How - Dov Seidman [74]
But along came such web sites as aintitcool.com (or Ain’t It Cool News), accompanied by blogs and boards catering to those who loved to talk about movies. Members of a test audience in New Jersey who saw a sneak preview of a film still in production could go online and share what they had seen. Even films that had just opened could suddenly become widely discussed. Marketers lost control of the message. “Instant communications technology has completely changed the role of word of mouth,” Nancy Utley, COO of Fox Searchlight Pictures, told the Los Angeles Times recently.18 “Word of mouth used to be confined to cities. Now, thanks to e-mail and text messaging, it crosses continents. It’s revolutionized what word of mouth means.” A recent Los Angeles Times poll backs up this notion, revealing that nearly 40 percent of teens and young adults (the largest percentage of the movie-going audience and the most wired generation) share their opinions during viewing, right afterward, or on the same day they see a film. Instant communication can build an almost immediate national consensus about a film, creating an instant hit or dooming it to a quick DVD release almost before opening weekend is over. In other words, you no longer define yourself in the market; the market defines you.
This trend is pervading other areas of society as well. Yelp, a web site that touts “Real People. Real Reviews,” is building a community of nonprofessional reviewers who log on and share their immediate impressions of everything from hot dog stands to five-star restaurants to corner hardware stores. When it launched in San Francisco in late 2004, it had an almost instant impact. Unlike the anonymous reviewers of the Zagat and Michelin guides, Yelpers post detailed profiles of themselves and bond around common interests. This transparency builds almost immediate trust, and a “good Yelp” can get cash registers ringing almost overnight. “No longer is each customer transaction a one-off interaction,” media analyst Ken Doctor of Outsell Inc. told the Los Angeles Times.19 “Any customer who has a great or horrible experience now has, as soon as they walk out the door, a megaphone to tell the world they had a great or horrible experience, fairly or unfairly.” Rather than being passive beneficiaries or victims of this new trend, smart businesses there are taking advantage of the feedback to instantly improve their products. “It’s changed the way I run my business because I get feedback right away,” said chef-owner Ola Fendert of restaurant Oola. “You used to find out too late, when your business was slowing down. Now it’s almost instant: Something happened, you see it on Yelp the next day, and you can fix it.” (Interestingly, as an even greater sign that we are reaching a critical mass of these trends, both of these Los Angeles Times reports—on movies and Yelp—appeared in the same day’s paper, August 25, 2006, in completely different sections edited by different people.)
The easy explanation for the trend toward the increasing effectiveness of word of mouth would be to assume that people are just overwhelmed and cynical about corporate messages and Big Media. After all, why should someone believe Joe from Berkeley over a reviewer from the San Francisco Chronicle or their own experience of a movie trailer? But if you dig deeper, the reason is far more profound. Proxies succeed in their function as messengers only when those receiving them endow them with trust and have no other sources of information with which to compare them. In a world where everyone is connected and has ready access to a flood of information, people can look past the proxies