IABC Media Relations Commons

Harry Potter is an extended tale of no, not just wizards and magic but the wisdom of the crowds in action. But that story got buried in the hoopla around the launch of Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows last Saturday.

Very predictably, the traditional news media covered the event in the same way they did, say, the iPhone. Too much attention to people queuing up for the book, the parties, the ‘education’ component, but very little about the phenomenon itself.

The fact is, the Harry Potter franchise just doesn’t belong to J.K. Rowling anymore. The books may be in 200 countries and 63 languages, but the Potter brand goes beyond that geographic reach. It’s been open-sourced in more ways than you could imagine; the wisdom of the Potter crowds has always ruled when it comes to creating their own message channels, cranking out their own Potter-esqe stories etc. Despite the fact that this is a book, and not a digital product, the fans are all over the social media map. There is:
* The Mugglecast podcast run by high school students, that has some 50,000 listeners a week, and features Elton John and Bono.
* The Leaky Cauldron leaks news about the books and carries a disclosure that it is in “no way affiliated with J.K. Rowling.”
* No shortage of Potter blogs, including one that suggests a Bollywood storyline for an Indian audience.
* The Harry Potter Fiction store, that’s not managed by Scholastic, the book publisher; it’s also “unofficial.”
* The Academy of Virtual Wizardry, at “Caledon Highlands” in you guessed it, Second Life!

I could go on…

So I wanted to track how the raving fans were behaving. I had a haunch that there would be an equal outpouring of passion on Saturday the 20th July around midnight not in front of the bookstores where the TV crews were waiting in hoardes, but on Wikipedia. At 11.00 pm Pacific Time the discussion (on the “comments” page of the Harry Potter Wikipedia showed signs that things were heating up. The Wikipedians had been discussing the value of locking down the Wiki, since everyone knew the book had leaked and the plot was being discussed elsewhere.

“Just wait until the official release time. Then we can put everything up in 5 minutes or so, considering the number of wikipedians interested in this.” said one editor at 11.03 pm. This was clearly a hard core editor, but also a big Potter fan. “Most people, me included, will be too busy reading the book on Saturday to check the article.” Others like him (or her) were unhappy that some editors had moved to freeze the pages until a week after the launch. Fan passion was expressed in the form of outrage that some newspapers’ reviewers had created spoilers by discussing the plot before the launch. Reading through their discussion gives you a glimpse of not just how these unpaid wikipedians work, but how fans operate late at night, doing a thankless job for what? To them this isn’t JK’s book. This is theirs.

If only other brands let their customers work their magic this way!

For those of us involved in marketing and/or corporate communications, trying to make sure the organization is not misrepresented in the media, it’s not enough to pay attention to press releases, media kits, and getting the ‘brand police’ department to flex some muscle.

Some people’s and many organizations’ image are not managed by appointed brand guardians, designers, or copywriters, but by unpaid workers at Wikipedia. Say what you like about the ‘bias’ of Wikipedia, but there are people out there, the hoi polloi, who have absolutely nothing to gain by the work they do into the wee hours of the morning but they do it anyway.

If you’ve only gone to Wikipedia to find out “things you would have known had you paid more attention in high school” ( to borrow a phrase from the NPR quiz “Wait, wait, don’t tell me” ) I invite you to take a peek behind the curtain to see a fascinating work in progress.

A few days back, as the news broke of BBC correspondent Alan Johnston’s release, I clicked on the discussion tab of Wikipedia, as editors hurriedly updated information about him. (The Discussion page is a place where those who edit content talk to each other about the accuracy of facts, and importance of detail.) I bet none of these Wikipedians are connected to the BBC or to Johnston, but they were debating whether this page should be about his life, or his kidnapping, whether he was even ‘notable’ enough to merit so a page on him.

Similar discussions go on about the much-used term “Web 2.0” where editors meticulously remove ‘retarded’ pictures someone keeps adding, and police and other types of mild vandalism.

Now to corporate marketing: Go over to to the entry on Sun Microsystems, and you’ll see an interesting debate has taken place. On the 27th February, one editor scolded:

What’s interesting, is that the editor says he’s not a hardcore Wikipedian, but asks someone to please step in and make the change. Someone has. The entry is now very balanced. As the editor says, allowing the simple use of the word THE, is

“akin to Bill Gates’ claiming that Windows Vista is the most secure operating system ever produced - pure hype, and demonstrably false.“

It’s the hoi polloi at work, folks. You may fire off the most creative press release one evening, or launch a campaign that’s getting rave reviews, but do you appreciate what someone with a screen name like NapoliRoma is saying about you on Wikipedia late at night?

We oughta get used to it, and rethink what our business cards say we are responsible for!

The Dow branding case study presented at IABC’s international conference in New Orleans had a lot of oohs! and ahs! and a few buts…

This Human Element campaign launched last June, was one of the most memorable branding campaigns in recent times. At least for me. So I had a lot of questions about the strategy behind it, and of course the execution. Was there more to it than the stunning video, and the faces attached to a periodic table?

The copy is powerful in a straightforward way. It’s about “Sodium bonding with chlorine, carbon bonding with oxygen…” The close ups of faces, the texture of waves, the energy of a waterfall. It’s what one might call the thoughtful bonding of words, images and ideas absent in corporate branding exercises.

As the presenter noted, proudly, not once was the Dow name spoken. Only a fleeting glimpse of the red diamond logo at the end. It takes a lot of courage not to force you ad agency to tweak things like that. (Remember that old line: “when a client moans and sighs, make his logo twice the size?”) I watched the video again on YouTube, and couldn’t help but notice the word ‘element’ (or ‘elemental’) occurs eight times, with the big picture painted in sweeping strokes, with hints of biology and lots of chemistry.

But branding is much more than stunning images and good copy. It’s a positioning statement that has to leap across every ’synapse’ (to borrow one a powerful reference from the ad) and connect with the other non linear communication channels. Sometimes these channels are ordinary non-marketing people in the organization. how could they carry that branding story forward, long after the agency has submitted its invoices?

We were told that Dow launched the campaign internally, bathing its building with those giant images of people, revamping its web site to reflect the campaign, providing employees with the background to the Human Element concept and philosophy. they were even encouraged them to set up their own periodic table with pictures of people they work with. Nice touch there.

It struck me as a campaign that could eventually run without mainstream media support: Employees creating their own human element posters, and uploading them to Flickr. Telling their own Human Element stories in podcasts, Voting for each others’ contributions on YouTube, or sayeyeVio in Japan. I bet those emlpoyee generated stories spread virally would be as powerful and sincere as anything its agency FCB could come up with. Wouldn’t that be the the proof of branding via the human element?

In summary: Don’t get me wrong. It is a terrific case study. But a global company telling a global story to a global audience just can’t afford to not engage it’s own people.

This was funny: The presenter asked us what came to our minds first when we watched the commercial. One person raised her hand and said, “It made me wonder what Dow had done wrong, and was trying to cover up.” Another said he was trying to calculate the cost of each of those marvelous segments of video!

On a related note: Paul Argenti, management guru and author who gave the keynote at the the IABC Foundation lunch, opened his remarks with a blistering analysis of why strategic communications is needed so badly. People are extremely cynical of communications, because of business communication failures from the likes of BP, KPMG, Tyco, Enron etc. “Transparency is a strategy and a condition,” he noted.

Translated: skip the tag lines, and bring back that human element!