Meet the “Royal Caribbean Champions,” a group of fifty prolific posters to popular online communities that Royal Caribbean rewards with special access and free cruises in exchange for their frequent and positive commentary. The Champions were outed by their creators, the Customer Insight Group, which boasted on their company blog that the potent group is “regularly leveraged for ongoing marketing initiates. Members of the popular reviewing site Cruise Critic, one of the main targets of the program, are understandably pissed.
The Customer Insight Group provides an excellent summary of the pernicious program’s goals:
Identifying Brand Advocates: Royal Caribbean worked with Nielsen Buzz Metrics to identify enthusiastic online supporters of Royal Caribbean. Using a combination of automated and manual techniques, they identified online communities that discuss Royal Caribbean Cruises. Relying on data mining software and human expertise in word-of-mouth analysis, they measured awareness, identifying emergent qualitative themes of discussion on blogs, travel forums, usernets to gain a better understanding of how consumers discuss Royal Caribbean cruises. Fifty Royal Caribbean Champions were chosen for both quality and quantity of posts with many having over 10,000 message board posts on various Royal Caribbean topics. While Champions were primarily found on Cruise Critic, they also posted on travel communities, usenet groups, travel blogs and personal journals.
Influencing Brand Advocates: In May 2007, the Royal Champions community of online enthusiasts was invited to their first big event, the pre-inaugural sailings of our newest ship Liberty of the Seas in New York and Miami. This was the first time in the company’s history that invitees to pre-inaugural sailings were “ordinary people” i.e. not VIP’s, corporate executives, or top producing travel agent. Royal Caribbean hosted ship and stateroom tours and cocktail parties with executives. President Adam Goldstein hosted the New York party and CEO Richard Fain hosted the Miami party. The events generated abundant positive word-of-mouth on various sites and created a cohesive community of Royal Caribbean online enthusiasts that are regularly leveraged for ongoing marketing initiatives.
Measuring Success: While difficult to measure precisely, based on observation and anecdotal evidence we are confident that the Royal Champions produce ample word of mouth and exert sufficient influence to make the investment worthwhile. Posts from Royal Champions are carefully monitored during events and on a regular basis to ensure that posts remain positive and frequent.
The program’s existence by itself isn’t objectionable. Every industry is a carrier for public relations parasites, but most so-called public relations professionals adhere to a code of conduct that includes a clear disclosure of their affiliation. As the Customer Insight Group acknowledges, “the key to success in viral marketing is to subtly influence the influencers without them overtly realizing they are being influenced.”
Since their posts are “carefully monitored,” Royal Caribbean Champions should be required to clearly disclose their role as Royal Caribbean mouthpieces so other readers can fairly and fully evaluate their comments.
Influencing Brand Advocates [Customer Insight Group Loyalty Blog]
Default Royal Champions Vereses the rest of us [Cruise Critic via Tripso]
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IS RCCL Manipulating CruiseCritic.com (owned by Trip Advisor)?
Jaunted.com
No surprise here: Royal Caribbean Cruise Line has a viral infection. For once, however, it’s not the Norovirus but that new-fangled byproduct of Web 2.0, the viral marketing infiltration. According to Consumerist, a group of fifty “Royal Champions” was outed by their own creator, the Customer Insight Group, as being a successful project whereby frequent positive cruise commenting on sites such as CruiseCritic was rewarded with free cruises and other perks.
So what’s the big deal? Well, it seems that the “Royal Champions” weren’t always up front about their status as compensated reviewers, effectively misleading readers of CruiseCritic forums with their positive comments. Add to this the fact that CruiseCritic admins assisted Royal Caribbean in choosing the fifty, with one of the stipulations being quantity of posts, “with many having over 10,000 message board posts on various Royal Caribbean topics.” From here, the hole just gets deeper.
Now that many RC fans feel slighted at not having made the ranks and most everyone else is disgusted at the covert trade of cruising for happy juicing, the trustworthiness of such forums is under fire.
Due to CruiseCritic’s ownership by TripAdvisor, which is in turn under the Expedia blanket of travel sites, a viral marketing stunt gone awry could possibly continue to negatively ripple. Does news like this affect your ability to trust good reviews on travel sites, or do you already consider yourself an excellent shill-spotter enough to weed out the solicited from the unsolicited? While this whole ordeal is mired in serious muckety-muck, let’s hope it serves as a lesson for future viral marketers and as an argument for transparency.
While I’m not a legal expert, I wonder if Cruise Critic’s participation in this activity in some way might violate FTC regulations. Cruise Critic’s management, in defense of their behavior, is claiming all it did was to provide their advertiser and marketing partner, RCCL, the contact information for those in to be invited to the Royal Champions Program;. Who are they kidding? Cruise Critic in addition knowingly published reviews and comments from this group and, according to a Cruise Critic bulletin board post (since removed from the site) from their Community Manager, both the Community Manager and Cruise Critic’s Editor met with a large group of Royal Champions aboard one of the free incentive cruises.
So, at the very least, Cruise Critic demonstrated a total disregard for their users who might have been disled by these shills, while creating an uneven playing field to the detriment of cruise lines other than RCCL. This seems to flaunt stated Trip Advisor policy, so it would be good to hear from them on this matter. And, as a public company, I wonder as well if Expedia, corporate parent of both Cruise Critic and Trip Advisor, may be liable for behavior that could be considered detrimental to their shareholders.
Re US law:
Here’s some of the pertinent language from the FTC for those not familiar with it: “When there exists a connection between the endorser and the seller of the advertised product which might materially affect the weight or credibility of the endorsement (i.e., the connection is not reasonably expected by the audience) such connection must be fully disclosed….
The FTC is planning to strengthen the endorsement guidelines to specifically address blogs and viral marketing, so hopefully these types of bogus endorsement programs will be a thing of the past. [www2.ftc.gov]
I have what will apparently come as a big surprise to all of you. Freebies in the hope of a positive review are a big part of not only tourism marketing (they’re called Fam trips – for Familiarization), but also publishing and many more industries. There may be reviewers who post positive reviews regardless of what they really believe, but in my case, trips and books (the 2 freebies I get) that I don’t like just don’t get reviewed at all – unless they’re very bad. RCI seems to have chosen their Forum-marketing team from active users who were already RCI fans – I see no foul there. Unfortunately they never noticed my many posts at CC saying that the Radiance is my favorite ship – perhaps the negative reviews of the Vision canceled them out