Online Buzz Tough to Manage and Measure

During the late '90s Dot Com boom, David Holtzman ran the most critical network in the world - the domain name system. As Chief Technology Officer for Network Solutions (acquired by VeriSign for $21-billion in '00) and the manager of the Internet's master root server, or the "dot," Holtzman oversaw the growth of the commercial Internet from 500,000 to more than 20,000,000 domain names. Post Network Solutions, Holtzman has been an important critic of how Corporate America is handling the numerous business implications of the increasingly networked world.

In this brief Q&A, Holtzman shared some thoughts about how well U.S. businesses are typically managing online buzz.

Q: To what extent has the Internet changed the control that the typical large corporation has over its reputation in the public domain?
Holtzman: The Internet has made it all too easy for any determined group of individuals to communicate with special interest groups. Small companies and savvy individuals have used this capability to their advantage by "virally" getting their message out quicker and cheaper than they could have done using conventional promotional media. Large corporations, by and large, have been less effective in controlling the buzz, because they tend to approach PR on the Internet wrong. They usually believe that precise message delivery is simply related to the funds expended on the effort. The Internet, like the real world, does indeed react to money--enough money gets attention. However money alone will not guarantee that the message will be on point. Often large reputational campaigns on the Net have the opposite from the desired effect, subjecting the paying companies to even more ridicule. Viral campaigns cannot be bought--like good television commercials, they must be entertaining. [Holtzmans rule on Buzz - Buzz on the Internet is proportional to the entertainment quality of the content, not the money spent.]

Q: How well is the typical organization able to quantify / measure what's being said about them in the public domain, via the Internet? How could it be done better / more precisely?
Holtzman: Not very much. There is a great deal of work left to be done on quantification of buzz. Seven years ago, I started a company called Opion, which attempted to do just that. A lot of science and statistical research went into the technology and we were unable to find a good market for it before our funding ran out. The lack of a good metric system is a major one and there are many exciting market opportunities for new companies that can displace the Nielsens of the old world that are currently claiming that they can accomplish the job of buzz measurement.

Q: There are countless bloggers out there on every conceivable subject matter. Do you think that the majority of blogs are actually influential / being read? What do companies that handle the blogosphere well have to gain? And those who handle poorly -- what do they have to lose?
Holtzman: I do not believe that blogs are influential as one-off websites. The ones that get the most attention quickly become self-serving, self-referential and run by monstrously bloated egos. Blogs are ways to humanize the content and make it more entertaining, thus getting the message out [refer to Holtzman's Buzz rule above]. Buzz saws spin both ways -- bad buzz, meaning non-entertaining, heavy-handed amateur PR can hurt a company's reputation and take years to undo the damage.

Q: What do you think about the typical corporate blog? How well / poorly are companies leveraging their own outbound messaging on the Internet? What could they be doing better?
Holtzman: Blogs run by companies suck. They are not, as a rule, written by key staff. They are often ghosted by professional 3rd party writers or internal corporate PR flaks who cannot express the emotional range of the product or the company, thereby creating non-compelling, non-entertaining content (Holtzman's Rule). We as overloaded and jaded consumers want to read Steve Jobs telling us why he doesn't like DRMs or Bill Gates talking about tabletop Windows. We even like the head of a development team explaining what it's like to build software. We could care less what the PR person thinks. The same situation applies to DVD commentary audio tracks.

Q: Where do you see the future of consumer Internet participation heading? Are there any new frontiers that you see in the ways that consumers use the Internet to report / police the companies that they do business with?
Holtzman: I am excited by the empowerment of consumers using modern networked information technology (Ie, the Internet.) We are moving towards a demand-based consumer model, where groups of buyers and customers of a product can band together to drive the actions of a retail company; not by being investors, but by being customers. Imagine a website with say, 10,000 consumers, all of whom were avid bicyclists. If they were able to organize well enough, they could vote for a boycott of a manufacturer's product. A protest like that, engineered by the mavens of a particular marketplace, would have a ripple effect far beyond the 10,000 consumers. Expect to see consumers becoming the new Unions.

More Holtzman-related reading: 1- The recent "Privacy Lost" book examines the vulnerability of individual privacy in the "Age of the Network"
2- Holtzman's blog offers sharp commentary on the convergence of technology and society
3- In a recent contributed article for BusinessWeek Holtzman takes a closer look at Big Brother implications of Google Maps and iTunes services.