The latest uproar in the blogosphere bubble is the following “scandal” exposed by Valleywag: John Battelle’s ad network Federated Media recruited top bloggers, including Om Malik, Paul Kedrosky, Mike Arrington, Matt Marshall and Fred Wilson to write quotes about Microsoft’s “people-ready” ad campaign.
In other words, Microsoft paid independent bloggers to say something nice about the company, albeit indirectly — the quotes ran in ads and the ads ran on the bloggers’ sites. I have to admit when I first saw these ads, which have been running for months, I was confused about the quotes. They seemed to be from postings written by the much-respected writers and they seemed to be endorsements of Microsoft.
In reality, the quotes never quite crossed that line. In launching this “conversational marketing” campaign, Microsoft simply asked the bloggers to write a squib about what “people ready meant to them” and then slugged those quotes next to an ad for Microsoft.
Even though not direct endorsements of Microsoft, the quotes in the ads are disreputable nonetheless and can only tarnish the reputations of the bloggers in the question, and of blogging in general, which is still struggling to achieve acceptance as a valid form of opinion, analysis and, yes, journalistic reliability.
From what I’ve read, only two of the indicted bloggers responded appropriately to Valleywag’s torpedo. The first is Om Malik. Om doesn’t pussyfoot or rationalize or try to explain away the ad campaign in the context of conversational marketing or any of that bullsh*t. He simply apologizes and says he won’t do it again.
So without making any excuses, to my readers, if participation in Microsoft’s advertising campaign has made you doubt my integrity even for a second, then I apologize.
The second is Paul Kedrosky, who thinks he should have just said “no” to the ad campaign at the outset.
But everybody should be aware that this sort of thing — “buying” positive comments — goes on all the time in one sector that I know very well, supposed independent media and tech research outfits. And Microsoft leads the way, but by no means is alone, in dangling financial remuneration in exchange for seals of approval from so-called independent analysts.
Take this recent press release by Microsoft regarding the renaming of its IPTV software. Three-quarters of the way down the release is a quote from an analyst at In-Stat that praises, if not the product itself, then the basic concept of the product (sound familiar?).
“As the digital TV services market continues to grow, service providers will search for competitive differentiators that set them apart in terms of features and overall consumer experience,” said Michelle Abraham, principal analyst at In-Stat. “A compelling and competitive feature set, powered by one of the strongest consumer brands in the world and the ability to create unique applications and services, is the recipe to convert consumers’ demand into service revenues.”
That quote made its way into dozens of (admittedly second-tier) press articles as if In-Stat had independently come up with the idea that Microsoft software is a cool thing and with no reference to the fact that it came from Microsoft’s own press release. More importantly, I would wager a lot of money that Microsoft is a client of In-Stat’s or somehow explicitly or implicitly promised something in exchange for that quote.
I’m not picking on In-Stat because all of the supposed independent analysis firms do it — Yankee, Gartner, Forrester, you name it. And every time I read a press release like this, I feel sorry for the analysts named because they’re willing to trade on their reputations for a short-term…what? bump in recognition? money?
However, unlike the current mini-scandal, almost no one ever gets upset about how willing these analysts are to “sell” their opinions. In fact, for reasons that escape me, these analysis firms never suffer any pain for their, well, payola. They never seemingly make anybody doubt their integrity.
Perhaps Federated Media thought that Microsoft’s conversational marketing campaign for the blogosphere would play out the same way it does in the independent research firm-sphere. But Valleywag didn’t play along and that’s a very good thing.
Cynthia Brumfield at 9:13 AM|Comments(0)
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