same people. All the hype stayed within the same sphere.

The Coasts vs. the Midwest
I also wouldn’t be surprised to find that most of the people who bought a ticket for Snakes on a Plane on opening weekend were located in urban areas on the East or West coasts (NY/LA). People living in the non-urban regions in the middle United States have a distinctly different culture when it comes to the Internet than those who live in urban areas like New York or LA. (They are also not targeted nearly as much by advertisers and marketers.) Life is slower and more easygoing in the greater U.S. than in the cities.

Most of the people I know in the Midwest treat the Internet as a tool to gather information and buy things, rather than as an integrated component of their lives. They’re also generally not as savvy about all the new tech buzz words and technologies like blogging, podcasting, social networks and the nebulous “Web 2.0″. The cities have a lot of people in them, but not nearly as much as the rest of the U.S. combined. Folks I know in the Midwest never even heard of Snakes on a Plane until opening weekend. By then of course, they’ve missed all the hype, and Snakes becomes just another one of those mediocre Hollywood movies.

Movies are a mass-market commodity, which means that any promotion for them has to reach the target cheesy R-rated horror/disaster flick demographic (18-34 year old males) across the whole market spectrum. When you miss a large chunk, like those who don’t roll in certain blogging spheres, or those who don’t live in urban areas, it shouldn’t be a big surprise that the large amount of hype we all saw on the surface for Snakes had little effect on the actual box office numbers.