More about “Participatory Marketing” and YouTube: Leveraging Reputation and Authenticity Through Social Network

...People articulate their identity by creating self-presentations, which include endorsements of various objects of material and symbolic culture—favorite music, TV shows, fashion items, video games, beverages, etc. YouTube and other online social networks are very successful in scaling up self-presentations and mobilizing forms of "joint attention", enabling their users to pay attention to each other and learn what other people like or dislike, and discover with whom they are most "alike". These features provide a ground for creating novel advertising strategies that could leverage the “wealth of the network” and capitalize on lateral conversations between users and on users' reputations...

One of the main challenges for advertisers is to create a sense of authenticity, which affirms the content of the ad as genuine and validates the voice of the advertiser as credible. In any kind of rhetorical discourse, not just in advertisements, people attempt to authenticate both their message and themselves as the source of the message. People authenticate their messages by providing relevant information and using various rhetorical tools to construct persuasive arguments. Their credibility, however, also depends on their existing reputation with their audience, as well as their ability to do impression management while engaging their audience. Advertisers have a serious problem in validating their credibility, due to their status as a paid agent, rather than an authentic speaker.

New media have created a new participatory culture and changed the ways people create and share knowledge. The traditional “top-down” models of knowledge production and dissemination are being replaced by more distributed models which consist of user generated content that is collectively arbitrated through lateral conversations between users. The following YouTube video illustrates how those emergent "participatory cultures" may affect the issues of authenticity and reputation in the relation between advertisers and consumers:



YouTube and other social media have empowered users who have grown skeptical about the top-down creation and distribution of information. Consumers nowadays seem to require a different relationship with advertisers, a relationship in which they will be a partner in a dialogue rather than a "target" of the advertisement. YouTube has a large and diverse community of users who seem to be very passionate about the things they care about—their political views, favorite TV shows, music, ideas, etc. Participants in YouTube also seem to take pride in performing their expertise and sharing the knowledge they create. They have strong opinions and they can be very creative in expressing them.

Here are two ideas for advertising strategies that attempt to leverage these features of the YouTube community:

1) Dialogue with participants: Repurposing of professionally made ads
In addition to watching sophisticated InVideo ads, YouTubers could engage in a creative dialogue with such ads and re-appropriate them for self-expression. For example, YouTube could enable its users to re-purpose professionally made commercial videos and create remix and mashups. Although some of those user-repurposed ads may turn to be parodies that are critiquing the ad, a critique on YouTube means virality, attention, an enhanced product awareness, and not necessarily negative attitudes toward the product.

2) User’s reputation as a leverage of authenticity
People articulate their identity by creating self-presentations, which include endorsements of various objects of material and symbolic culture—favorite music, TV shows, fashion items, video games, beverages, etc. YouTube and other online social networks are very successful in scaling up self-presentations and mobilizing forms of "joint attention", enabling their users to pay attention to each other and learn what other people like or dislike, and discover with whom they are most "alike". Several online applications have already taken advantage of that feature. For example, a Facebook application ""ProductPulse"" enables its users to rate their favorite brands, movies, bands, or even TV shows in categories like “love it/hate it/want it/need info”. Users can also check out what products their friends are using and get recommendations and original reviews from the whole productpulse userbase... Furthermore, all rated products have links to online stores for "instant gratification" :-)

By creatively appropriating and applying these and similar ideas, YouTube and other online social network sites could create radically novel advertising strategies that would leverage the “wealth of the network” and capitalize on lateral conversations between users.