Microsoft sows anger and confusion

In the past I’ve been hesitant on this blog to criticize the actions of other agencies and how they handle blog programs, even egregious examples like fake blogs being setup and other clear violations of the playground rules. It might be out of a sense of decorum – that it’s simply bad form to lay into a rival – or because should I screw up in the future I wouldn’t want to be dragged over the coals by those folks. I’m not sure what the reason is but it’s not something I’ve been anxious to do.

I feel the need, though, to chime in on the current situation involving Edelman and Microsoft. Microsoft, through a program setup and executed by Edelman, sent free Acer Ferrari laptops pre-loaded with the new Vista operating system to various bloggers. While it seems that some bloggers were contacted in advance asking if they were interested in getting the mailing others were surprised to find a laptop on their front porch (scroll down to Update #2 for Scott’s recounting of this). Whatever the case, it does not appear that either Edelman or Microsoft were requiring any positive coverage out of this. Certainly they were hoping for it but there doesnot appear to be any “If you don’t love it we’ll sue you” sort of language in any of the communications I’ve read.

Where we start to get murky is in the fate of the machines. To keep it, return it or do something else seems to have been the dilemma most bloggers were wrestling with and it’s this point that I think caused some of the imagined outrage. The email that Michael Arrington reposted at CrunchNotes makes it clear that what the bloggers did with the laptops was completely up to them to decide. All Microsoft asked was that they be notified of that decision when it was made. I certainly applaud Scott Beale’s decision to auction it off and donate the proceeds to the EFF but am disappointed that the guy was basically pressured by others into feeling bad about getting a gift. Scott did nothing wrong here. He disclosed that he got a machine, where he got it from and certainly didn’t sugarcoat how he’s not usually a Windows guy but thought this was still cool. He was open and honest and got hammered for it.

Some seem to think that it was Microsoft/Edelman’s responsibility to hold a gun to the head of the recipient and force them to disclose everything about how they came to be in possession of a new Vista-loaded laptop but I disagree. Disclosure is always – ALWAYS – in the hands of the media. Some unscrupulous marketers (and I’m not accusing Edelman or Microsoft of this) will always try to buy a good review by wining and dining influencers, reviewers and other opinion makers. It’s the ethical standard of those opinion makers that dictates to what extent they disclose any incentives they might have received.

Since I’ve been at MWW Group I have advised on many occasions that clients send products to bloggers to review, sample or otherwise check out. In fact we’re working on a significant program along these lines right now. Doing so is no different, at a basic level, than handing out free cookies to commuters outside a train station. You’re trying to influence that person’s opinion and, if things go well, they’ll share that opinion with others who will also be moved. This is just bigger because it’s an expensive laptop and not a package of cookies. But it’s the same motivation on the part of the marketer.

There were some mistakes made, or at least some glaring omissions in the planning and follow-up process that I think have contributed to the backlash. First, it’s unclear whether this is coming from Microsoft or Edelman. That’s a problem since, to my mind, there needs to be one person or group handling this. That prevents the confusion that will come from multiple figures thinking they’re in charge, something that can lead to contradictory and confusing messaging. It’s exactly that confusion that likely led to the second problem, which is this email to Marshall Kirkpatrick telling him the best thing he could do would be to return the laptop.

What strikes me most is the deafening silence from Steve Rubel. While I certainly don’t expect Steve to chime in on everything Edelman does, he’s in a unique position to clear up some of the misunderstanding and confusion that’s come up. Instead, he’s declaring this, that or the other thing “dead.” I implore you, Steve, weigh in on this. You’ve shown a willingness in the past to cover Microsoft “as a blogger” so I don’t think it would be out of bounds for you to take an opinion on this simply “as a blogger.”

As I mentioned, MWW Group is working with a client on a similar program in the near future. So, to wrap this up, I’m asking for the community’s input. Right now the program has three major points of initial contact with the bloggers we’re reaching out to: 1) What’s your address, cause X wants to send you something; 2) Here’s what the program is, please opt-in/out and 3) The actual product being mailed. So in these communication points how much do we need to pressure the blogger to disclose what they’re getting and why they got it? Right now there is some basic language there about how there’s no requirement that they blog about any part of this, we just thought they’d be interested and please let us know how it works out. Do we need to go further in the interest of avoiding any appearance of impropriety?

I’m interested to hear what everyone thinks. Feel free to leave a comment, email me at chris-at-mww.com or IM me at mmmthilk. I’d love to put up a follow-up post with everyone’s email or IM reactions but, of course, will be sure to get your permission before doing so.

LOTD: December 26th

Rounding some stuff up from before the holiday as well as this morning.

• An Australian court has ruled that simply linking to copyrighted material is enough to be an offense.
• Jackie and Ben show how one blogger’s efforts led to mainstream media coverage of some controversial cameras in downtown Chicago. That coverage then resulted in the cameras being removed.
• Shel Holtz is worried about the amount of spam pitches he and others are going to get thanks to Umbria’s new system of selling batches of URLs of bloggers to marketers.
• Shel also is talking about how old media can actually adapt to the new media world.
• If you’ve been itching for a chance to work with Joe Jaffe he’s got two ways we all can participate in the creation of his next book.
• Mack Collier is finding that his “Z-Lister” meme is having exactly the effect he hoped it would and sending new links to some off-the-beaten-path sites whose owners put up consistently good content.
• An excellent overview of YouTube, both its uses and dangers, from the LA Times.
• I’ve always been, well let’s just say skeptical of what Microsoft had in mind when it started mucking around with RSS. So I’m not encouraged by the patent filings by the company that have everyone buzzing.
• Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales got some money from a group of sources and will be attempting to launch a search engine to rival Google next year. The search wouldn’t be algorithm based but, like Wikipedia, rely on the judgment of the community to determine search results.
• Andrew Baron is trying to remind people he’s still around.
• I think Rick Klau from FeedBurner is right. If we can overcome the education gap that exists with RSS it can truly change the way content is delivered. As soon as anyone I know has discovered it they wonder how they ever searched the web without it.
• Everybody’s speculating that big media companies are lining up to buy AOL or Yahoo!. Yeah, cause the whole AOL/Time Warner thing worked out so fantastically.
• Business networking site LinkedIn has been valued at $250 million.
• The New York Times makes some media predictions for 2007.

LOTD: December 20th

Get a cup of coffee. I’m catching up from the last few days so there’s going to be quite of bit of news in here.

• Blogjackings seems like a nice new term for a practice, hijacking the URL of a legitimate site for nefarious purposes, that’s been going on for a while.
• The new version of Google’s Blogger is finally ready for prime-time.
• Once again bloggers are referred to as dirty ******** hippies. That’s us. All unwashed, socially awkward weirdos who live with our moms and don’t know how to talk to girls.
• Joe Jaffe spills the title of his upcoming book. An anxious audience drools.
• CC Chapman has a very cool PDF on marketing in Second Life.
• The Venice Project, the internet TV project from a couple of Skype founders, looks extremely interesting.
• A bunch of new websites are putting a new twist on matching up singles. They arrange for meetups on planes and other things like that, pairing one single person with another for a trip. I may have now officially seen everything.
• I hate to tell you, Facebook, but no matter how many times you say you’re not for sale some people are going to continue their speculation. Sorry.
• Sex sells, even when you’re talking about mainstream media coverage of Second Life.
• Finally, Phil Gomes finds some sharks with laser beams on their heads in Second Life.
• Josh Hallett has some justified problems with how the Florida Tourism Department is dealing with a site they setup for state residents. The main problem is that they seem to have no policy in place regarding negative comments on the site. This is something that everyone – everyone – needs to have thought out when they launch something like this.
• I’d be shocked by the news that the planned YouTube killer from a consortium of TV networks seems to be falling apart if it weren’t for the fact that I and everyone else saw this coming from the moment it was announced.

Time buys its grandma a gift card

I know that I’m supposed to be all flattered by Time magazine’s naming of me as their Person of the Year but the award is diluted slightly by the fact that it also awarded all of you the same honor.

That award is supposed to mark something truly special; it’s supposed to commemorate someone who made a lasting impact on their world. By naming “You” (or, I guess, “Us”) Time really copped out. I can’t decide if the editors who made this decision were lazy, trying to blatantly generate link-bait for the online world or just didn’t want to talk about those messy things (genocide, civil war, nuclear proliferation, etc) happening in non-U.S. parts of the world because it would make people feel bad.

Even worse, though, their profile of the citizen journalists included almost solely A-list bloggers and corporate executives like the founders of YouTube. To many people on the web those people, because of their incredible popularity and/or financial success are still “them” and not “us.”

This choice by Time is basically an attempt to play to the cheap seats. It’s a power chord in a stadium-ready anthem. It’s a chase scene. It’s a flatulence joke. It’s meant to make as many people as possible feel as good as possible as opposed to actually showing them what’s important.

We’re important not because Time has told us we are. The online community is important – and will continue to grow in importance – because we’ve used the power of self-publishing to fill in the gaps and pick up the slack left by the mainstream media. We talk about the things they’re not talking about. We connect with other people because doing so is easy in the online world. We create content because we can and no one else is.

The awarding of the Person of the Year to Us is an attempt by the mainstream media to bestow legitimacy on us lowly bloggers and podcasters that we don’t need. The producers of good content earn that legitimacy on their own and fight for it against the perceptions of others every day. It’s the MSM that needs to work on proving its relevance to the people and not the other way around.

So while some people are applauding this decision I’m not going to join them. I’ll continue to work hard to use the tools that allow for self-publishing to engage with an audience that finds what I write of interest. Everyone should do the same.

LOTD: December 15th

• Americans are spending a record amount of time, 8 1/2 hours a day, consuming media of any and all sorts according to a Census Bureau report. What I’d like to know is what KIND of media they’re consuming, professional or consumer-generated and in what proportion.
• CBS is relaunching CBS Records as an outlet for new artists that will be distributed through iTunes and whose songs will be featured on CBS TV shows. Great idea.
• People are house-hunting online before going out and about.
• Jeremiah talks about how social media outreach is (rightly) becoming an actual budget item at a number of large companies.
• News Corp. reportedly offered to buy digg for $100 million.
• When he was just on YouTube he was branded as a nut, but now a Coast Guard whistle-blower’s accusations have been investigated by some major media outlets and, guess what, he was right.
• Robert Niles at OJR has a good list of the problems that new online publishers often run into but should try to avoid.
• The Chicago Tribune’s Steve Johnson pops in an old CD-Rom and takes us on a trip down memory lane.
• A number of sites, including Last.fm and Bebo have come together to hold a contest looking for unsigned bands.
• Despite many people who are advocating a shift to a media-agnostic/message-specific mindset, most ad executives think media specialization is here to stay.
• Oh, like we didn’t all see the day coming when Google would start selling domains itself. The only surprise is that this didn’t happen two years ago.
• A number of European newspapers are finding that allowing people to design their own paper and print it PDF-style is allowing readers to connect with the papers better.
• Wow. When AOL re-structures it really restructures.

No, in fact, you are still marketing to people

Sorry, but I disagree with the basic premise that Max Kalehoff is basing this MediaPost column on. He says that it’s more important to think of how you’re marketing to algorithms as opposed to people. Since searches, which compile their results via those algorithms, are how people find brands, products and companies, it’s more important he thinks that you keep those in mind when drafting campaigns and online content.

This is exactly like the thinking that has led to the fall of traditional advertising and the rise of micro-targeted marketing. Agencies and others became so obsessed with how a commercial was going to look visually, what was going to look flashy and high-tech and what was funny and slowly become less concerned with what was actually connecting with the audience. If marketers start getting so obsessed with how metadata-friendly their content is they’re eventually going to forget that the whole point of being found is to reach out to the audience.

This is exactly the wrong direction to be going in. We do not need more focus on tweaking things so they’re found within searches. I don’t mean to say that there’s anything wrong with that being a goal – making the front page of Google results should be on every marketer’s to do list. But that’s something that we need to leave it to Google and other search engines to sort out.

Let me give you an example: Tom Biro is always sending me the Google searches he runs that contain phrases included in posts he’s written. The latest one, just today, was a search for “i love netflix.” The second result from that search is a post he wrote on his blog The Media Drop. Overlooking the fact that this is the kind of thing that just shouldn’t happen, it did happen and it’s not because Tom spends hours pouring over how meta-friendly his posts are. It’s because Tom is a good writer who has developed a following by putting up important and relevant information. He’s established himself to such as extent that his blog is ranked highly by Google and his traffic is representative of that.

That’s what marketers need to be spending their time on, building relationships and their own reputations and not figuring out how to manipulate their content to come up higher in search engines. If it happens, it’s because you deserve it, not because you gamed the system.

Newsgator makes changes, including bringing ads back

Not sure whether this is another “test” that accidentally got pushed live or not (I have a call in to a spokesperson) but I’m once again seeing Google AdSense ads appearing next to feeds within Newsgator Online.

Notice also that there’s now a small “+” sign next to each post. Everything is now coming through as a partial feed and you have to click that “+” to see the full text. Even if the full text is already displayed (if, say, someone has just written a one or two line post) any links are being stripped out of the post. You have to hit that “+” to see the links appear.

Again, I’ve got a call into the spokesperson I’d previously talked to about Newsgator adding advertising and will check back in here with any updates I have.

LOTD: December 14th

• Users of social networking sites can now connect via the phone thanks to a new click-to-call app called Jaxtr. You can’t actually see the phone number that you’re calling but clicking a link will connect you to the cell phone of the person you’re trying to reach.
• Thank you, Gartner, for throwing a stick of dynamite in the room by declaring that blogging will “peak” in 2007.
• The head of the Media Bloggers Association wants to be able to give some training to bloggers in journalistic best practices in order for them to be credentialed. Great idea.
• Just because there are some not nice things going on online does not mean you need to start leveling fines at everyday people over their blog content. The proposed legislation from Sen. John McCain is too draconian and it aimed at exactly the wrong people.
• Research that looks at a variety of retailer data shows the Long Tail in action as search enables people to find the right product for them, no matter how narrow the niche.
• ABC is doubling the amount of video content it supplies to Yahoo!. Of course this is totally unrelated to Amanda Congdon debuting her segment on ABC News, a debut that Rocketboom co-founder Andrew Baron says he’s none too thrilled with.
• One in four links within searches for a brand name go to consumer-generated media. That’s kind of huge.
• Neville Hobson rounds-up some of the discontent over the recently concluded Le Web 3 and the way it was seemingly taken over by French politicians.
• Go listen to the “boozcast” with David Armano and Greg Verdino. It’s a hoot.
• Speaking of David, don’t miss his round-up of people’s thoughts on the most significant take-away from 2006. Lots of smart people sounding, well, very smart.

“Boy, that escalated quickly… I mean, that really got out of hand fast.”

Like Eric Kintz I think it will be interesting to watch as more companies that compete directly with each other open their own blogs and use them as a means of targeting those competitors and controlling the information flow. That’s kind of an area that gets ignored when people are corporate blogging. Sure, blogs are great ways to speak directly to stakeholders and consumers, but how are they really utilized to position a company in its marketplace?

A lot of this is going to depend on how much influence the marketing department has on the blog’s content. If they’re the ones writing it or approving the content then the conversation could move from one of impassioned people sharing their viewpoints to one that becomes simply a battle of copypoints – and we have enough of that in the form of paid advertising and press releases.

Personally, I think this polite yet blunt. Think about watching the British Parlimentary debates on C-SPAN (don’t try to say you’ve never done this). One member gets up and goes through his or her bit and then someone from the opposition gets up and says, “My honorable colleague…” and then proceeds to call him or her the equivalent of a raving lunatic. Get gritty. Fight for position. Back up your point of view with facts (not spin) and then dive into the fight. That makes for both good reading and shows that you as a company are passionate about what you do and how good you feel you are.

LOTD: December 12th

• Another fake blog has been outed, this one from Sony, who apparently set up a site that was just a tad too enthusiastic in its love for the PSP.
• Mike Arrington has some interesting developments in the long-rumored Yahoo/Facebook saga that shed light on how this has progressed over time.
• A number of retail sites that list deals and such are using RSS to allow people to get updates and alerts that are relevant to them.
• NBC Universal’s iVillage has established a presence in Second Life that includes a regular “girls night out” session on the iVillage island.
• Speaking of Second Life, some are wondering if the real-life energy usage of so many avatars is sustainable from an environmental point of view.
• Netflix, in their upgrading of their Previews service, might have tipped their hand regarding a future movie download service.
• YouTube is taking some measures to make the site a little more comfortable for CBS by adding a layer of comment filtering onto clips from the network.
• Microsoft is taking RSS into the 3D realm, bringing back all sorts of bad memories of Jaws 3D.