Have you ever seen poll results on TV? They always amuse me, because there is a good chance that the poll was done online, and the news anchors have no choice but to act like it is a statistical fact, without dealing with all the obvious drawbacks of self selection.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, you're thinking - "this is starting to sound like a post about Market Research! We came here for Ads!" Sit tight; I have a point (somewhere)
Back to my original thought: the validity of "truth" online is questionable, (and yes, this does affect business and marketing and all that). Online opinion results are far too often used as a talking point on TV - "our readers say this is fact, and so it is fact for our highly paid analysts to talk about" (Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, they all do this). I know it's not accurate, and I think they know it too: those polls, made up of the viewers of that channel, already have a pretty strong demographic target built in, so all they ever do is validate an opinion that is already held. It obfuscates any "actual" discussion that could be had from a topic, and the credibility goes down just about everywhere.
Stephen Colbert is the master of this; he even coined the term "Wikiality" to encapsulate the meaning. Online, what is factual / correct is based on popularity and opinion, rather than on anything solid. Reference points fade away, and people lose the ground they stand on, floating on a sea of ambiguity on what is fact and what is fake. I can't even tell what is real news anymore.
But beyond the fact that nobody can think for themselves anymore, there is a major takeaway here.
It is easier than you think to get people to do / think certain things
I go back to Stephen Colbert on this one - the man is a machine. Did you know he has a bridge named after him? At least, he should - his vote totals were 7 million votes higher than the entire population of the country that was voting. How did he get so many votes?
HE ASKED FOR THEM.
It's ridiculously simple, especially if people either semi-agree with you, or really couldn't care less (the latter describing most people doing most things that involve online polling). Colbert's done this more than once, but you can't win them all. You can win more than your fair share, though.
Colbert does it to prove his point, which I think what most ballot stuffing is about. There are others that have seemingly less noble causes as well. But the underlying marketing takeaway is that, online, people can / are willing to fight for a cause they believe in, a cause they don't believe in (to prove a point), or simply because somebody gave them an opportunity.
So how can this be used as a marketing tool online? If you read this post on Copyblogger, which I provided earlier, then you already have a hint - asking people online to spread the word actually leads to them spreading the word. Saying Please helps, too, and so does being direct; it's almost as if marketeers over-think, and don't realize that their customer does not have the patience to dig, when they could just Digg.
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