Spinning the Web

The Web Is a Two-Way Street

As this example illustrates, corporate front groups are acutely aware that the Internet is a two-edged sword. PR firms use the Internet themselves to flog their causes and market clients' products, but they are becoming increasingly alarmed by the growth of online activism. At the same time that they are promoting their own brand of online corporate activism, they are increasingly using the Internet to monitor public opinion and to devise new strategies for silencing, discrediting or otherwise neutralizing corporate critics.

The Internet has the "ability to destabilize business and borders," frets Doug Pinkham, president of the Public Affairs Council (PAC), an association of top industry PR advisors and business lobbyists. And according to PAC communications director Wes Pedersen, that spells big trouble in coming years.

"Bonded by ties to the Internet, non-official, supranational groups have achieved successes that have disconcerted and sometimes dismayed U.S. diplomats and, with increasing regularity, American business," Pedersen warned in the January 2000 issue of PAC's monthly newsletter, Impact.Pedersen pointed to 1999's massive demonstrations against the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle as evidence that "international activist organizations" have "used the net to great global advantage, rallying others to their various causes--environmentalism, anti-free trade, anti-Americanism, and, most astonishingly, anarchism." Seattle, moreover, is only one example of the growing influence of Internet-savvy nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).

"Since the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992," Pedersen stated, "cyber-savvy NGOs have brought their agendas to bear on more than a dozen major conferences, more often than not targeting American interests and policies in the process. Countering the growing influence of these cyber-powered, anti-American, anti-corporate international organizations is one of the greatest challenges U.S. corporate and government public affairs practitioners will face in this new millennium."

Pedersen, whose career in public relations began in the 1950s when he worked as a "communist affairs analyst" for the U.S. Information Agency, describes recent successes by Internet-linked nongovernmental organizations as "wakeup calls" indicating a need for "increased business support . . . to counter extremist NGOs."

He warned that the Internet is helping nongovernmental organizations extend their political influence in forums ranging from the United Nations to Main Street USA. "The work of statesmen is being opened up to a broader and more contentious public," he stated. "Within the U.N., NGOs, their influence magnified many times over by use of the Internet, are proposing creation of a standing body in the Commission on Sustainable Development to review voluntary codes in the area of sustainable development, and NGOs are looking to broaden the scope of the review process to all aspects of corporate accountability."

Pedersen is not the only PR pro expressing alarm about the radical potential of the Internet. Writing in the same issue of Impact, Bell Atlantic Assistant Vice President Link Hoewing described the Internet as "activism's dream tool" and pointed again to its role in the protests surrounding the World Trade Organization talks in Seattle. "The activists aggressively used the Internet to plan and organize their teams," he wrote. "The WTO protests reflected a significant growth phase in the development of activist groups worldwide. Private citizens throughout the world are banding together in what may be thousands of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). The increase in the number of such groups is phenomenal. . . . With the Internet as facilitator, that number can be expected to climb quickly."

"Do not ask for whom the web tolls. It may be your company," Edward Grefe wrote in the September 1998 issue of Impact. As an example of the Internet's alarming potential to empower the powerless, Grefe cited the recent success of an international treaty to ban land mines. "From beginning to end, that globe-spanning campaign, coordinated by a Vermonter, was a movement started by people who had no power base, only a mission and a keen awareness of the rallying power of the Internet. . . . Most politicians around the world wished the campaign would fade away. It succeeded because it appealed to people at the grassroots in other countries who then pressed their leaders to act."

The lesson to be learned from examples like this, Grefe warned, is that "We are being trumped. . . . In nations around the world, grassroots movements are being formed that will spread fast and far beyond borders. These movements will often have a decidedly anti-American and/or anti-corporate tilt. . . . I would like to be able to assure you that the United States Congress--that Washington itself--is still the dominant player in handling world issues. That would be reassuring to those spending millions of dollars in this country to defeat agendas being driven by millions of people in other countries. I cannot, however, offer such assurance."

The Internet, Grefe said, is "the key--the vital key--to the new globalism and the new regionalism."

Opportunity Knocks

For the public relations industry, the emergence of the Internet as an important new communications medium has created both problems and opportunities. Before Grefe began worrying publicly about its potential to empower anti-corporate internationalism, he was waxing euphoric about its potential as a capitalist tool.

A former former vice president for public affairs at Philip Morris, Grefe claims to have "invented" corporate grassroots programs that use sophisticated databases and other modern technologies to marry business objectives with the tactics of radical organizers such as Saul Alinsky. "The heirs of Saul Alinsky can be on both sides of the equation," he wrote in his 1995 book, The New Corporate Activism, which chronicled the rise of what he called a "new breed of guerrilla warriors" dedicated to promoting corporate values. "The essence of this new way," he wrote, "is to marry 1990s communication and information technology with 1960s grassroots organizing techniques."

In May 1997, Grefe told readers of Impact that the Internet was coming into its own as a corporate organizing tool. The key, he said, lay in evolving technologies that would make it possible for websites to identify and track the identity of visitors.

"Until recently, the Internet was, in many ways, somewhat passive," he wrote. "You could put your information out, but knowing who was viewing it was difficult at best. And knowing whether those viewers were people with whom you might have something in common --such as their willingness to become involved in supporting you on your issue -- was, of course, questionable. . . . It was virtually impossible to track down folks on the net and evaluate whether they were potential recruits for third party coalition endorsements or even active grassroots involvement." New technologies, he predicted, would change this by making it possible to discover "the e-mail address of anyone who has taken the time to look at a video on your site."

Other corporate activists have also been busy developing new techniques for seizing control of the Internet. Conservative direct marketers such as Richard Viguerie and Bruce Eberle (see story in this issue) have thrown together hundreds of websites touting conservative causes and fostering scare campaigns designed to rally followers. In the years leading up to the dawn of the new millennium, Viguerie hosted several websites devoted to Y2K scaremongering which predicted serious disruptions to international finance, travel and security. Eberle has developed a "viral marketing" system that uses conservative talk radio hosts to promote "Internet opinion polls" that collect visitors' names and addresses for subsequent fund-raising appeals.

Recognizing that "word of mouse" is critical to Internet PR, the Burson-Marsteller PR firm has coined the term "e-fluentials" to designate people on the Internet who influence others. "Our data reveals a distinct, identifiable set of Internet citizens who act as online opinion leaders," said Leslie Gaines-Ross, B-M's chief knowledge and research officer. "These cyberworld town criers whose voices are not measured in decibels but in megabytes, are able to express their opinions at extraordinary high rates, using the Internet as their soapbox." According to Christopher Komisarjevsky, CEO of Burston-Marsteller Worldwide, "Companies must absolutely try to figure out and identify who the e-fluencers are that influence their business and develop a way to reach those people."

A Thousand Blooming Flowers

The scary thing for large corporations is that the Internet makes it possible for everyday citizens to become "e-fluencers" at affordable prices. "The information glut puts pressure on those responsible for getting the word out to maintain control," PR Week noted on March 1, 1999.

Traditionally, PR people could concentrate their efforts on influencing a limited number of information channels which included leading newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post, the national TV networks, and perhaps a handful of local newspapers and other media outlets whose audience was significant to their particular client. That system began to break down with the advent of cable television, which vastly increased the number of channels available to viewers. Instead of broadcasting their message to the public at large, PR people began to talk about "narrowcasting" to different targeted audiences.

Wire services, which formerly were limited in number, have also begun to proliferate. Two wire services have traditionally dominated the public relations scene: PR Newswire and Business Wire. In addition to disseminating news releases to thousands of newspapers and other media outlets, they distribute quarterly financial reports and other corporate information. "Journalists have come to depending on the credibility of PRN and BW as third party sources," notes PR Week. In recent years, however, the Internet "has opened the door for other wire services to enter the commercial news distribution game," including companies such as US Newswire and Newbytes, which focuses on news related computer and high tech.

Frank Mankiewicz, vice president of the Hill & Knowlton PR firm, worries about the Internet's absence of "gatekeepers--editors, critics, producers and other informed delegates." Without gatekeepers, he fears, the result will be anarchy: "The old egalitarian idea that everyone is entitled to his own opinion is being swamped by access to just plain garbage," he complains. "The Internet has created a new class of individual purveyors to whom everything is equal and only 'what you want' is purveyed. On the World Wide Web, without gatekeepers all we have are trespassers."

In September 2000, Ronald Duchin of the PR spy firm of Mongoven, Biscoe & Duchin wrote that "career anti-corporate activists" were behind the growth of student activism and pointed again to the important role of the Internet. "In the past decade," he wrote, "most U.S. colleges and universities have made Internet-based technologies readily available to all students. (American Demographics reported in May that 84% of all students aged 18 to 24 regularly access the Internet from campus computer facilities.) At the same time, the NGO activist community overall has expanded its organizing capabilities, using the Internet as an inexpensive, instant tool for recruiting large coalitions around specific issues. . . . The moral: Today's Internet-savvy campus activists will be tomorrow's NGO leaders, and their facility with information technology will shape the dynamics and effectiveness of public-interest activism in the future."

"Suddenly a company's voice is no longer louder than that of its leading critics," laments Infonic, a London-based PR firm that specializes in monitoring the Internet for corporate clients such as British Airways, Levi Strauss, Unilever, Shell and Sony. "Activists, customers, journalists and employees are talking to each other like never before," Infonic warns, "with big business finding it increasingly difficult to stay in the conversation."

In November 1997, Impact quoted Alan Rosenthal, director of Rutgers University's Eagleton Institute of Politics, who warned that "'Participatory democracy' is growing at the expense of representative democracy. Government is no longer conducted by representatives, with the consent of the governed, according to the original Federalist plan. It is conducted with significant participation by the governed, and by those who claim to speak for the public's interest, according to a more populist plan."

Eyes and Ears

Some companies have tried to block their Internet critics by pre-emptively registering domain names that someone else might use to attack them. Volvo, for example, has bought the rights to VolvoSucks.com. Chase Manhattan owns IHateChase.com, ChaseStinks.com, ChaseSucks.com and ChaseBlows.com. Likewise, Verizon telecommunications tried snapping up VerisonSucks.com, only to have its effort thwarted when a small online zine created a website called VerizonReallySucks.com.

Other firms like Infonic have emerged that specialize in monitoring discussions on listserves, websites and Internet chat rooms. In September 2000, for example, leaked internal company documents showed that the Sony Corporation was relying heavily on Infonic in Europe to perform "detailed monitoring" of environmental groups groups that criticize its line of electronics products, many of which contain toxins and are difficult to dispose of.

"The Internet is serving as a tool for gathering intelligence both on potential allies as well as opponents, and recruiting people both inside -- and, perhaps more important -- outside one’s organization."
--Tony Kramer, Public Affairs Council.

==========================

"Activist groups around the world are increasingly relying on the Internet to distribute information and activate their grassroots supporters," Impact reported in December 1999. "Many have state of the art sites that enable their members to not only read action alerts, but send e-mail and faxes to government officials. As websites begin to replace mailings as the primary source of information on these groups, it becomes increasingly important to monitor their actions on the Internet."

"When those nasty rumors start breeding on the web, you've got to move fast," says PR counselor and conservative pundit Alan Pell Crawford. "Smart organizations facing this challenge now routinely monitor what is said about them on these sites--or try to. . . . Having discovered that they can't do the job properly in-house, many companies are turning to monitoring services like e-Watch, Inc., or Cyveillance."

Crawford advises companies to "Learn everything you can about what is said about you. Don't confine your search to the major webzines. Monitor chat rooms and discussion groups, too. If you find a site where you are being criticized, determine whether the site has any traffic; maybe it doesn't and can be safely ignored. . . . View the Net as a vast, completely uninhibited focus group that can provide insights you'd never get any other way. Eavesdrop all you want, learning the attitudes of specific audiences and the issues most important to them."

Richard Bell, a senior consultant at Issue Dynamics, advises PR pros to "use the Internet to gather timely intelligence about potential issues and problems for your company or your industry. . . . By monitoring, you will have an early-warning system that will pick up nasty rumors early, giving you a chance to kill them off before they can reach the mainstream media."

The New York firm of Middleberg and Associates, which also specializes in web monitoring for corporate clients, has an unabashedly hostile view to free speech: "The dark side of the Net is that anyone can say anything to anybody at anytime and there's absolutely no regulation, no one needs to verify anything," Don Middleberg explained in February 1997. "It could be true, it could be false. And as a result, people are doing some things that are very damaging to companies' reputations and they are also doing some things to companies that are actually impacting sales. . . . The explosion of information going on out there is just beyond any one organization's ability to control," Middleberg said. "So you do the best job you can with the resources you have."

In addition to the web, PR firms monitor chat rooms and newsgroups. Relatively little effort is focused on chat rooms, because discussions there are limited to small groups of people. Newsgroups, however, are a different matter. "We find that the newsgroups are much more interactive than the Web," said Adam Cooper, creative manager at the Interactive Solutions Group of Edelman Public Relations Worldwide. "So the newsgroups are really what we would consider the key place to listen to people."

Monitoring Internet activism can be expensive, but lots of clients are willing to pay the price. More than 200 clients, ranging from Mrs. Fields Cookies to Northwest Airlines, have turned to eWatch, which charges $16,200 per year to help a company track its online critics, monitoring some 63,000 Internet mailing lists and newsgroups, more than 1,000 web-based publications, and hundreds of public discussion areas on America Online, Prodigy, Compuserve, the Microsoft Network and Yahoo. Another company, WebClipping.com, offers a similar service for rates of up to $250/month. Pricier still is CyberAlert, which charges $1,995 per month to monitor the web, newsgroups, e-mail listserves and online forums. Other companies in the Internet surveillance business have included NetCurrents Inc. (now defunct), Decision Strategies (formerly Decision Strategies Fairfax International), and Kroll Associates.

The Internet Crimes Group, based in Princeton, New Jersey, monitors the Internet "to identify anonymous individuals and groups engaging in improper or illegal activities" such as copyright violations, Internet fraud, and "anonymous message board or newsgroup posters," and "malicious or offensive e-mail." The Internet Crimes Group appears to be a reincarnation of CyberSleuth, a similar service that was initially provided by eWatch. CyberSleuth was criticized in a widely-circulated article in Business Week, which quoted the service talking about "identifying perpetrators and neutralizing information." After eWatch was purchased by PR Newsire in January 2001, it discontinued CyberSleuth but refers companies seeking similar services to the Internet Crimes Group.

In 1999 and 2000, the Foundation for Public Affairs surveyed PR firms and found that 66% of PR firms are using the Internet to monitor the news media, 45% use it to monitor public interest groups, and 44% monitor newsgroups.

"Eavesdrop all you want,
learning the attitudes
of specific audiences
and the issues
most important to them."
--PR counselor Alan Pell Crawford

==========================

Striking Back

Some PR firms have also planted ringers in online chat rooms--paid consultants who defend their clients while concealing their financial ties to the company being discussed. "A small industry is emerging among consultants who specialize in spinning online discussions to favor the positions of companies and interest groups," the New York Times reported in October 1999. Audrie Krause, for example, works as a consultant for AT&T but has represented herself online as a "consumer advocate" during discussions of broadband Internet access, a subject in which AT&T has a vested interest.

According to Mindshare Internet Campaigns, a firm in Washington, DC, its staffers "regularly adopt pseudonyms and participate in online discussions on behalf of some clients." According to Mindshare's Shabbir J. Safdar, some of his clients pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for Internet monitoring and intervention. "I've seen some big price tags," Safdar said. "I've seen clients who were very, very worried and would plunk down large sums of money."

When talking up a client's side of things fails to win the day, some corporations go a step further, using lawsuits and legal threats to silence their online critics. In February 2000, Business Week esimated that more than 100 such suits had been brought around the country. Companies filing suit have included Raytheon, a military contractor; Stone & Webster Inc., a construction firm; ProMedCo Management, which manages physician practice groups; and the Kimberly-Clark paper company. Examples of lawsuits that have gone to court include the following:

In California, the Terminix extermination service sued to shut down a website owned by Carla Virga, an angry customer who claimed that the company had botched its pre-purchase inspection of her home. Terminix sued her for libel, and after losing that lawsuit, it took her to court a second time, claiming "trademark infringement" because her website mentioned the name Terminix. After nine years of litigation, the company finally dropped the lawsuit, by which time legal fees had driven Virga and her husband into bankruptcy.
Harken Energy Corp., a gas and oil exploration company, sued numerous people who posted online comments in July 1999 about a drilling venture in Colombia.
Fruit of the Loom subpoenaed Yahoo, demanding to know the identity of two people who posted anonymous messages on a finance message board, criticized the company's lobbying activities related to a trade bill that would benefit Fruit of the Loom by allowing them to import certain items duty-free.
Ford Motor Company sued a website for criticizing the company and posting information about its upcoming products.
Dunkin' Donuts threatened a lawsuit against a disgruntled customer whose website, www.dunkindonuts.org, posted gripes about the company's products. Rather than suing, however, it settled the matter by buying out the website, deleting the complaints and replacing them with cheery pro-donut propaganda.