Messages That Matter

Fast Company

July 01, 2002

Excerpted from an article titled “AOL’s True Believers” from the July 2002 issue of Fast Company magazine.

If there’s one statistic that defines the power and the lighter-than-air nature of AOL’s business, it’s this: Every day, AOL Instant Messenger ( AIM ) users send about 1.4 billion instant messages. In contrast, all of the long-distance carriers in the country transmit a combined total of barely one billion long-distance phone calls a day.

Do those messages matter? The popular conception is that IM is all fluff, just another way for giggly teens to ask, “Wassup?” and gossip about their friends. Even the basic format of the service cries out, “Don’t take me too seriously.” AIM has never been dressed up as a Microsoft office-productivity tool, with gray accent colors and requests to provide “business contacts.” Open up the AOL service, and you’re looking at loud rainbow colors and a chance to start filling out your Buddy List.

But appearances deceive. At AOL’s Virginia headquarters, AIM is as crucial to how business gets done as Microsoft Word or Excel. When AOL executives want to schedule a meeting or haggle about the fine points of a deal, they don’t use email, the phone, or the fax. They IM one another.

When AOL Time Warner’s chief talent scout, Michele James, wants to put her final offer in front of a job candidate, she often uses AIM to get top-level approval for her terms. “We had one case recently where the boss was at the airport, about to take off,” she recalls. “We were down to the last few minutes in deciding what we could do to win a candidate. He sent me an IM from his mobile device saying, ’Wheels up in 10 min. Deal?’ I sent back, ’$200K b w 30,000 options y/n?’ He came right back with ’Y,’ and we were able to make the hire.”

Raul Mujica runs the AIM service, and he is a nonstop evangelist for the power of AIM within the enterprise. “Look at my own Buddy List,” he says. On the right-hand edge of his computer monitor is a list of more than 170 people, grouped as “Web Props,” “Partners,” “IP,” and so on. That is his business network; it is how he deals with just about everyone who is important to his job.

Two years ago, people at the old Time Warner might have regarded such a list as bizarre. Now many of them are setting up their own lists in order to cooperate with AOL executives. “As we work with the Time Warner properties,” Mujica says, “we tell people there, ’AIM is the easiest way to reach us.’ We answer IMs right away. It’s more effective than voice mail or email. It’s almost the only effective way to reach certain people.”

Mujica is hard at work too, developing IM as a tool that can help AOL Time Warner do more business with customers. Currently, there are more than 140 million AIM registrations worldwide. And the very nature of the service makes it viral. Pass along a URL or a joke to a friend, and within a few hours, that message can make its way into thousands of people’s lives.

For executives at the Time Warner properties, the chance to create positive word of mouth about a new movie, song, magazine, or book is too exciting to pass up. In January 2002, the company created IM tags that let Alanis Morissette fans send friends a link to a streaming-audio version of a hit song on the singer’s new album, Under Rug Swept. That helped spur online listening to the song — and nudged up sales of the CD.

Of course, even a big push from AIM can’t make everything a hit. Late last year, Warner Music launched an unknown 14-year-old singer, Lindsay Pagano, and marketers thought that it would be clever to create a synthetic AIM version of the artist online. That way, her fans could “chat” with LindsayBuddy, even though they were actually interacting with a computer program.

Many teens tried chatting with the ersatz version of Pagano — but hardly any of them bought her music. Some grumbled that the dialogue didn’t sound real. ( Ask, “Who’s your favorite singer?” and out comes a stiff, 100-word answer that sounds as if it were culled from a press release. ) Mostly, though, listeners didn’t find her music compelling. Within AOL Time Warner, LindsayBuddy is spoken of as “an interesting experiment.”

But Mujica isn’t brooding about missteps. He is looking for new ways to turn IM into a business tool. One of his favorite examples involves A Walk to Remember, a movie starring MTV celebrity Mandy Moore that was released last year. That film is not likely to be mistaken for Citizen Kane. Critics called it a formulaic tear-jerker romance — and those were the kinder reviews. Its big break came when AIM offered users a chance to see a trailer and pictures of Moore ahead of the official release.

That bit of guerrilla marketing helped the movie find its audience with teens who liked Moore and were willing to gamble on the film itself. Eventually, A Walk to Remember brought in more than $40 million at the box office — a decent showing. And, as Mujica sees it, “We really made a difference.”

Discuss in the forums