ASSOCIATION FOR CONSUMER RESEARCH Labovitz School of Business & Economics, University of Minnesota Duluth, 11 E. Superior Street, Suite 210, Duluth, MN 55802 Opening the Black Box of Buzzing Bloggers: Understanding How Consumers Deal With the Tension Between Authenticity and Commercialism in Seeded Word of Mouth Campaigns Robert Kozinets, York University, Canada Kristine De Valck, HEC, France Sarah Wilner, York University, Canada Andrea Wojnicki, University of Toronto, Canada Word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing has gained ground as a powerful communication tool. One way in which marketers tap into consumers’ WOM potential is by seeding products to influencers. These consumers take on a dual role, being both target and agent in the WOM episode. Because of cultural contradictions between the roles of consumer (authenticity) and marketer (commercialism), this dual role is likely to cause tension. This paper examines how consumer-agents and final target consumers deal with this duality by means of a netnographic study and experiments. [to cite]: Robert Kozinets, Kristine De Valck, Sarah Wilner, and Andrea Wojnicki (2008) ,"Opening the Black Box of Buzzing Bloggers: Understanding How Consumers Deal With the Tension Between Authenticity and Commercialism in Seeded Word of Mouth Campaigns", in NA - Advances in Consumer Research Volume 35, eds. Angela Y. Lee and Dilip Soman, Duluth, MN : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 49-51. [url]: http://www.acrwebsite.org/volumes/13329/volumes/v35/NA-35 [copyright notice]: This work is copyrighted by The Association for Consumer Research. For permission to copy or use this work in whole or in part, please contact the Copyright Clearance Center at http://www.copyright.com/.