Gatekeepers Require Scarcity

When Wal-Mart turns to blogs as a serious part of its communications strategy, you know there are changes going on in PR, media, and commerce. BuzzMachine, BubbleGeneration, Richard Edelman and others are taking a look at the PR and media angles. It basically comes down to this:

• With power comes responsibility - bloggers have gained power and not surprisingly some of them are misusing it or at least not yet fully using it responsibly.
• Power is a zero sum game - the power bloggers have gained comes at the expense of journalists and media, some of whom not surprisingly respond by sniping and whining
• Marketing/Journalism/PR 2.0 – have neither arrived nor been defined any better than Web 2.0, and really are just the hope that with some new technology, the lessons of experience, and the optimism that a new start brings, we can do things better next time. (But nobody agrees on what ‘better’ means.)

I find the implications for commerce more interesting. Jarvis discusses the idea that gatekeepers are changing or disappearing in terms of corporate information, celebrity, and politics. But gatekeepers only exist where there is scarcity. Product information and reviews used to be scarce, and companies and the media (magazines usually) were the gatekeepers. Boy are those days gone.

Now ‘unofficial’ product information abounds, in many cases far before the company acknowledges or releases a product. Once a product is available, anyone can write reviews or share opinions, perspective, and analysis. And subject only to the relevance of search results or the coincidence of finding the link, anyone trying to learn about a product will have equal (or sometimes superior) access all of this information. Clearly the marketer is no longer in control.

This means that marketers now have to do two things they didn’t have to do before. First, you need to provide complete and high quality ‘official’ information and work hard to distribute it. Picture-price-paragraph isn't going to sell anything to anybody. Secondly, you should assist and enable the ‘unofficial’ providers because there is nothing you can do to edit or stop them. Like it or not, they’re going to have a huge, perhaps decisive, impact on your success.

Wal-Mart clearly recognized this and so they hired a high-end PR firm to impact the process for them. Regardless of the intentions or ethics of either side of the equation, if these people don’t think they can shout-down or ad-drown out the masses, you better believe that you don’t have any chance either. And that is true whether you’re trying to hire lots of people without providing health care, or sell high-tops to kids that skateboard.