Paul Scrivens, who I recently met at the Blog Business Summit, has an interesting post on Being the Hype, making the case that hype can be overblown, like the boy who cried wolf, leading to negative effects: "If you continue to hype every product you release, hype will no longer be generated. This is what 37signals was doing wrong in my opinion. It's not that they are releasing a number of products or that many of them, some will argue, share the same qualities. It's that instead of just telling us that a new app will be launching next week or simply just launching it, we get a taste of our 4th product marketing speech which begins to wear on people. Apple gets hype because they don't bother hyping anything themselves. The rumor sites take care of that. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Microsoft hypes every new OS and has no chance of living up to their own hype." Amen. [tags: paul+scrivens]

Russell Beattie hit a few nerves with his recent PR People Are Morons. His contention that there are many, many clueless PR flacks out there is well-founded, but the blanket indictment of PR as a whole has folks like Shel Israel and Anil Dash slapping his wrist. My hope is that the PR professionals that do get it will quickly wise up their clueless comrades, or else the PR trade will continue its plunge in respect. Russell is the one willing to overgeneralize to get attention on the real problem: PR folks attempting to short circuit the blogosphere for personal gain. [pointer from Micheal O'Connor Clark] [tags: PR People Are Morons, Russell Beattie, social+media]

Boston Globe reports that "Forrester Research Inc. reported last month that 64 percent of marketers surveyed are interested in advertising in blogs, the highest percentage compared with other emerging interactive channels, such as instant messaging or video on demand."

Constantin Basturea does a masterly job in an open letter to the silent management of Ketchum Personalized Media in Dear Ketchum, welcome to the blogosphere: "When it launched the Personalized Media service, Ketchum had some good ingredients for preparing a smooth entry in blogland: a (sort of) blog (and RSS feeds, by default), a podcast (well, almost), and a collaboration with a PR blogger. But it just didn’t managed to put all these elements together, which kinda sucks when you’re such a big PR firm, and didn’t managed to listen to those who talked about the launch and change what didn’t work, which definitely sucks in the blogosphere (no conversation = bad, bad, bad in my Cluetrain book)."

He cites chapter and verse as to how the got it wrong -- almost everywhere -- and how to fix it. I bet we don't hear from them, as Constantin suggests is necessary, Monday AM. Anything this screwed up requires a committee of important people, and it will take a committee of important people at least a week to respond.

A must read.

Neville Hobson touches on the reasons why would-be clients should be skeptical of Ketchum Public Relations new Ketchum Personalized Media Service:

Yet I can't help but wonder how much credibility, if not faith, you'd want to place in a PR agency which enters this area where:

1. they don't have a blog,
2. none of the people named in the press release has a blog (none that I could find with a bit of Googling),
3. there's no RSS feed on their website,
4. the new offering announced yesterday isn't mentioned anywhere on the website apart from in the press release, and
5. the offering appears to be a separate service, not integrated with PR.

Picking nits? you may ask. No, I don't think so.

I do think that if I were a potential client, I'd want to know what hands-on experience they have to back up the talk in the press release about what the service comprises and their skillsets, and how it all fits into the overall PR services they offer. In conjunction with reviewing the CVs of all the people mentioned in the announcement and reading their blogs, and perhaps reading a paper on the Ketchum website called The Challenge of Blogs to Public Relations (undated but a thoughtful paper, in my view), I'd still want to know what hands-on experience they offer with new channels that demonstrates their understanding of them as integrated elements of a credible PR offering.

Anyone can say they can do something, and produce an impressive-looking list of people. But in this field of new-media communication, you'd better be able to walk your talk. Otherwise, the only word that comes to mind is 'bandwagon.'

Ketchum, if I were you, I'd at least start a blog immediately.

Actually, it's way too late for that. They had better hire someone to run or front the service with some credibility. Like Michael O'Connor Clark, for example. It's way too late to start a blog, and point to it as some kind of success story.

And its even worse than that. The Challenge of Blogs to Public Relations paper that Neville suggested was thoughtful, has a bunch of outsider-looking-in mumbo-jumbo in it. It is also written by some faceless, nameless editor who isn't named, but who lobs a bunch of softball questions at Ketchum's media 'experts':

In its current form, how would you describe a blog?

AB [Adam Brown, director of eKetchum and 'expert' on new media]: A blog is the output of personal journalism. It's a diary of its owner, a news-clipping service of its moderator, a minister preaching to the choir. In most cases, though, it's navel gazing. Most blogs are simply people writing to themselves for their own personal edification about what interests them, with the idea of an external audience almost an afterthought. [emphasis mine]

[Yikes. This is Ketchum's expert, mind you.]

NS [Nicholas Scibetta, Director of Ketchum’s Communications and Media Strategy Group and an 'expert' on traditional mass media]: There is a strong element of personal gratification to them. Blogs tend to stick to one topic because the author is passionate about it. To Adam's point, though, I believe a majority of the bloggers are writing about issues that mean a lot to them and want to get their opinions out to a mass audience. Blogs are important because opinion influencers read them and they give a voice to people who are typically outside of the mainstream media.

[One topic? Mass audience?]

Are blogs just a passing trend, or do they represent a permanent part of the media landscape that PR practitioners must reckon with?

NS: Blogs are rapidly becoming authoritative news sources. There's a whole level of personalization with a blog that represents a new form of media that won't go away soon. Proof positive of that is the big move of outlets such as The Wall Street Journal to post blogs themselves. These media mainstays are slower to move into new technologies and new information channels, so they think this is something actively capturing consumer interest. That said, the blogs that will be around in the long run will be those that "cross over" and influence the dialogue in the mainstream media.

[Or the ones that remain standing when MSM finishes its death glide?]

AB: We'll probably see with blogs something similar to what happened in the first years of the Internet, when everyone threw up their own Web sites. Ninety-nine percent of these personal sites are now ghost towns. These sites were developed in the heat of the moment of the novelty of the Internet but then were never updated. You're going to see much the same thing with blogs. You're going to see a lot of small, one-person blogs that people have started because it's the newest thing, but then these will fall by the wayside. Some of the blogs published by more well established organizations will then become that much more of authoritative information sources.

[It's a fad, it's just like websites in the 90s, yada, yada, yada.]

I actually like the comments of the mass media guy better than the new media 'expert', but only by comparison. This is once again the natterings of those most threatened by the rise of social media, who see their business model being sideswiped by something large and fast-moving, but whose exact shape and dimensions they cannot fathom.

Better advice for the blog-lorn is much more likely to come from people who really understand the social dynamics in the blogosphere, not those attempting to triangulate on what is happening using the old terms and metaphors of broadcast and mainstream PR.

[This was not intended to be a plug for Corante's Social Media Advisory Service (SMAShmouth), per se, but I will admit my bias and potential conflict of interest, since we are in the business of providing advice in this area. Maybe Ketchum should hire us, so we could rework their jargon into something less likely to raise the hackles of the bloggers their clients want so desperately to influence!]

Robert Manning of UPS is stridently stuck in second gear in his recent piece: Blogging Is Not Fundamental.

Please, enough about blogs already.

As someone who makes his living in interactive marketing, I'm ecstatic over the flurry of effusive commentary around digital media and marketing, everything from "the vanishing mass market" and the ROI of search marketing, to new interactive television formats and podcasting. It's positive affirmation to read forecasts such as the recent Adweek report predicting that by year's end advertising revenues generated by Yahoo! and Google will rival those revenues by the big three television networks. Interactive marketing has truly arrived.

What I love about blogs is the authenticity of voice, how they further democratize web publishing, and how they provide more relevant information through contextual links. What concerns me about blogs is the signal to noise ratio -- do we really need all these niche, special-interest blogs, or will it become increasingly difficult to find relevance amidst the seas of personal web journals (or diatribes) without much to offer the broader constituency?

What I propose for those in the digital marketing realm is to stop chasing the latest fad and concentrate on the inherent utility of the medium. Digital marketers need to get back to the fundamentals: What are the inherent qualities of digital marketing that warrant an even larger share of the overall marketing spend? Digital marketing is non-linear, interactive, targetable, measurable, and most important, user-initiated -- it puts user choice and personal preference at the forefront of the experience.

Well, well, well. I guess we ought to just shut up and let the real professionals explain 'digital marketing' to would-be-marketers.

Manning's real metaphor is the individual as a consumer of information, a little pacman, zipping around taking a bit here, a nibble there. Manning has progressed from broadcast and mass media metaphors (industrial age) to those of microcast and niche media (information age), but he is reluctant to move into the social era: its a social medium, where individuals are interacting, and there won't be any -casting at all.

But then, this is example the sort of push back we will see from corporate types, who are struggling madly to get the genii back into the bottle, so they can 'attack markets' through 'segmentation strategies' instead of engaging in direct conversations with people, and more inportantly, to be willing to sit on the conversations that people outside the company are naturally involved in already.

The signal to noise ratio is irrelevant, a term brought in from engineering, and it only makes sense in the context of pushing a message through a communication channel. Social media are in part based on the rejection of the 'pushing messages to the market' mindset.

In the blogosphere, people who write dumb, uninteresting stuff will just have no interesting conversations going on, since we vote with our attention and links, here. The chaff is winnowed out by the activities of millions of independent actions. What remains are the impacts that these conversations have on those who participate. Traditional marketers hate this sort of paradigm, because they have no control, their 'messages' are changed, and their positioning is upended.

For all his love of 'digital marketing' I think Manning just thinks of it as a new bag of tricks to herd the couch potatoes, and control their 'buying behavior'. Its like the 1990s television mantra of 500 channels liberating us. But the same people who love 500 channels are terrified of the prospect of infinite channels, which really means no channels, no control, everyone finding their own shows whenever they want, the death of prime programming, and the upending of the entire worldview of television... which is happening right now.

So, beware of marketers who say they love the Internet, but that blogging is a fad. It's like saying you love democracy, but are opposed to univeral suffrage.

[Pointer from Scoble]

I came across an interesting article on News.com today titled "Blogs: The next big thing for advertisers?". The article deals with the ways that blogs are being monetized, assuming that the technique is to mimic the broadcasting model:

[from News.com, "Blogs: The next big thing for advertisers?"]

Any group of bloggers can set up a network, as a group of liberal bloggers have done. Altogether, the Liberal Blog Advertising Network can provide an advertiser with a million or so page views a week in one fell swoop. The ads will appear on all the blogs maintained by members of the network, so they become a form of broadcasting, or blogcasting. Blog readership is demonstrably growing, and pretty soon such networks will be able to compete at least with cable television for ability to reach viewers.

I think that this is an obvious answer to a difficult question. It leaves me still wondering, however, if the barrier to bigger and better blogging business models is really the distribution. Unfortunately, the fearful part is that they don't control the message, the presentation and most problematic, the creator. The operative word here being control.

Ross Mayfield recently did a length analysis of the role of fear in corporate blogging (and social software). If you've not seen it, I'd recommend reading "Fear, Greed and Social Software". It's been shown time and time again that the people trying to co-opt the medium usually don't get it. Isn't it ironic that we're more surprised that someone "gets it" than anything else?

But the worst part of getting the "big media" buy in, seems to be the disconnect in terms of what they are buying in to. I came across a great piece on The Long Tail Blog, "The dangers of 'Headism'", that hits on many of the issues with trying to force this square peg through the round hole. Though you should read the entire post, the section on Incentives is extremely relevant:

[from The Long Tail Blog, "The dangers of 'Headism'"]

Likewise, the incentives for the producers and creators of these products change as you go from hits to niches; Madonna may be in it mostly for the money, but I sure wasn't when I slapped a bass badly in my misspent twenties. Most authors, meanwhile, write books to find readers, not riches (although those readers can lead to lucrative consulting fees, speeches or tenure; books are powerful marketing vehicles for personal brands). And plenty of up-and-coming independent filmmakers would be only to happy to have their movies freely spread far and wide on bittorrent to build their reputation.

Michael O' Connor Clark is back and blogging at Flackster after a long hiatus. He is rolling out a multi part series: The Seven Deadly Agency Types.

An agonizingly funny spoof of a trendy marketing boutique:Huh? We do stuff.[pointer from Jeffrey Zeldman]

In a recent study, NOP found that Word-of-Mouth Ain't Just Blogging ...:

When asked how they make recommendations, 80% of consumers say they make them in-person, followed by 68% who say they make them over the telephone. This phenomenon is even stronger among the Influentials(SM), (the one in ten Americans who tell the other nine how to vote, where to eat and what to buy, according to over 60 years of NOP World research) with 90% of this group making in-person recommendations and 79% making recommendations by phone. Surprisingly, the study found that less than 40% of consumers use e-mail to make recommendations to others, including via personal e-mail (37%), by e-mail forwarding (32%) or through mass e-mails (12%). While slightly higher percentages of Influentials use e-mail (personal e-mail 53%, e-mail forwarding 39% and mass e-mails 18%), face-to-face communication still far outweighs this medium.

I would be interested in the methodology of the study: did they simply ask people to relate what they had done in the previous year? It has been shown that such recollections are inaccurate.

Still, I am not surprised that most of our recommending goes on F2F, really. F2F is the most powerful social networking mode, after all, and even those of us who are intensely wired still interact with friends, family, neighbors, and colleagues on a F2F basis regularly. My bet is that there would be a larger proportion of digital recommendations with those who spend more time online, and of course, those that blog within a larger community of readers will have their recommendations heard by a larger group of people. Just looking at the proportions of recommendations made won't capture the number of people influenced. Its not just one-to-one communication, there's one-to-many, and many-to-many forms as well.

[pointer from Emergence Marketing]

[tags: Word Of Mouth]

Over at Strange Attractor, Suw recapitulates a fracas that transpired over the past few days with Dave Balter, the president of BzzAgent. I missed the whole thing because of an email server problem, but suffice it to say that Dave has apologized for calling Suw and Corante liars. I don't think the controversy about BzzAgent and it's social spam form of marketing is done, but perhaps this flap is dying down.

[tags: BzzAgent]

I have been way too nuts recently to do a good job of dissecting a recent piece in Darwin (where I used to have amonthly column) entitled Enough With the Blogging Already. I guess this the start (or more) of the inevitable blog antihype from those that don't get it, don't buy in, or who hope it will all just go away. I refute the author's points one by one, below, in line.

Graeme Thickins

1. Business doesn’t do “passion.” That, according to the experts, is the prime requirement for launching and successfully building a voice with a blog. On the contrary, business is about logic, predictability, executing a strategy, even-temperedness, a steady hand – and, yes, earning a profit (something absent in the field of blogging). Name one successful CEO known for passion who’s lasted beyond a short flameout period (okay, besides Steve Jobs).

Yikes. I thought all sucessful businesses spon around the axis of some sort of passion: service to the customer, building the best product, or fighting to provide the absolutely lowest cost. Something. Companies operating without passion are doomed. But anyway, I think passion is only one of many key elements to successful blogging, not the key.

2. Business doesn’t like gossip. The blogosphere is well known as a caldron [sic] of innuendo and over-the-back-fence chatter. (That’s not to say some political blogs haven’t helped get to the truth in some notable instances -- such as the Dan Rather incident. But we’re talking business here.) The fact remains that business people still have two big questions when it comes to this blogging phenomenon: Who would I trust out there? And, what would I get out of slogging through all this uncontrolled chit-chat?

Hmmm. And the traditional media aren't? I know lots of firms that are trying hard to use media, in general, to spread "buzz" -- hard to distinguish from gossip -- and gravitate to places where people are exchanging information that is personally important to them with others that likewise are interested: gossip.

3. Business doesn’t like doing public experiments. Again, this seems to be one of the favorite recent themes of the hypesters: that businesses should start blathering with their “corporate voice.” But a mainstream business doesn’t let just one person speak for all its interests. And that applies even to the CEO – or, I should say, especially to the CEO in the current climate of ethics lapses and Sarbanes-Oxley.

The idea behind corporate blogging is to have a dialogue with your market, not just another vehicle for the corporate voice. That's why Sun, Macromedia, and Microsoft's efforts have been so effective. It's not Gates yammering, its hundreds or thousands of Microsoftees talking about what they are up to. It's not just another pipe, Graeme, its a conversation.

4. Business doesn’t bare its soul, and certainly not its personal diary. In fact, companies don’t do diaries, unless they happen to be one-person firms that do blogs. It should come as no surprise that business does not choose to hang out its dirty laundry for all to see, which is exactly what some proponents of blogs say companies should do. (I’m not making this up.)

Many businesses have been successful at involving their markets through an ongoing serialization of information regrading product roll-outs, response to critical issues (Bhopal) , and corporate events (like mergers). Many are not. The notion of transparency is not solely a question of blogging: blogging is merely a medium for such things. But, if a company is not interested in the benefits of that sort of interaction, they certainly won't gravitate to blogging.

5. Business is already time-strapped and blogs burn time like nobody’s business. Roger McNamee, famed Silicon Valley VC and private equity investor, recently appeared on CNBC business news. When asked where he thought the next big investment ideas and business opportunities would be, he said: “People don’t have enough time.” So, who has time to waste?

The implication is that reading blogs is wasting time, I suppose.

Pew Internet research has shown that every hour spent ont he Internet is an hour not spent watching TV. Robert Putnam pointed out in Bowling Alone that while most Americans feel they have no time to get involve in social actitivities -- like the Kiwanis, political activism or league bowling -- they still manage to watch a lot of TV. Over 4 hours per day in the US. This number has been steadily growing, and the more channels there are, the more people have been watching: at least until recently, since the rise of Internet 2.0.

Of course, I bet Graeme would make some convoluted argument about CEOs versus the rank-and-file -- but I don't buy into the whole corporate myth of the "Great Man" -- a subject for a different post.

6. Businesses already communicate well in various ways. And they don’t just do that willy-nilly. They carefully manage and account for their communications, especially those deemed to be “business records,” which includes e-mail and instant messaging. They must also comply with government regulations covering some of these forms of communications – archiving e-mail, for example – or face severe penalties and fines if they screw up. You’ll understand, then, why they’re not exactly clamoring for a new form.

Oh yeah, companies are in general doing a great job of communicating with their markets. I guess Graeme missed the Cluetrain, and isn't reading the wide range of writing about how business communications are desperately in need of rethinking, given the Internet and generational changes.

Anyway, the great majority will resist adoption of new innovations until all the risk is shaken out, courtesy of earlier adoptors. But don't try to tell me that those who move earlier don't gain an advantage: they do.

7. Businesses are advertisers, and advertisers don’t like blogs. Take it from an expert, Peter Horan, CEO of About.com (recently acquired by the New York Times Co.): “Advertisers don't want to advertise on someone's personal home page, they don't like advertising in forums, they don't like advertising in blogs. It's a media business. Media is about getting to critical mass and about getting advertiser support.” (From an excellent interview by Mark Glaser appearing on USC’s Online Journalism Review, in which Horan is also quick to point out that About.com’s business is not a blogging model, as many might think.)

Many blogs -- like those at Corante -- are not personal home pages. (Aren't home pages dead?) What advertisers want is cost-effective contact with qualified buyers. The plummeting percentages in analog media (see recent Chris Anderson post) demonstrate that people are defecting from print, TV, and radio, and going digital. Even digital media from traditional media outlets are dropping. So, no matter what people may say about what they want, ultimately they will go where the people are. If people want to read blogs, then advertisers will have to figure out how to advertise there, if they want to connect with people.

8. Business and politics don't mix well. If companies ever do politics, it's usually through their industry associations (which have lobbyists to play that game) while they do business. Only a tiny fraction of businesses employ their own lobbyists or government relations people. Most won't be online participating in endless chatter about what happened in today's city council meeting.

Ok, but I don't know what that has to do with blogs in general. It's a widespread misunderstanding -- based on the media frenzy at the national conventions last year -- that blogs are all about politics, but blogs can be about anything.

9. Business writing style and blogger style don’t even come close. Editing is the major missing ingredient in the latter. Most of the content of the blogosphere is badly lacking in proper usage, punctuation, organization and more. And there seems to be an unstated blogger’s creed of “Why say something in 100 words when you can say it in 1,200?” Once people see the alternative, they realize they actually do prefer copy that’s readable, coherent and to the point – puh-lease, to the point!

Spare me. The best bloggers are great writers, and basic business writing is in general soulless, superlative larded, and jingoistic. People in general want a point of view expressed in the first person: an authority expressing strong beliefs in lucid prose. Most business writing and journalism lasks those features: no True Voice.

10. Businesses have other ways of dealing with promoting their stances. The corporate communications and public relations profession is remarkably quiet in all the rah-rah hype of blogging. Here’s but one example of their lack of buy-in: the League of American Communications Professionals recently published a newsletter on the topic of “Converting a Corporate Cause to a Grassroots Campaign via the Web.” The b-word never even appeared.

The who? The American Marketing Association is running a national series of conferences on blogging (I will be speaking at one in NYC this June, for example), and the American Business Media association just held a meeting on the topic. There are scores of PR professionals blogging regularly, and recommending that their clients work to incorporate blogging into their media mix... as quickly as possible.

Well, a short rebuttal has become a long counterpoint. Graeme has run out all the classic parts of the Wet Blanket List: if this was important we'd be doing it already, there are better ways to do this, this is just the old stuff in new wrappings, the establishment (in this case, the old-line Communications folks) thinks this new stuff is dumb, etc. Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions points out that the emergence of any new paradigm -- one that invalidates a previous worldview -- will be subjected to these sorts of attacks, independent of the actual issues that differentiate the new from the old. And, of course, those that espouse the new paradigm will be personally discredited and attacked by the establishment.

I don't know who Graeme Thickins is, or what he does, but he is playing the role here of an advocate of the Media Counter-Reformation. I expect that those arguing against blogging will get increasingly strident as more businesses adopt blogging as a core element of their communications plans, and the old ways start to fall down. Jobs will be lost, careers ended, and money that historically flowed through old line PR, communications firms, and media companies will find new channels into other pockets.

A number of people, including Scoble and David Berlind, wag their finger at Microsoft's Jeff Raikes for launching an antique-style web column instead of a blog: and no RSS? Scoble says people like this should be fired.

How did I miss this news?

[from E-Commerce News: Technology: New Version of MSN Messenger Released]

In its latest bid to make money on free Internet services, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Latest News about Microsoft is betting that consumers will be willing to use their instant messaging Latest News about instant messaging identities as billboards for products ranging from Sprite to Adidas sneakers.

The newest version of MSN Messenger instant messaging product, released late yesterday, allows consumers to download free backgrounds, pictures and other content tied to specific ad campaigns. The hope is that users will then share those downloads with other consumers -- providing another boost to advertisers, who pay Microsoft for the privilege.
Attracting Users

Blake Irving, a corporate vice president with Microsoft's MSN online unit, said the company hopes to attract users who are so taken by the advertising campaigns that they choose to associate themselves with the brand -- much like a person might buy a Starbucks (Nasdaq: SBUX) Latest News about Starbucks. coffee mug.

Yikes. I hate self-identity building through brand affiliation in the abstract, and in my IM client in specific.

That reminds me, I am going to do a mockup of what the perfect real-time desktop client should look like, in the hopes that someone out there will read it, and build it for me. Lord knows, I have explained the ideas to dozens of real-time technology companies, and to date no one has come close. Next week. I promise.

[pointer from John Husband]

[Arieanna Foley blogged about this here at Get Real recently, and I missed it!]

Holy smokes... I previously posted an Xtreme podcasting story. This update caught me by surprise... read the following and find the audio report below...

My colleague Chris Valentine now writes:

We received another message from my Italian mountaineer friend Lorenzo Gariano today. He and his team, who are intending to climb Everest via the north col in late May, are trapped in Katmandu, indirectly due to action by Maoist guerillas. The city's bus drivers are refusing to take them to Base Camp without armed escort.

Check out the 12 Apr 2005 13:37 (UK time) audio report, or subscribe to the RSS/podcast feed at the bottom of that page.

[UPDATE: "In a chat with one of the climbers in Kathmandu, ExplorersWeb has learned the details of the Maoist attack involving two Russian climbers en route from Kathmandu to the border town of Nyamare Saturday.". See also BBC article 'Meeting Nepal's Maoists' for more background.]

Technorati Tags: podcasting, xtreme, everest, maoist

Edelman and Intelliseek have released a report (see here) that warns the corporate types to get hip to the blogosphere, or all us fringe lunatics will out you.

Joe Lepper

[from PR crises loom for firms that fail to 'respect' bloggers]

[The report] urges firms "to respond quickly, with the facts and with respect" to unfavourable comments made on blogs. Above all, firms should never lie because "those in the 'blogosphere' will find out and humiliate you".

Key blunders by firms include making unfounded criticism against bloggers, pretending to be someone you are not and paying people to write kind things about your firm.

When approaching bloggers to attempt to get publicity, correspondence must be: short; snappy; relevant; fit the tone of the site; and never an obvious advertisement. Useful information such as website links and offers to answer questions are also popular among bloggers.

I am not so sure about the "short; snappy" idea. I would rather that it was crafted to meet the sensibilities of my blog.

The report highlights Mazda's BR (Blog Relations) disaster:

One of the worst examples of an attempt to engage with bloggers, highlighted in the study, was a move by Mazda last year to gain publicity via blogging for its Mazda 3. Blogs, purportedly from anonymous bloggers, were found to be sponsored by advertisers working for Mazda.

Pete Blackshaw, chief marketing officer at Intelliseek, said: "Mazda totally ignored the importance of transparency. Corporate blogs are OK, but they must be labelled and identified as such.

"Bloggers are savvy, inherently sceptical, defensive of their medium and able to sniff out imposters quickly."

[Pointer from Ben Silverman, who states "I haven't read the report yet, but probably will once I have some time and I'm bored out of my skull."]

Monetizing the implicit social capital that high Google rank represents seems to be a constant theme in the blogosophere these days. Yesterday, I participated in a debate (via Flashmeeting) moderated by Alex Williams, and involving Marc Canter, Jason Calcanis, Stephen J. King (CEO of Marqui) and me: the topic was Marqui's controversial marketing program to pay bloggers to blog about Marqui and its products.

Jason and I have stated endlessly that this is an immoral and ultimately ineffective way to market. The bloggers involved are strip mining their credibility for the sake of near term cash. Marqui may have gained some press from this, but it is a flash-in-the-pan, a one time finesse: now that its been done, no one else will get all the publicity that Marqui has from this campaign, and even Marquis will find that the program -- if extended into the long term -- simply won't work.

Mark and Stephen argue that they were completely open and transparent: bloggers clearly state they are being paid, and since transparency is a key element of trust, surely bloggers in the program will retain their credibility. Marc in particular makes the point that the Internet is open to all, the blogosphere is not ruled by us, or anyone. He and Marqui are free to create whatever sorts of marketing approaches they want to.

I agree that transparency is a key element in trust: but it is not sufficent alone. And it is this very transparency that seems to create the ambiguity about Marquiism. If the bloggers were taking the payola and not disclosing it, we wouldn't be having this conversation. But the liar who tells you that he is a liar is not trustworthy. So I don't buy that argument.

I also disagree with Marc about the freedoms afforded us in the Blogosphere. It is a shared space, a commons. Just because we share the common doesn't mean you can overgraze it with a too-large herd of sheep. We must agree on some conventions of conduct, otherwise no one will be able to trust anyone. And this model of advertsing subverts the trust network that underlies the blogosphere; ultimately, it will fail.

Marc has made the case that its a social experiment, and it seems to have worked relative to Marqui's goals: to make a big splash for small money. But the experiment has not been conducted scientifically, and no one has extrapolated the curve. What if some group of bloggers gained so many sponsors through Marqui-like programs that all of their blog entries were bought and paid for? How long would they have readers? How many links would they generate? How quickly would their social capital zero out? It's just another form of social spam, where the bloggers are polluting the ongoing conversation, and making it less valuable.

Added to this ongoing debate (we have been arguing since November) is the new, shiny Wordpress affair, where it has come to light that that blogging technology company has allowed a third party to leverage Wordpress' high Google rank to game the search results:

Waxy.org

[from Search Engine Spam]

The Problem. Wordpress is a very popular open-source blogging software package, with a great official website maintained by Matt Mullenweg, its founding developer. I discovered last week that since early February, he's been quietly hosting at least 120,000 168,000 articles on their website. These articles are designed specifically to game the Google Adwords program, written by a third-party about high-cost advertising keywords like asbestos, mesothelioma, insurance, debt consolidation, diabetes, and mortgages. (Update: Google is actively removing every article from their results, but here's a saved copy of the first page of results. You can still view about 25,000 results on Yahoo. Or try this search tool, which searches multiple Google datacenters.)

Why Wordpress? The Wordpress homepage has a very high Google Pagerank of 8/10, largely because every Wordpress-powered blog links to the Wordpress homepage by default. The high pagerank affects their ranking in Google search results, making context-sensitive Google ads very profitable. This, in turn, makes Wordpress very attractive to advertisers.

I stumbled on this issue from a support topic, which was immediately closed without response by an unknown moderator. (After I pointed it out, Matt reopened the thread to add a final comment.)

So, last week, I instant-messaged Matt to ask him some of these questions. He was very helpful, giving me the full story.

The articles are given to him by Hot Nacho, a startup that pays freelance writers to generate 300-800 word articles about specific topics. All advertising revenues go directly to Hot Nacho, and he's paid a flat fee for hosting the articles and ad banners.

Matt said he was skeptical at first, but the money is helping to cover his costs and hire their first employee. "The /articles thing isn't something I want to do long term," he said, "but if it can help bootstrap something nice for the community, I'm willing to let it run for a little while."

He added that if the user community didn't like it, he'd end the program. "Everything we do is user driven. If it turns a lot of people off I definitely don't want it. At the same time, if you think people don't care it provides some flexibility in setting up the foundation."

Questions. This poses some interesting questions. First, do organizers of open-source projects need to disclose how they're making money off the project? Matt isn't disclosing anything about this activity to the community. I don't think anyone would be upset about Matt trying to support Wordpress with outside sources of revenue, but as an open-source project, they should be held to a higher level of transparency. Without the users and developers all working for free, it wouldn't exist.

Second, is it ethical for open-source projects to make money gaming search engines? Unlike a blog about asbestos news, the Wordpress website has nothing to do with asbestos. It capitalizes off the goodwill of the Wordpress community, which links to the Wordpress website because they support the project -- not because they support search engine spam. But as long as there was transparency about their plans, I think this is less of an issue.

This superficially seems a question of transparency, but its not. The Wordpress guys were co-conspirators in a blatant attempt to subvert Google search (using "cloaking" of embedded, hidden links) as a means to underwrite their noble open source project. But of course they would never have disclosed this, since it is explicitly against Google policies, and is obviously immoral, as well. Saying that they needed the money to continue their project is weak. Everyone needs money, but most people don't steal it, although a lot of crooks justify their crimes that way.

So here we have the Wordpress company trying to exploit their social ranking in the blogosphere for cash, and in the end, harming themselves, their users, and all of us, too.

[Update: Kottke chimes in.

Jonas Luster also has something to say about Wordpress.]

Blogads' annual survey is available here. Fascinating. Obviously early days for podcasting, where 97% have never listened to one.

Nooked is conducting a survey on The rate of adoption of RSS in the PR and marketing world. Participants will receive the results.

I received a press release today from Andy Sernovitz of the The Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA), who released a code of conduct.

[from the press release]

The WOMMA Code establishes guidelines and best practices so that honest marketers have a framework with which to plan and execute ethical word of mouth marketing campaigns.

At the heart of the Code is what WOMMA calls its Honesty ROI -- honest disclosure of Relationship, Opinion, and Identity. This demands that advocates (those who are spreading a marketer's message by "word of mouth") disclose their relationship with marketers in their conversations with other consumers; that they be allowed to form their own honest opinions and let those with whom they're communicating form their own opinions; and that everyone be transparent and reveal their identity to anyone with whom they're communicating.

At the heart this effort seeks to prop up sneaky advocacy practices by companies like BzzMarket with a campaign based on transparency and honesty.

However, isn't it a bit unnatural, while you are hanging out at the watercooler discussing MP3 players, to have someone make a recommendation -- their "honest opinion" -- but then state that they are a paid advocate of iRiver or Apple? Full disclosure is not enough. "Honesty" of the advocate's opinion is not enough. The fabric of social intercourse is altered profoundly by individuals acting as hirelings for the companies whose products and services they tout. This is rise of social spam, where the natural pathways of discourse are going to be layered with commercial graffitti, and every utterance may be nuanced by corporate logos.

My sense is that this code of ethics becomes the whitewash for something that is nearly immoral. This is just like Marquiism, although instead of blogs the channel of discourse includes face to face interaction.

Happy to announce a new blog launching today, BrandShift, with Jennifer Rice, Andy Lark, Johnnie Moore, and John Winsor. Incredible talent, incredibly important topic: How "Brand" is changing.

Evelyn Rodriguez looks into the debate about brand = promise versus brand = invitation, based on various discussions from last week's New Communications Forum:

[from An Invitation to Purpose-Driven Marketing]

During the Branding and Blogging Panel, Stowe Boyd speaks up from the audience reiterating his stance, "A brand isn't a promise, it's an invitation."

The brand is a promise and the brand is an invitation debate rear its head again.

She goes on to explore the 'branding' in American religious circles today, pointing out that religious organizations and corporations are alike in their attempts to fill our need to belong to something, as a way to derive meaning from the world. She goes on:

Marketers and corporate communicators alike are inquiring into this 'belonging' need. Andy Lark's insightful keynote (in my opinion, it was hands down the best session in four days of business blog conferencing, BBS and NCF inclusive [I agree]; slides here) contemplates the disruptively massive changes in media and communications and asks us if something deeper is going on. "People are wanting to be part of a community, wanting to belong, wanting to join." In many ways. he says, Fast Company's founding premise was prescient, "We are declaring: 'I want to be part of something more meaningful.'" And there is a world of difference in communicating to an audience (transmit) and a community (engage and participate).

This is again the core of True Voice, a term I lifted from the Support Economy and the work of the social psycologist Englehart. The rise of social brands -- through social media -- is driven by our need to push aside the control of large, impersonal organizations, and participate in the essence of invitational brands: to define ourselves and find meaning through our involvement in the implicit communities of use surrounding products and services.

This is not just another way of looking at self-identification by class, or economic bracket, or being in the in crowd. It is a direct expression of an emergent, bottom-up exploration of our relationships to each other and our purpose in the world, where the goods and services we acquire and apply become a medium, in effect, where we interact with others.

Perhaps no better example of this invitational branding exists than the iPod, where we can not only share the superficial association of being cool, but the way that the product has grown to create a world of shared experience: I can share my playlists with my friends and the wide world, I can post the last song I played on my IM status, and, now, the new trend of spontaneous iPodjacking.

In the future, all commerce, and all brands, will have to become totally socialized to be viable.

The Mad Linker pointed me to a great pice by John Winsor, ostensibly about branding, but which is at its heart about True Voice: Beyond the Brand: Developing a Story

We are in the twilight of a society based on data. In the coming years, brands and companies will not thrive on the basis of their data, but on the strength and meaning of their stories, creating products and services that evoke emotion. Products will become less important than the stories they convey and the way those stories are interpreted. It is a return of the ancient form of narrative. Companies need to have stories to tell -- stories that inspire action. And companies must themselves embody those stories with congruency and authenticity.

When developing your story, there are some essential qualities your narrative must have:

Context

The story must be in the context of the audience's experience. You want the audience to think about their own experiences and stories and be able to see themselves in the story.

Simplicity

Many messages are too complex. Focus on the power of simplicity.

Interest

A story has to be interesting enough for the audience to register it, remember it, and tell it again.

Trust

The best stories are true to the audience's experience. True stories evoke in an audience an attitude of "I get it."

Meaning

A story must get across a strong message that inspires the audience to rethink something.

Connectedness

A story must connect the right audience with the inspiration you are trying to convey.

Magic

A great story violates the listener's expectations. There is a surprising gift.

Relevance

A story must embody the inspiration in such a way that the audience will intuitively know what to do with it.

Immediacy

A story helps people to take the leap of faith necessary to take action.

These are all characteristics of great blog writing, leaving out only a few, like Authenticity, Authority, and my personal favorite: Drawing a Line.

Glenn Reid, CEO of Five Across, has entered the Marquiism fray with a spoof badge: "Marc Canter is not paying me to blog this".

At the New Communications Forum in Napa, Jan Marie Zwiren of Edelman mentions a new approach to evaluate the return on blogging (ROB): conversation rating points (CRP), roughly analogous to TRP and other more traditional metrics.