Global PR Blog Week 2.0

By Robb Hecht, IMC Strategies | PR Machine
EDITORS’ CHOICE

Background of Stephen J. Dubner & Steven Levitt

Co-authors of “Freakonomics” (2005 William Morrow), Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner set out to explore the hidden side of everything in their current best-selling book. But an area PR Machine wanted to cover and dig deeper with the authors was the blogosphere. Of the two, the author we caught up with was Stephen Dubner.

Stephen J. Dubner (http://www.stephenjdubner.com/bio.html) has been a writer for New York Magazine, The New Yorker, Time, The Washington Post, The Times Magazine, author of both “Turbulent Souls: A Catholic Son’s Return to His Jewish Family,” “Confessions of a Hero-Worshiper” (January 2003, William Morrow/HarperCollins) and finally of “Freakonomics.”

Dubner’s other writer and idea-maker is Steven D. Levitt, self-titled “rogue economist” and “not-a-pop social scientist,” Levitt is a teacher of economics at the University of Chicago. He recently received the John Bates Clark Medal, awarded every two years to the best American economist under forty.

PR Machine On “Freakonomics”

Back on May 14th of this year PR Machine said this:

“Just like stale marketing and public relations campaigns can be revamped to draw more customer and client interest (via such things as registered web site users, purchases and brand interest), Dubner and Levitt have suddenly ’spiced up’ the entire category of economics simply by releasing a publication which ‘asks the right questions and draws connections’ in a tongue everyone can understand. Imagine what could be done to the steel or plumbing industries with a release like this? We predict ‘Freakonomics’ will be a big seller. And, putting Levitt and Dubner’s insights to use, we predict that college economics courses will see an increase in enrollment next Fall (due to the popularity of this book and its new ‘approach to thinking’).”

PR MACHINE: Thank you for taking the time to speak with PR Machine today. We’re happy to have your feedback during Global PR Blog Week 2.0. Your book has done so well being applied to everyday American matters, so we’re pleased, given the audience of Global PR Blog Week 2.0, you’ve taken the time to apply some of your teachings to the Internet and specifically, to the Blogosphere and marketing.

Freakonomics Legitimizes Blog Marketing

PR MACHINE: During the release of your current #1 Wall Street Journal business best seller “Freakonomics” (this Spring’s “It” book, according to The New York Times) you included blogs in your marketing efforts. You actively engaged the blogosphere as part of your marketing strategy by seeding advance copies of your books to influential bloggers. How did you go about identifying the bloggers to receive your book gallies?

DUBNER: I used Technorati to see who had written about Levitt’s work or the previous articles in the New York Times that I’d written with or about Levitt. We also sent out galleys to good and/or prominent economics blogs, like Marginal Revolution and Brad DeLong’s blog.

PR MACHINE: According to Fortune, your marketing people passed “Freakonomics” to 100 bloggers. Fortune also reported that your publisher (Harper Collins) hired a company called BzzAgent to run a guerilla marketing campaign for 12 weeks. Did you think online viral marketing would work quite so well?

DUBNER: Harper Collins had their online marketing manager forward our book gallies to the prominent bloggers I identified. She did a great job of contacting them to get their feedback on the book.

PR MACHINE: What do you think about blogs being used as a marketing channel, therefore? Do you think there is a future for them in a marketing capacity?

DUBNER: Many people have claimed that our idea to use the blogosphere was “revolutionary,” but we felt soon enough that it was so obvious that we should seed our book galleys to influential bloggers. It was so obvious, we don’t feel like revolutionaries having used blogs to market at all.

PR MACHINE: You, in fact, have a highly trafficked weblog for “Freakonomics.” This was an innovative move. The book has generated tons of coverage with traditional media and in the blogosphere. Product seeding - when it’s a good fit between the product and the blogger - appears, then, to be a PR strategy that can build word of mouth. What is the traffic of your Freakonomics Blog exactly?

DUBNER: Our Freakonomics blog, gets between 10,000 to 20,000 visitors per day.

PR MACHINE: Wow, that’s a lot of online traffic for people who didn’t want to blog in the first place.

DUBNER: Well, blogging, at least for us, wasn’t initially essential. It’s a lot of work managing a blog, to constantly keep your readers engaged. But, we found such a large number of people who who mentioned they were reading our blog (during conversations that were entirely unrelated to online marketing and blogging) that it took us entirely by surprise and then we decided to really put some effort into it.

PR MACHINE: So hearing people bring up your Freakonomics blog was the deciding factor in focusing on posting to it more often?

DUBNER: Yes, exactly. I would go to family weddings and relatives would walk up and comment on our California book tour post [on our Freakonomics blog] and other posts and it was then that it to occurred to me that if my relatives are reading blogs, then maybe lots of other people are as well.

PR MACHINE: Running your blog must be exciting given all the media coverage of Freakonomics?

DUBNER: Our readers post questions, challenge and critique our work. We actually learn a lot from it. It’s an excellent response mechanism. With each post, comments are made and emailed to us. It takes some time to try and respond to our readers’ emails. We want to keep them happy.

PR MACHINE: So, you’re not using your Freakonomics Blog merely for promotion, instead you’re using it as an interactive relationship management tool?

DUBNER: Well, we’re not just using the blog to promote our work. Levitt and I look at it as extending the content of our book.

PR MACHINE: You said you get a lot of people posting questions and challenges on your blog to the ideas of your book. Can you tell us more about that?

DUBNER: Yes, people complain on our blog. As such, I’m pretty certain that the blogosphere holds a higher quotient of complainers than the real world does. (I think more people complain on our blog than they do on the Amazon customer feedback pages.)

PR MACHINE: How’s that?

DUBNER: There was no previous public forum to express and vent like there is nowadays with blogging. In the past there were letters to the editor, customer service, and things like Amazon’s feedback sites. But now, people can complain in the open on blogs and almost get a form of publicity from their complaints. I’m sure if you compared the content of audience feedback in the blogosphere utilizing Technorati to reader feedback on Amazon’s site, you’d find more negative critiques in the blogosphere. The blogosphere seems to be a place where people are really speaking their minds to companies, products and services.

PR MACHINE: What do they complain about?

DUBNER: They complain and challenge the arguments of our book. All of which is fine to do; that’s the beauty of blogs.

PR MACHINE: Why the hype around blogs do you think? Are blogs the tail end of the Internet hysteria? A replacement for what was lost during the Internet downturn four years ago?

DUBNER: Blogs being so popular has to do with the advances in technology and the fact that most of them are free to develop. They aren’t one-way communications vehicles. They are about building two-way relationships. They are the perfect form of true interactive communications vs. email or a website.

PR MACHINE: You mentioned in “Freakonomics” about how the Internet has changed the pricing structure of the entire auto industry, so certainly, the Internet is having an effect on modern business. BusinessWeek claimed a few months back, in fact, that “Blogs Will Change Your Business.” Given your book is at the very top of the business book charts, and blogs are on everyone’s minds right now, what is your view of blogs? Hype or a revolutionary medium?

DUBNER: Levitt and I never set out to use the blogosphere in an active way. The blog was an afterthought and it becoming so popular was entirely an accident. We actually initially shared a lack of desire to be bloggers. We didn’t really have blog marketing in mind, but what we did have was the burning desire to constantly communicate with our readers. So, the means of utilizing a blog as a contact point to interact with our readers, made sense.

PR MACHINE: Given your years of writing and being a bureau chief for several top-tier national magazines, you probably have an opinion on how the Internet (now a medium full of publishers and advertisers) perceives blogs. Do you think blogs will continue to be integrated within the construct of mainstream media publishers?

DUBNER: I do believe blogs are changing mainstream media. I also predict, however, that there will be churn in blogs (or a blog burnout). The bloggers that will survive are those that continue to appeal to an audiences’ needs. Lots of people start blogs; they blog about their blog, then they blog about their work. It leads, for the most part, to lost readership if the blog content isn’t all that appealing to the reader.

Issues Reaching “The Blogging Point”

PR MACHINE: In “Freakonomics” you argue that many apparent mysteries of everyday life don’t need to be so mysterious: they could be illuminated and made even more fascinating by asking the right questions and drawing connections. (We at PR Machine might add that many of today’s bloggers ask the right questions and draw connections by checking mainstream media’s reporting).

Given that underlying all your research subjects in your book is a belief that complex phenomena can be understood if we “find the right perspective,” what, do you believe, makes an issue reach the “Blogging Point” - the point at which an issue becomes so important that someone writes about it and pushes [syndicates] it around the Internet by blogging about it?”

DUBNER: People blog about issues that are not addressed well in the media. Bloggers are filling in the cracks. They are illuminating information that was previously overlooked. Bloggers fill in the cracks and are adding value to what can be a puzzle reporters are piecing together. I know many journalists, who although initially critical of blogs, have now come to truly rely on them and endorse them.

Bringing Publicity to Economics

PR MACHINE: Just like stale marketing and public relations campaigns can be revamped to draw more customer and client interest (via such things as registered web site users, purchases and brand interest), you and Levitt have suddenly “spiced up” the entire category of economics simply by releasing a publication which “asks the right questions and draws connections” in a tongue everyone can understand.

But, Economics is not widely considered to be one of the sexier sciences to spice up. The annual Nobel Prize winner in that field never receives as much publicity as his or her compatriots in other academic disciplines or industries. Now, your book is bringing tons of publicity to the field. What has been the reaction of the economic world? (Are they pleased, or are they disinterested in the PR you’re bringing them?)

DUBNER: “Freakonomics” being positively reviewed in the Wall Street Journal helped us a lot as far as generating initial very good publicity for the book. But Levitt, as a University of Chicago economist, actually hates doing PR because he doesn’t like the attention it brings him. PR and marketing take a lot of attention away from what he likes doing (research and economics). That said, our blog, however, as a public relations tool, is developing conversations online, where people question our premises and conclusions. So, so again, we don’t look at our blog as just promotion. We look at it as developing a dialogue with our readers. And in our case, there’s a lot of dialogue.

PR MACHINE: But, what’s the view of academic economists of “Freakonomics” - good or bad?

DUBNER: Academic economists have been giving us some flack and look down a bit on “Freakonomics” because they say it’s dumbed-down and pop-culture oriented. This may be the case, but look at psychology. In the past the field of psychology was seen as a mysterious discipline, and since the advent of self help books two decades ago, the average person knows a lot more about psychology. People are learning about themselves.

PR MACHINE: What about some of the criticisms of the book. How do you address them?

DUBNER: We’ve also received some criticism for being egotistical in the book– in the sense of how could Levitt, as a respected economist, endorse a book that so clearly glorifies him (in reference to the passages at the beginning of each chapter taken from my initial New York Times article I wrote about him).

PR MACHINE: PR Machine posted back in May of this year that “Freakonomics” would be a big seller. And, we predicted that college economics courses would see an increase in enrollment this Fall (due to the popularity of your book and its new “approach to thinking”). You stated in a New York Times interview that “Freakonomics” has been adopted in a lot of economics courses? Is this the case?

DUBNER: Yes, economics professors have called us seeking permission to use pages of our book in econ courses. Recently, two economics professors emailed seeking to use our book material to develop study guides.

PR MACHINE: How did you come up with a catchy book title like “Freakonomics”? Did the book name come first and the freaky examples back the title up? Or, did all the freaky data lead to the book title?

DUBNER: Steve Levitt’s sister is the one who came up with the name for the book. We immediately thought it was catchy, but also knew that 10% of the public would hate the title for one reason or another, and 10% might love it because it’s clever and catchy. The other 80% lay somewhere in between.

America’s Best-Selling Business Book Tastes

PR MACHINE: It seems lately there is an intense interest by the public in consuming media that deals with different ways of decision-making and questioning old patterns of thought. From identifying the patterns of how fads and trends develop in the “Tipping Point” via groupthink to identifying how people make split personal decisions in Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink”. We’ve noticed the co-branding of your books with Malcolm Gladwell and if all three of these books (”The Tipping Point,” “Blink,” and “Freakonomics”) are current best-selling business books, what does this tell us about Americans and business today? What is it that you three see?

DUBNER: Malcolm Gladwell’s books “The Tipping Point” and “Blink” and our book “Freakonomics” are all similar books in the sense that we try to write stories that are interesting, engaging, timely, useful and true.

PR MACHINE: What is it about “Blink,” “The Tipping Point,” and “Freakonomics” that keeps them on the top of the best-seller business lists? Is it that you have developed content people want to read about? Good and inventive marketing? A mixture of both?

DUBNER: I think we write what people want to read about. We’ve worked hard at that. But, we have been extraordinarily lucky. Again, we had a prominent first book review in the Wall Street Journal, which put us over the top (first book reviews are so important).

PR MACHINE: In what ways does “Freakonomics” differ from Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point” and “Blink,” though?

DUBNER: Malcolm Gladwell’s books and “Freakonomics” are similar in some ways. But, we differ a lot as well. In “The Tipping Point” and “Blink” Malcolm Gladwell corrals stories to illuminate his ideas, while we with “Freakonomics” take case studies and draw our stories from the case study data. We, unlike Malcolm Gladwell, have no initial central premise. “Freakonomics” has no direction-building story around its research idea. Instead, the data we are sharing “is what it is.”

PR MACHINE: Ok. What about the data in Steven Johnson’s recent book “Everything Bad Is Good For You” where he declares that kids are not only learning valuable problem-solving skills by playing video games and watching reality TV, but that they’d probably do better on an IQ test than you or your parents could at their age. Johnson advises parents to go ahead and let their kids watch more television, too, since even reality shows, in his view, can function as “elaborately staged group psychology video games.”

DUBNER: Yes that the media and entertainment industries are smarter seems to be a truism. Johnson has a sensible development of his argument. Humans seem to be wired for more storage (via one media or another), but I haven’t seen the data to agree with him.

PR MACHINE: What could be the side effects of blogging, therefore? Aren’t people writing and putting ideas together online now? Everyone’s a micropublisher! Or, is there some freaky negative aspect to blogging everyone may have overlooked (time away from family, away from work)?

DUBNER: IQ levels may have risen over time, but saying that’s due to the complexity of TV or reality shows may be a bit extreme. But again, I haven’t seen the data to give you an answer. And, if there is any central premise to “Freakonomics”, it’s that data is important because it shows rationales for things you typically don’t think of. So, again, I’d have to see some data to answer you.

Freaky Advice to Marketers

PR MACHINE: What can marketers learn from the findings of “Freakonomics”?

DUBNER: The three things marketers can mainly learn from our book include realizing conventional wisdom is often wrong; dramatic effects often have distant, even subtle, causes; and, knowing what to measure and how to measure it makes a complicated world much less so. But, keep in mind our methods in “Freakonomics” actually counter intuitive marketing thinking.

PR MACHINE: How’s that?

DUBNER: When one markets a product or service they often sell product and emphasize pieces of the story that sell the product. But we focus people (the readers of “Freakonomics”) on letting the actual data talk. “Freakonomics” says to marketers: no need to lie: use data.

Brand Storytelling

PR MACHINE: If there’s one powerful lesson marketers can learn from “Freakonomics” it’s how conventional wisdom is a powerful “story” [in itself] that most people want to believe (even when shown sound analysis and data to the contrary).

DUBNER: Exactly. Our book, like Seth Godin’s new book “All marketers Are Liars,” challenges readers to question conventional wisdom (I haven’t read it, but I know its premise from reviews). To Seth Godin, marketing is storytelling: you have to have a compelling story to tell customers in order for them to “believe you.” Seth Godin says “Don’t try to change people’s conventional wisdom by marketing how your services change their thinking — instead, focus on telling your company’s story to people who are inclined to believe your story in the first place.”

PR MACHINE: But doesn’t “Freakonomics” say to its readers: utilize data, not storytelling?

DUBNER: Yes, but let’s face it, people don’t want to just look at data (they want stories that illustrate the data, like the stories they read in “Freakonomics”).

PR MACHINE: Our last question, focused on applying your lessons from “Freakonomics” to a marketing case study, is your book example about cause and effect. You use the example of bad breath (halitosis) and body odor, which were not seen as “socially problematic” until the invention by marketers of mouthwash and deodorant. Can you elaborate on any other freaky cause and effect marketing examples that would highlight how “vulnerable” yet “welcoming” our society is to the power of subliminal marketer and advertiser PR Machine messages?

DUBNER: In our book we discuss real estate brokers employing “code words” in advertisements to let potential buyers know that an apartment can be bought for prices different than what they are listed at. “Spacious and great neighborhood” tend to be associated with a lower closing price, whereas “state of the art” and “maple” are associated with a higher closing price. People tend not to be consciously aware of these marketing messages. However, if an ad outwardly reads that your light bulb will last 12x longer than the average light bulb, people know they are being marketed to.

Industry marketing code words thus can be powerful and feed into stories surrounding product, stories people subconsciously understand.

PR MACHINE: Thank you, Stephen Dubner.

About the author

Robb Hecht, Partner, IMC Strategies

Robb Hecht is a brand communications strategist with 10 years of corporate communications, new media and marketing communications experience. He currently serves as Partner and Client Services Project Director at IMC Strategies, a freelance consultancy located in New York. Reach him at robb.hecht@imcstrategies.net.