Friendly Persuasion
Don't miss Rob Walker's piece, "The Hidden (in Plain Sight) Persuaders," in this week's Times Magazine. It's about volunteer word-of-mouth marketing campaigners who, for the most part, don't see what they're doing as "marketing." They're just recommending things that they like - books, movies, chicken sausage, you name it - to their friends. At the moment, I can't decide whether the promotions engineered by BzzAgent (a freestanding outfit that will let anybody sign up) and Tremor (a division of Procter & Gamble that seeks out "natural" persauders) are benign or insidious, but I couldn't help connecting what Mr Walker's eager beavers were doing to what I'm doing. If nobody's sending me products to push or concert tickets to write up, one of the reasons just might be that nobody has to.
