geert lovink on Mon, 23 Apr 2001 19:18:20 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> Deirdre Macken: Chain Reaction |
[Below you can find an attempt by the Australian journalist Deirdre Macken to reconstruct the way in which the "sweatshop" Nike e-mail story, written by Jonah Peretti (see below), has been spreading itself like a chain letter. The case turned into a classic case how "viral anti-marketening" can backfire on business. The Peretti e-mail showed up on nettime at February 16, 2001 and I have received this chain e-mail at least five times (so far). Macken's article is posted on nettime with the permission of the author and appeared in the weekend edition of the Australian Financial Review, 21-22 April 2001. /geert] From: dmacken@access.mail.fairfax.com.au Chain Reaction - From Nike with Love E-mail's grassroots power is being harnessed by consumers and mass marketers alike. By Deirdre Macken By the time I received the 'Nike Personalised Shoe' email, it had been three months since Jonah Peretti emailed his correspondence with Nike to a dozen friends, setting off a chain reaction that would reach millions of 'friends' across every continent and create a template for the marketer's nightmare of the 21st century. Peretti's correspondence with Nike about his request for the company to 'personalise' his shoes with the word 'Sweatshop' had become a mass media story but, even in mid-March, it was still doing the rounds on the micromedia of the less-connected. I had long been intrigued by the list of names trailing the jokes that popped up on my email. Who were these people? I'd scan the 'cc' list and recognise one, maybe two names, but the others were strangers. It was like sharing a joke in a crowded pub. Only some of the people were in Nebraska. Noticing the long tail of 'cc' names on the Nike email, I decided to track back through the email chain, find out where this email came from and discover what sort of people received copies along the way. Six degrees of separation is the expression now used to describe the linking effects of the email medium. Just the same way it is possible to link everyone in Hollywood with Kevin Bacon if you track back through six co-stars; the same way the 1993 movie explored the accidental links between strangers in a city, email is meant to link acquaintances within six postings. The exploration of that Nike email posting didn't get us back to Jonah Peretti but in the space of a few weeks and dozens of postings we crossed the ocean twice, found several chatty friends, freaked out one friend of a friend of a friend and walked a track that mathematics suggested would be trodden by 11.4 million others. Along the way it was possible to appreciate the unique qualities of this new medium - not just a postbox between friends, not just as the sneeze that distributes viral marketing across markets but as an information exchange that takes the village square to the four corners of the world. While email linkages can feel like holding hands across the world, it is not as benign as its clubby conviviality of 'cc's would suggest. It is so easy to track people back to their workplaces - where they work and even what position they hold - that it would seem wise to click the 'bcc' (blind copy) button more often. But loose chatter on the net is most frightening for marketers like Nike. Jonah Peretti's polite exchange with Nike requesting the word Sweatshop to be printed on his personalised shoes and Nike's slippery responses spread through the virtual world because it amusingly exposed the hypocrisy of the Nike ideology. Viral marketing can work in favor of companies (see John West salmon email) but it is most powerful and destructive when the message of the micromedia makes a mockery of the message on the mass media. While tracking back through the snail trail left by my Nike email, a friend onpassed a story in The Financial Times where Doug Miller, of the Toronto-based consultancy, Environics warned, "I visit 75 boardrooms a year and I can tell you the members of the boards are living in fear of getting their corporate reputations blown away in two months on the internet." The Nike personalised email didn't take that long. Recounting his 'Nike Media Adventure' in The Nation this month (April), Jonah Peretti says it was mid January when he emailed his Nike correspondence to a dozen friends. Then, with no further help from him, it raced around the world. "The press has presented my battle with Nike as a David versus Goliath parable," says Peretti, "the real story is the battle between a company like Nike with access to the mass media and a network of citizens on the interest who have only micromedia at their disposal." The first people to receive his email were friends and then "friends of friends who tended to be left-leaning and interested in technology," writes Peretti. "At this point, I received responses from people like a college student in California who posted the emails to her sociology calls discussion list. "As the message spread it began circulating among die-hard activists ... in the coming days the message would race through the anti-Nike, culture-jamming activist community. At this point, I was getting twenty or thirty emails a day. I assumed the circulation had peaked. "Then something interesting happened. The micromedia message began to work its way into the mass media ..." firstly in alternative online media, then bigger media sites like Salon and then Time, USA Today and the Wall St Journal picked it up. Within six weeks of hitting the Send button, Jonah was in New York being interviewed on NBC's Today program and his email had surfaced on the far reaches of my friendship groups - the friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend. "I began receiving 500 messages a day sent from Australia, Asia, Africa and South America.." Jonah writes, adding that he knew his message had reached its final destination when he received - courtesy of that 'cc' button - a message that read in part 'somebody should burn 'sweatshop' into this foolish c**ksucking faggot's forehead with a cigarette.' Jonah Peretti had the extraordinary experience of pressing the button on a message to the world. Tracking that message back from the screen of one of those recipient computers may not be so exciting but, like an archeological dig, it unearths fragments of other lives, other times and other cultures. Plus a few surprises. My email arrived on March 22. It came from a friend - Julia - who lives in the same city and who says she sent the email onto three others. My friend received the email from one of her friends, Adriana, a woman I had met once or twice but possibly wouldn't recognise in the street. A friend of a friend. However, Adriana had received the email on February 28 from a friend in Mexico, Lai. And it was Lai who had inadvertently revealed her mailing list of 20 friends when she onpassed the Nike email that would arrive in my mailbox. In the net's friendship networks, few bother with the 'bcc' button - perhaps they're happy to be seen with their friends. As Lai said in a brief note, it is "interesting having connections on both sides of the globe as i often get emails from here or over there, don't send them on but still receive them from the other end months or a year later." This list, with email addresses in both Australia and America, I plundered for research. Who are you, I asked each of the 20. How do you know the sender? Where do you live? How many did you onpass the email to? Then I waited. Perhaps it's the stagecoach ancestry or the associations with the daily walk to the letter box but most view the arrival of email with a sense of anticipation. Presumptions are made about people who onpass messages or share the 'cc' box - similar friends, like-minded politically, same sense of humour. As Peretti says in his Nation piece in email "the audience is pre-selected for its receptivity to the message". Everyone who received the Nike email was sent it because their friend knew they would be amused/outraged by it - they were mostly critics of Nike, some were supporters but everyone was presumed to have a feeling on the subject. Most often it is a shared sense of humour that occupies the global chatter, sometimes its politics, or goodwill as in the case of the 'Donate Free Food' button but more and more its consumer referencing with users passing on information about products, sites or services. According to American research, 57 per cent of web users say word of mouth ('word of mouse') was their main source of information about new sites and between 5 and 15 per cent of people who receive these messages click through to follow the links. This compares with just 0.5 per cent of web users who click on banner ads. For marketers email mailing lists are self-selected target audiences. They don't have to do the market research, or find a time slot on a radio station when their buyers are likely to be listening. They just have to slip onto the right mailing list. A few months ago John West hitched a ride on the Forward buttons of friendship groups when its 'bear kickboxing fisherman' video clip was accidentally sent off from the UK to circumnavigate the world. John West still claims it was incidental viral marketing - one of their clients must have forwarded the pre-release video, they say - but they followed it up with a mass media showing of the video/commercial. While waiting for responses from the 20-strong friendship group that Lai had onpassed in the Nike email, I was able to track the origins of the email back another step. Lai had received the email from someone called Rami on February 26 - about the same time the story was being picked up by America's main media. Rami - quick as a click - said he sent the email onto 36 friends on his mailing list (one of whom was Lai) and he had received the email from a friend in Australia called Scott. Scott was the sixth degree of separation. And he would be my dead letter office. Scott, Scott, I'm not, as I said in my email, a Nike lawyer! Perhaps that - "I am not a Nike lawyer" - was not the best introduction for my email missives because while I got some very pleasant and friendly replies - including one from a woman who sent the email to both "a mountain-dweller greenie" and a former Nike-sponsored athlete, another who received it from her aunt - I caused fear and loathing when I popped up on other screens. "I did not get any Nike email nor send any email regarding Nike to anybody", replied Mike, who was on Lai's list of 20 friends. Judging by the legal-sounding tone of Mike's reply and his denial of the undeniable, Mike was worried. But why should he be worried just because he received a chain letter? More importantly, should I be worried? Could Nike track us down? Or were we risking the wrath of our employer? As I write, a media report in the daily paper details how a brusque email send by the chief executive of a health software group to 400 employees ended up being posted on Yahoo. The result, when sharemarket analysts read it, was to push the share price down 22 per cent in three days. At least Neal Patterson wasn't as embarrassed as Claire Swire when her email discussion with her boyfriend about what she wanted to do to him later that evening was posted around the world. The Forward button can take email anywhere but email also leaves a trail. Sleuthing through the internet is one of the more recent innovations attached to the viral marketing industry. Search companies, like the US IntelliSeek, can track what is being said about a company and its products and 'identify potentially damaging rumours", says company spokeswomen Kelly Baker. Data mining is generally done in chat rooms and message boards and intranets - the public spaces of the internet - but there's a thin line between online snooping and data mining and the difference is whether they've got your name. Says president of the Market Research Society of Australia, John Sergeant, "anything where a person's identity is used isn't market research, it's spying." But Mike was probably more worried about his employee finding out about his role in subversive marketing - subverts as they're called. Days after his denial, the NSW Government announced it would legislate to enable employers to spy on workers' email - with permission and/or notice. Not even a click on 'bcc' would save Mike's correspondence with the culture jammers of the world if his boss decided to mine in his mailbox. Mike had reason to be concerned. When I placed his server name in Google, I found he was an employee of an Australian magazine publisher. With his company name and number I could ring his company and, with a bit of persistence with his switchboard operators, track him to his desk. Mike, I am not a Nike lawyer but you're lucky that I'm not. It was just as easy to track others. One of Lai's friends had a Santa Cruz email address and it took only minutes to discover it was an address for a school in Santa Cruz. What's more this school offers browsers the email addresses of all their teachers - including one on my list. Now, I was worried. But the medium of email is not just our mailbox to the world, it's a scouting device that enables us to open communication with areas once considered a closed shop and do it in a style unique to the grammar-free language of small screen. While waiting for Scott to complete my sixth degree of separation, I bookmarked an ingenious use of email that cast the micromedia against the mass media. In Brill's Content, the new editor of its All-Star Newspaper site, Will Leitch, wrote about a series of email messages that began the day after he started the job. The first email began "Dear Not-So-Good Gill Leitch, I thought I noticed a sudden dip in the quality..." Every day for the next few weeks, the email stalker sent Leitch critical appraisals of his editing work. "Your article descriptions read like item descriptions from boo.com ... We'll begin today with your over reliance on the colon ... You misspelled government in the Pomfret lead, you melon-headed motherfucker ... for the sake of my now-queasy stomach include fewer of your close-fisted bangings on the keyboard ... Today's was your worst outing yet, please return to whatever parking lot you formerly tended." Correspondence between editors and readers predates the printing press but email opens up a new form of communication - it's easier to send, it gets to the right destination without passing secretaries, it's personal in nature, colloquial in style and a permanent record of correspondence. As it prises open the doors between reader and editor, it breaks down the boundaries between micromedia and mass media - hopefully with wit and good intentions but not always. It is now possible to become an anonymous mailer. With silent phone number and anonymous mailing address, one can go to a random insult generator and spray recipients with a loathsome pile of email. With such graffiti, spamming, unwanted 'subverts', stalkers and tired old jokes cramming the mailboxes of the widely connected, the honeymoon days of email must be coming to an end. Like the phone system, which has become a network of messaging services, private numbers, call-waiting pauses, Hold buttons and call-routing programs, the email system must soon start closing its doors to the world. And a glance at the mathematical possibilities of my Nike email chain would suggest it's time to shut up shop. The four people who I'd been able to track as senders of the Nike email had sent copies of the message to an average of 15 people. Within one posting those 15 people - averaging 15 forwards each - would reach 225 people. Within two postings, those 225 people, sending it off to 15 people each, would reach 3375. If you follow the mathematics through six degrees of separation, 11.4 million people would receive the Nike email by the time the Forward button had been hit six times. And I still couldn't entice a reply from my dead letter office, Scott. Posting off a request one last time, I noticed Scott's email address. His server was the same magazine publisher where Mike - the guy who sounded as if he was typing with a lawyer standing behind him - worked. But Mike and Scott hadn't sent the email to each other. It had started with Scott, went to Rami in America, to Lai in Mexico and then to Mike who works in the same company as Scott - maybe right next door to him, maybe the same office. Six degrees of separation in just four moves! ---- Below is the e-mail correspondence with custom service representatives at Nike iD, an online service that supplies personalized Nike shoes. The dialogue began when Nike cancelled an order for a pair of shoes customized with the word "sweatshop" (get the latest on this story at www.shey.net). From: "Personalize, NIKE iD" <nikeid_personalize@nike.com> To: "'Jonah H. Peretti'" <peretti@media.mit.edu> Subject: RE: Your NIKE iD order o16468000 [[see <http://www.nettime.org/nettime.w3archive/200102/msg00207.html> --mod]] # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net