Are you a blogger? Do you have a podcast? Have you ever spent time replying to posts on an internet message board? What about uploading videos to sites such as YouTube?

If you answered in the affirmative to any of those questions, the odds are that you have already engaged in citizen marketing. The fan who creates his own poster and trailer for an upcoming movie is a citizen marketer. So is the customer who creates an online community around the idea of saving a discontinued product, or the loyal customer who uses a bad customer-service experience to bring about change within a business organization.

But above all else, citizen marketers are motivated by a sense of loyalty. That loyalty comes from a sense of ownership that citizen marketers feel for their favorite product, company, movie, etc. Even citizen marketers who create campaigns designed to bring attention to mistakes the company has made often do so out of a desire to see the company improve its processes.

The rise of social media tools has given citizen marketing its jumpstart into the business mainstream, and today's companies must understand both what motivates their customers to make the transition to concerned citizen marketers and who those customers are.

The Four Fs of Citizen Marketing

One of the strengths of the book Citizen Marketers, besides explaining the concept, is the book's ability to detail, for the first time, the types of citizen marketers and what motivates them. McConnell and Huba dub these citizen-marketer types the "Four Fs":

• Filters: The Filters collect all manner of stories, blog posts, podcasts, etc. related to a specific topic and present them in one place. These filters serve mainly as an aggregator of content in all forms related to a particular topic, but they also add their own analysis and commentary on occasion.
  
  
• Fanatics: The Fanatics are very similar to evangelists. They love (obsess over?) their favorite brand/product/person/company, and are committed to informing others about the object of their love. They are in the truest sense of the term "customer evangelists." But they also have great love for the brand/company/person and aren't afraid to criticize any action that they feel is detrimental to its progress.
  
  
• Facilitators: Facilitators are community creators/builders. They bring like-minded individuals together around a central framework, usually an online forum or blog. Ben and Jackie liken them to "online mayors."
  
  
• Firecrackers: Firecrackers are the one-hit wonders of citizen marketers. They may create a hit sensation viral video, or a blogging meme, and then never be heard from again. They burn very brightly and quickly, and burn out just as rapidly.

The 1 Percenters

In the summer of 1947, members of the Pissed Off Bastards of Bloomington Motorcycle Club and the Boozefighters Motorcycle Club converged on Hollister, California, for the town's annual motorcycle race. Beer flowed freely, and according to a Life magazine photographer in attendance soon the fists were as well. The photographer snapped a picture of a biker asleep atop his ride, with shattered beer bottles littering the ground around him. Life ran the photo with the accompanying caption: "Cyclist's holiday: he and friends terrorize town."

The magazine ran a story claiming that 4,000 bikers ran roughshod over the California town, leaving a trail of destruction in their wake. The American Motorcyclists Association is reported to have replied to the story, saying that 99 percent of its members were law-abiding citizens, effectively marginalizing the remaining "1 percent" as outlaws.

McConnell and Huba say the 1 Percenters label applies to citizen marketers as well. Like the outlaw bikers, they too are outlaws... but of culture. Their actions are mainly performed outside the boundaries of a corporation, sometimes with little or no recognition. But they find their reward in the dedication to their passion, their work, and the communities that are created as a result.

But the 1 Percenters have a statistical correlation to citizen marketing as well. The authors' research into citizen marketing uncovered what they call "the 1% rule," according to which about 1 percent of the total number of visitors to a democratized forum will create content for it or contribute content to it. In their research, the authors found that 0.9 percent of Wikipedia's monthly visitors contribute to the entries; visitors to the QuickBooks Community create content at the same rate. Yahoo Groups, a free service that welcomes over 9 million monthly visitors, also has 1 percent of visitors who create and contribute content. McConnell and Huba add that about 10 percent of the total number of visitors interact with the contributed content.

So why refer to these content creators as citizens? The authors say that the term is appropriate because content creators who frequent online communities such as Digg, Wikipedia, and YouTube contribute and support the site because they believe in the concept behind it and have a shared sense of ownership in the community found there. Much as a citizen would. These citizen marketers feel a sense of duty in contributing to the larger community, and as the authors say, "It's citizenship in the age of marketing as a culture."

The Democratization of Everything

McConnell and Huba describe the term "Web 2.0" as referring to "creating collaborative Web experiences when information is shared multilaterally." Whereas Web 1.0 may have been one-way communication between a Web site and its visitors, Web 2.0 opens up the door by allowing site visitors to communicate not only with the website but also with each other, sometimes simultaneously. And with extra communication channels come new ways to transfer and share data:—via blogs, podcasts, photos, videos, maps—all of which can be recombined in entirely new forms.

This has led to the rise of the "mashup," a "hybrid combination of two or more data sources that when combined, create a new product or improve an existing one." The authors identify the two major forms of mashups: data and entertainment.

Data mashups are usually created by software developers who often combine the mapping technologies of Yahoo, Google, or MSN with their own data or those of others. For example, Adrian Holovaty took the crime statistics supplied by the Chicago Police Department and combined them with Google Maps to create a piece of software that automatically visits the CPD's site and collects new crime information, plotting it with Google Maps to identify crime areas as well as the type of crimes committed.

Eentertainment mashups tend to involve the creation of amusing videos, with two or more different movie or TV shows as the source. One of the most popular recent entertainment mashups was Brokeback to the Future, which combined visual elements from the Back to the Future series of movies with the musical score to the gay-cowboy movie Brokeback Mountain. The mashup is a humorous attempt to paint the relationship between Back to the Future's two main characters, Marty McFly and Dr. Emmett Brown, in an entirely new light. Another popular mashup involved changing horror-classic The Shining into a family comedy, called Shining, by rearranging key scenes and adding new voiceovers to give the original movie an entirely new, lighthearted theme.

As technological advances accelerate, more and more social media tools are being put in the hands of everyday people. This is resulting in an explosion of content creators, along with massive amounts of created content. And the interesting aspect of social media is that the everyday people who have these tools in their hands are the most familiar with them, and in the process have literally taken control from the few and given it to the many.

Everyone Is a Publisher, Everyone Is a Broadcaster

Throughout the centuries, humans have yearned for new tools to make the consumption and passing of information more efficient.

Over two thousand years ago, Roman citizens were publishing the day's top stories, as well as gladiator fight recaps and gossip, on stone slabs known as the Acta Diurna. Johann Gutenberg's creation of the printing press forever changed how humans share knowledge. Modern forms of communication such as television and radio have helped shape our culture.

But the rise of electronic and online communication tools has led to the ability of users to quickly and efficiently communicate with each other. Blogs, cellphones, podcasts, video and photo-sharing sites—all of these evolving communication channels put publishing and broadcasting tools in the hands of everyday citizens.

Perhaps the most popular social media tools, is the weblog, or blog. Blogs offer the ability for anyone to quickly and easily publish content, usually in written form, to the Internet. Blogs are similar to personal homepages that became popular in the 1990s; but whereas at least basic HTML knowledge was necessary to create and update a home page, blogging platforms handle the coding automatically. This simplification of the personal-publishing process has led to a huge spike in the number of blogs.

Blog-tracking service Technorati began tracking the number of blogs on the Internet in 2003. At that time, there were a few thousand blogs. Since then, the blogosphere has consistently doubled roughly every 6 months. By now, the total number of blogs that Technorati tracks is approaching 60 million.

But as we ponder whether blogs can continue their torrid growth pace, what about "blogjects"? This is a term coined by University of Southern California researcher Julian Bleecker to define things that collect data, then disseminate them via social media.

For example, in 2006, a flock of pigeons in San Jose, California, were used to begin collecting data about air pollution, with the results posted to PigeonBlog via text messages. Each bird carries a tiny cell-phone transmitter and air-pollution monitor. They transmit data while flying, eating, even resting. Their locations and routes can be pinpointed to a satellite view of a Google map. Similar applications in other settings could involve other animals and even inanimate objects such as planes and cars, making them "blogjects."

A natural extension of the popularity of being able to publish in written form (blogs) is the ability to do so in verbal form. Which has led to the growth of podcasts.

Podcasts are unique in that they can be listened to at the users' convenience. Whereas a radio show is live, podcasts can be stopped and started, paused, rewound or fast-forwarded at the listener's whim. And as with blog posts, podcasts can be digitally delivered to listeners via feed subscriptions. Thankfully, the FCC is excluded from regulating the content of podcasts, so anyone with a computer and a microphone can reach listeners without the FCC's approval. The dream of pirate radio has come to the masses. The authors cite a report from Bride Ratings that estimates about 63 million Americans will be downloading podcasts by 2010.

Video podcasts are similar to audio podcasts, but as the name implies they add video content as well. These shows can be watched on computers or downloaded to handheld video devices such as a video iPod. One of the more popular video podcasts is Rocketboom, a daily three-minute take on Internet news and culture that had 300,000 subscribers after its first two years. That viewership number would top that of almost any single local newscast in America.

Much has been made of the stellar rise in popularity of social-networking sites such as MySpace and YouTube. The authors say the reason lies in the ability that the sites give users to democratize the tools of self-expression. Users can add a plethora of graphics, widgets, and electronic gadgets to their MySpace pages. MySpace moreover takes feedback from users and adds the features and functionality they ask for.