Rewards cause word of mouth to backfire

Shannon Stairhime is in Europe today, so we've asked Lois Kelly of Beeline Labs to serve as guest editor of the day. Lois Kelly also blogs at Bloghound.

Rewarding people to participate in online communities or act as word of mouth advocates actually backfires, according to Robert V. Kozinets, associate professor of marketing at York University's Schulich School of Business in Toronto. "My interpretation is that these forms of community and word-of-mouth will, over time, inspire dissatisfaction with the community experience and the brand. But it won't be particularly visible. More intrinsic than extrinsic, particularly in the short-run."

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wowowow advice on crisis communications

How to respond when your reputation is under attack? Writing in the fabulous new online community wowowow, Leslie Stahl offers this advice: "The best way to respond when your reputation has been sullied is to get real LOUD. Go on offense with a noisy, unrelenting, niggling, persistent, bellicose warrior's attack. If you're swinging and kicking, that's what people will see (and the press will cover). And the besmirching of you will fade like an old scar."

wowowow, now in beta, and featuring conversations among cool women celebrity professionals like Candice Bergen, Whoopi Goldberg, Joan Juliet Buck, Peggy Noon, Joni Evans and Lesley Stahl.

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Rude is rude, enough is enough

Some of the biggest buzz this week was around the audience heckling during Mark Zuckerman's keynote at SXSW in Austin. A big round of applause to Michael Rubin for his post about the event over at Marketing Profs, "Enough is enough. It's time that we as a community -- especially the A-listers who get quoted everywhere as so-called "experts" -- stand up and call it like it actually was: rude and unacceptable." Go Michael.

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