Robert Kozinets wrote:Way back in the early days of the Web, in May of 1998 t’be exact, a big-budget, shrouded-in-secrecy remake movie of the famous Godzilla series came out. You might remember its memorable penile tag-line “Size Matters.” Ah yes, those were the days. At that time the film’s producer and co-write, Dean Devlin, and its director, Roland Emmerich, has started a production company called Centropolis Entertainment, which helped to market the film and produced an official “Godzilla ” website to build hype and promote the film. The website was a decent one, and the film’s producers knew that there was a lot of word-of-mouth flowing among Godzilla’s active fan community about the film. So, of course, they provided an open forum for those fans to discuss the film amongst themselves.
Where was I? Oh yes, Godzilla, or Gojira as my Japanese friends and I like to call him. The long-time fans were the first ones in line and the first ones past the red velvet ropes to see the movie. And they hated the movie. Hated it bigtime. So when they had a chance to post their comments and contribute to their community–which was, after all, not a new invention of Misters Devlin and Emmerich, but a long-standing community with lots of existing fans, practices, and networks–guess what they did? Of course. They criticized. They moaned about what a butchering, unfaithful, horrid hatchetjob had been done to their iconic film and its proto-iconic icon. And they warned other fans and interested people to stay away. It was not only a bad Godzilla movie, they told everyone on the forum, it was just a bad, stinky, terrible movie in general. Blech, blech, pooey pooey.
Now, that’s a real test of commitment to community, isn’t it? As managers, Misters Devlin and Emmerich had some decisions to make. In particular, how should they handle this? Abort, retry, engage, fight back, ignore?
They didn’t have the benefit that we do of having some wise advice in this area widely available from luminaries like Alex Wipperfurth and Grant McCracken and Andy Sernovitz and Henry Jenkins and Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba and Don Tapscott. However, the Cluetrain Manifesto was already circulating in its early forms. Remember the Cluetrain Manifesto (available in much longer format in print as The Cluetrain Manifesto)? What an important document that was and still is! It talks about the need for companies to engage in open, honest conversations with the organizing networks of people who are their markets. In fact, it defines a company’s markets as a set of conversations. To his credit, Mr. Devlin did decide to engage these fans in conversation.
According to a Wall Street Journal article on the event (`Godzilla’ Web Visitors Terrorize A Touchy Hollywood Producer,” by Bruce Orwall, Jun 8, 1998. p. B.1), here’s what happened:
To one especially tough-minded fan he [producer and co-writer Dean Devlin] wrote: “Our movie did what it was supposed to do. We’re all happy about it. If you don’t like that, to hell with you.” To another who called the movie a flop: “Please tell me how you figure that a movie that will make the studio over a hundred million dollars in profit is a flop? Where’d you learn your math?” To the editor of a science-fiction magazine who had chided him, Mr. Devlin wrote: “And as for my ‘royalty’ check you refer to, since it’s larger than all of my other royalty checks on all my other films combined, I’m more than happy with it, thank you.” The cyber-howlings of a well-paid Hollywood producer didn’t find a sympathetic audience. “My God! It sickens me to hear a man go on like that!” one fan wrote. “You’ve got to get over the fact that a lot of people, for whatever reason, just don’t like the film.”
After a bit of back and forth jousting, taking heavy hits, enraging the online community, and setting a pretty stark quintessentially us versus them, me-big-capitalist Hollywood Producer you puny little consumer fanboy invidious hierarchized boundary dichotomy (that seems pretty heavily socially-classed, my sociologist friends) Centropolis made its decision.
Shut down the dissent. Shut the fans up. Shut the site down.
