<nettime> Deirdre Macken: Chain Reaction

["geert lovink" <geert@xs4all.nl>]

[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