Categories
Advertising Business Personal Publishing

A response to the rhetoric of weblog marketing…

The story so far… Ben Metcalfe takes a vague swipe at the Stormhoek wine that Hugh MacLeod is marketing through the blogosphere. The approach Hugh is taking is to offer free bottles of the wine to webloggers on the understanding that they can write about it if they choose – either positively or negatively. Ben believes this to be a pollution of the weblog ecology and an undermining of the authenticity and personal integrity of individual webloggers who are prepared to put themselves up for sale. Here where things get a little weird, because Hugh responds to Ben’s comments with an extraordinary, and (for my part) quite unfathomable, broadside against the BBC:

The Beeb likes to think it’s in the business of “Empowering People”. Maybe they are, but only if it doesn’t lessen their own power base within the British Establishment. They sneer at commercialism; their currency of choice is control. Are they transparent about that? The hell they are.

Now there’s no point me pretending that I can talk impartially about the BBC in public. After all I consented to work for them, and they pay me for the privilege. So it’s quite lucky then that – having read the posts concerned several times – I can see no relevance to mentioning the BBC in this context at all. The debate seems to me to be in a completely different area. I wrote a comment on Hugh’s site, which I think sum up some of my feelings about marketers giving freebies to webloggers. What follows is a pretty heavily revised version of those comments, edited for readability and rhetorical weight rather than meaning (I hope):

Ben’s comments on the wine marketing move were fairly blunt and I’d probably not be so aggressive, but I certainly don’t think it’s an unreasonable position to take. Hugh and I had similar conversations about whether the Stormhoek experiment was cynical or exploitative at a recent conference we both attended. I have to say I’m still not convinced.

As another commenter suggested, if you’re a ‘citizen’ weblogger all you really have is your name. Weblogs are about authenticity – about people being able to express their voices and opinions. If people get the sense that you’re distorting your opinions for your peers because you get free stuff then it seems to me that they’d have to be less inclined to believe you (and think less of you as a person). And quite rightly – it’s a demonstration of a lack of personal integrity.

Now this case is obviously slightly different, because people are being given the stuff for free and no one is forcing them to write positively about it. But the problem is that people will always find being given free stuff attractive. And that means that – as long as there’s the possibility a negative opinion will result in no more freebies – there will always be a pressure towards playing to the sponsor. A good proportion of people will find this kind of thing completely acceptable, but let’s not pretend that it’s completely impartial, morally neutral and fair. There’s a power dynamic happening here – it is a form of bribery – it just happens to be a fairly mild and gentle form of it in which people don’t really get hurt that badly.

But because it is a form of gentle bribery to say nice things, it seems to me that this means that any positive comment will inevitably be considered dubious by the wider community, and will result in suspicion and a gradual loss of trust. It’s like that old joke that ends, “We’ve established you’re a whore, now we are just haggling over the price…”

The problem is that – at least at the moment, and long may it last – the weblog community determines its heroes and its trusted and noble citizens from smaller but finer-grained metrics than we do in the wider world. We determine who to read based on whether we’ve come to feel a relationship or a personality that means we actually directly like the person or people concerned, whether we trust them, whether they’re the kind of people we would want to associate with or who say things that we respect (or amuse us). And these relationships are more fragile, but deeper and more reciprocal, than those we have with sports heroes and movie stars.

They almost have to be – writing for a weblog is a rapid process that often lends itself to personal and informal writing. It’s harder to keep up a pretense, to hide what you’re like in such an unorchestrated space. So when someone loses our respect, or appears arrogant or when we feel they’re no longer being truthful, then we stop reading. And the brand that they’ve been marketing must get tarnished by this association as well.

It seems to me that marketing of this kind probably has an unfortunate effect on the weblog community, and will probably have mixed results that make some brands very happy but many others slightly damaged. In the case of the wine, it would seem much more sensible to just get the people who make the wine to write their own weblog and use it as a position to talk to the wider world. Perhaps there’s other ways to introduce the wine to a wider community, but the only way it will work is if any perceived link between the weblogger’s opinion and the products on offer for them to try is broken completely. And that’s a bloody hard sell…

There is also one other thing I’d like to say, and I say this with all due respect to Hugh, who I’ve met several times. There seems to be a hell of a lot of mileage recently in grabbing onto a technological trend that’s owned by the people and talking about how it’s going to rip down every aspect of the old world order and replace it with a brave new world without large media / business / governmental organisations. You find a trend and you shout about it in public, waving a fist at the big boys as you threaten to drag them down to their knees. You get invited to a lot of conferences this way. You may even get a book deal. Large companies will invite you to talk to them about why they should employ you to protect them from the future you’ve said will destroy them.

But frankly, it’s all complete balls. The world is changing really rapidly – technology is having a significant impact. I think the idea of tens of millions of individuals expressing their opinions in public is profoundly moving and important and is likely to have all kinds of repercussions that we can’t possibly foresee at the moment. And there are battles to fight and battles to win. But much of the rhetoric simply cannot stand scrutiny.

I’m totally fed up of people standing up and waving a flag for the death of institutions based on sketchy information and a vague belief in the rightness of their cause – and I’m also slightly sick of more moderate voices being drowned out under the revolutionary fervour of people fresh with their first wave of excitement about user-generated content on the web. Weblogs suffer from this enormously. Someone said that every journalist that writes about weblogs thinks that the year they discovered them is the year weblogs went mainstream. I’ve watched this for almost six years now. I now need people to think about what’s more likely to happen – that big media organisations, and governments and businesses will dry up and evaporate, or that some of them will adapt and change to a new ecology, renegotiate their place in the world and have a role in fashioning and supporting whatever it is that’s coming?

Whatever is on the horizon – social software, social media, ubiquitous and pervasive computing, technology everywhere, permanent connectivity, media distribution, mass amateurisation, disintermediation – it’s going to have an enormous impact on our lives. But that impact will probably seem relatively subtle and gradual to those people living through it, and its true effects will probably not be fully recognised for a hell of a long time. So let’s try and be a bit humble about the whole thing, eh? Let’s get excited about possible futures, let’s argue for the changes we think should happen, let’s present ideas and theories and ideas and business models and look to the future and test them and explore them. But please, no more religious wars of us versus them, big versus small, old versus new… We’ve got enough entrenched dogmatic opinions in the world already without creating new ones…

27 replies on “A response to the rhetoric of weblog marketing…”

Responding specifically to the part of your post about someone offering free wine, can nobody give anything away for free without being blamed for having some cynical intentions? If a blogger is given free wine and they end up being dishonest on their website just to receive more wine, isn’t the blogger revealing their own character flaw, rather than a flaw of the offer? And do we went the wine maker to end their offer just to prevent that flaw to be revealed? Or shouldn’t the blogger be exposed to the repercussions of the mistake they chose to make? The other day I went to the movies and in the lobby was given a free bag of M&Ms. This naturally made me more happy about M&Ms, but if they tasted bad and I still told all my friends to buy M&Ms just to increase my chances of getting more free stuff, that would make *me* (pardon my French…) a dick, not Mars, Incorporated.

If you watch Kathy Griffin’s reality show on Bravo in the US, you get an interesting take on the Hollywood culture of freebies. As a D-lister, she has to beg more openly for free gifts and comp’d services, but there’s still an interesting power relationship, given that she can get an aspiring designer’s work into the papers. If you’re an A-lister, you basically never have to pay for anything in your life. (The Emmys 2005 gift bag is a good example. The other awards ceremonies are even more generous.)
Does knowing that ‘to those who have much, more will be given’ change the way we think about them? Possibly. I’m aware of a certain company handing out certain gadgets to certain prominent bloggers at a conference in the knowledge that those freebies would be feature prominently — not as product placement, but because the products would be used. Gadgets are different from wine, though. If you give a blogger a bit of kit that is beneficial to that person’s blogging, then in most cases, it shows without too much effort.
At what point does the power of individual bloggers reach the point where they can get somewhere near that kind of treatment? I wonder…
But you’ve hit the crux: I’d much rather hear about the winemakers talking about what they do, in a way that gets them linked from interested bloggers.

Well firstly, yes, of course people can give things away without there being any cynical intentions. But any corporation that gives away their own products is trying to sell you something. That’s not a bad thing to do, but it’s not charity either.
In no way am I saying that a company who suggests these kinds of offers is doing evil, but I do object slightly to it being presented as a kind of gonzo alternative marketing where everyone’s happy and content and there are no cynical motives at all. It’s instead an attempt to look at a weblog culture that’s relatively free of marketing and relies on word of mouth and standards of authenticity and exploit it in some way. I’ve heard people saying this stuff much more overtly and tactlessly than Hugh ever has – ‘people believe the weblogs, so we have to market through them’ – but even though it is more tactful, I don’t believe it’s qualitatively different. It’s people looking at an environment that’s relatively untouched by people lying to sell things, and trying to work out how to use it to make money (and if that happens to make that culture more cynical or whatever, then whatchagonnado).
But you’re right of course. The bulk of the responsibility for any move of conscience lies with the individual and I would never want to take it away from them. If people want to do this kind of thing and think they can do it without compromising their integrity then it is their right to do so and good luck to ’em. And those that don’t care about their integrity, well the sooner we know the better.
In a nutshell, no I don’t think it’s evil, yes I agree that the right to choose and responsibility to act honourably lies more heavily with the individual weblogger, but I think we must also accept that this doesn’t represent a brave new world of distributed, open, ethical marketing where everyone is cool and there’s no pressure put anywhere, but is in fact pretty much like marketing always is – a necessary evil that occasionally migrates into just being an evil.

When you mention this massive vertical integration of technology leading to an all pervasive, social software, social media, ubiquitous and pervasive computing, technology everywhere, permanent connectivity, media distribution, mass amateurisation, disintermediation; if it’s completely monetised before it gets out of the gate then it really has no choice but to sell its space for the sake of marketing. No? I mean, why bother with the equivocations.

Well if that’s true, then I find it completely depressing, and will look forward to my friends dropping in brand associations in telephone calls in the future so that they can scrabble for a few extra pennies at the cost of any respectI had for them.

What I never realized before organising the Our Social World conference is that all journalists expect to attend conferences for free and in fact get quite narked if they are expected to pay.

What I never realized before organising the Our Social World conference is that all journalists expect to attend conferences for free and in fact get quite narked if they are expected to pay.
Ah, but that’s another power relationship. More established conference organisers get quite narked if journos on free passes don’t write about said conference. After all, the hacks are getting freebie bags and access to alcohol…

While Hugh might sound big and clever and awfully new media, he is doing nothing more than democratising via weblogs the existing status quo of how a product enters the mainstream consciousness. It’s no big deal, it’s not surprising, it’s not even exciting. It’s how stuff has been sold for decades, just with a handy new conference-friendly spin on matters.
That there is a backlash is also not surprising. Of slightly (but not much) evil is that a blogger getting free wine is likely to give it a good buzz, wow, didn’t see that coming. Hugh knew this, and that’s fine also.
Blogging is not and will never be (sorry Tom) journalism. We’re all human at this level, so let’s just realise that marketers will enter this space, like all others, and try and exploit it. It’s not a great thing, but it will happen.

I really like Tom’s eloquent analysis. One of the clear problems is that in seeping into the commercial world – as it was bound to do – blogging has opened the doors to any number of new business models. Hugh’s is one such. And it is in the delivery that those business models are tested. At the moment, Hugh’s is under attack and for the right reasons. Attacking someone who doesn’t agree with you doesn’t add to the debate, it undermines it.
The very fact there is fear among large brands that something damaging could be said and become part of the public consciousness through blogs when for so long there has been tight control over media exposure is a fascinating issue that has relevance here.
In this context it is interesting to compare Hugh’s attacks with Watchdog. Much as Anne Robinson shook a number of CEOs to their boots with pithy and sometimes intrusive journalism, I don’t recall any company she flayed ever going to the wall or anyone getting publicly fired (correct me on this if wrong). In similar vein, Those Hugh flays – usually those that don’t agree with him or put him to the test regarding his claims – will not lie down.
On the other hand, if the volume of abuse that is getting hurled around is anything to go by, the ’cause’ of social software will suffer. No-one will know whom to trust anymore. The fact a blog attracts a large audience doesn’t diminish its potential to fall away. Think Dan Rather. That’s the real danger (IMHO).

It’s how stuff has been sold for decades, just with a handy new conference-friendly spin on matters.
Hasn’t blogging challenged those inlets, to some extent? That’s to say, media-critic bloggy types (even the Denton stable) have been fairly good at identifying astroturf Sunday Format buzz-generators. (Danny O’Brien’s Four Waves is good here, too.)
A counter-example. How many David Allen books and Moleskine journals have been sold on account of Merlin Mann’s ’43 Folders’? Lots, I presume. But the site isn’t marketing those products; indeed, to a great extent, it presents alternatives to them.

I’m totally fed up of people standing up and waving a flag for the death of institutions based on sketchy information and a vague belief in the rightness of their cause…
You are hitting a button here Tom… a good one. Sometimes I feel like one of those people. However, I try to convince myself that what I am doing with Aidpage is not “against” or even less “replacing” the system of institutionalized (government and nonprofit) distribution of aid to those that need it. Rather, I see it as adding an additional layer… or channel… so that people have the possibility to do things based on their own intuitions and impulses… including taking the responsibility for potential failures.
But still… your remark makes me think.

Hey Tom,
To answer your earlier question, when I say “Socialised Media” I do not mean “Socailist/Left Wing Media”. I mean Media designed for social cohesion/control, and in the case of the BBC, top-down.
Which is not always a bad thing. Societies that cannot cohere tend to break down and die. As you know well, I’ve said many times before that I like the BBC. Especially the Radio.
But I find it interesting, when I think of the tools and ideas being created in the blogosphere that I really like… Movable Type, WordPress, Technorati, delicious, Creative Commons etc etc.
None of them seem to be coming from Big Media, Socialised Media, Time Warner, The New York Times, Hollywood, Wardour Street or Madison Avenue. They’re coming from wee start-ups nobody heard of 5 years ago.
The more I think about it, the less that surprises me.

Well that doesn’t surprise me enormously either for a whole range of reasons, but mainly because large organisations are often not terribly innovative – and instead tend to let innovation thrive in start-ups and small organisations and then buy them when they’re about to go mainstream. I don’t think it’s something restricted to the media organisations – although I will agree that they have a special investment in the idea of broadcast-like one-to-many structures. But it’s not evil that drives this, it’s just a clear understanding of why people have traditionally used their services and a lack of comprehension about many-to-many media. Once they get it, they’ll try and find ways to interact with it effectively, and those that don’t will suffer. Such is the way of change!

It’s people looking at an environment that’s relatively untouched by people lying to sell things, and trying to work out how to use it to make money (and if that happens to make that culture more cynical or whatever, then whatchagonnado).
Zigackly. I don’t even like ads on blogs – I tend to agree with Harry Hutton[1] on this one – but at least they don’t imply editorial approval. Bringing paid editorial product endorsement into a sphere which didn’t have it before… I’m afraid ‘pollution’ is the only word. For as long as this goes on, there’s no way I’m reading Hugh’s blog – or any blog which endorses the wine in question.
please, no more religious wars of us versus them, big versus small, old versus new…
Hey, did you know that top-down classification schemes are dead and tagging is the future? (Jaundiced musings here.)
Digressing yet further, as an ex-journalist I had to come back on this:
What I never realized before organising the Our Social World conference is that all journalists expect to attend conferences for free and in fact get quite narked if they are expected to pay.
Mmmm? We[2] don’t attend those conferences for the fun of it, you know. A freelance would probably only make a couple of hundred quid out of covering the thing. Staff writers don’t have that worry, but getting a conference fee approved as expenses isn’t always easy – magazines have incredibly tight editorial budgets these days. No, you can milk the punters, but us[2] hacks need our[2] freebies…
[1] Link NSFW, but googling “Harry Hutton” “whole hog” will find it.
[2] In a sort of virtual, lifetime-membership sense.

“For as long as this goes on, there’s no way I’m reading Hugh’s blog – or any blog which endorses the wine in question.”
I can respect that decision. Here’s what I posted on my blog:
“Hey, Tom Coats. Thanks for the input. I enjoyed our talk at Our Social World, I have to say.
I think it may be a cultural difference. If I opened a store selling the cookies, or if I was hired by one, the first thing I’d do is be outside on the sidewalk, handing out free cookies to passers-by. As a way to start a conversation. Markets are conversations 😉
And yeah, where I grew up (Edinburgh), that approach would have been considered offensive by lot of people (At least, 20 years ago it would have. “Who does he think he is, trying to foist that crap on us?” etc.
But then I went to university in Texas, where that kind of behavior is admired. To call it “bribery” would just get you laughed at.
I see a similar cultural clash happening here, perhaps.
But hey, not my problem. Entrepreneurally, I’m more aligned with the “Texan” side of the coin. And so are millions of other bloggers.
See you next time, whenever 😉
…”

Just wanted to say that I agree with you pretty much wholeheartedly, Tom.
Hugh, who’s a nice chap that I’ve met before, is perfectly within his rights to try and market products through weblogs. The decision is with the bloggers on whether they want to write about them or not. But I don’t think there’s anything particularly bad about saying “why can’t we be idealistic and hope that it doesn’t get over-polluted”. I’d prefer if the world wasn’t populated with monetising ad people, and I don’t particularly enjoy seeing that mindset filter into weblogs.
My issue is really whether this *really* opens a conversation, or simply generates publicity. Either way is not a problem, but I’m not sure every advertiser who followed this model would be doing it out of entirely honest motives. Because of course the conversations *are there to be had already*.
And you’re totally right on those who overegg the pudding. I think evangelists – and I’d include myself in that – really have to take a look at themselves and how they project, flag-wave, overreach and ultimately burn out what might well be an interesting phenomenon.

Two more things!
1) I wonder whether the repetition of “markets are conversations” (surely you’ll be emblazoning this on your tombstone, Hugh) is eventually turning into something more like “conversations are markets”.
2) To Geoff, there are many reasons journalists don’t like to pay for conferences. They go to a lot of them; they’re often very boring and very expensive; hacks are cheap Big Media whores etc etc. If Hugh’s showed us one thing here, it’s that people like “free”: if you want to get something talked about, you don’t give somebody a disincentive to look at it.

My issue is really whether this *really* opens a conversation, or simply generates publicity. Either way is not a problem, but I’m not sure every advertiser who followed this model would be doing it out of entirely honest motives.
At the risk of turning into a bad Bill Hicks impression, no advertiser who follows this model is doing it out of entirely honest motives. This model is dishonest: Hugh and his client are trying to harness freefloating All Your Base blogbuzz (memes, indeed) and use it to shift units of a specific product. I’d even suggest that this model – like BzzAgent, which in many ways it resembles – is inherently dishonest…
Because of course the conversations *are there to be had already*.
Precisely.
(I’ve heard good things about KWV, incidentally.)

Of course, that was partly my point: the motives aren’t honest, and they shouldn’t be couched as if they are.
And I suppose that is part of the fundamental objection Ben had in the first instance. Personally, I felt like Hugh had sold out when he became an evangelist for the wine. Why? Because for me the positives of using the medium aren’t sufficiently robust to counteract the negative effect I associate with being marketed to, in this instance at least.
Now, if a *wine blogger* wrote “this stuff is good”, I’d appreciate the insight. That’s the authority that bloggers can have.
Not everybody feels that way, but I did think that Hugh’s rather vitriolic objections seem somewhat counterintuitive because his whole spiel’s about how beautiful the wider conversation is – whatever it says.

I’m totally fed up of people standing up and waving a flag for the death of institutions based on sketchy information and a vague belief in the rightness of their cause.
Amen, brother. There seems to be a bull market in populist digibabble (about blogs, tags, Wikipedia or what have you) that rewards audacious claims over reasoned attempts at synthesis. But that may just be the fate of rhetoric in a populist medium. See also: TV politics.

Personal publishing is, a little like radio, a medium of mass intimacy.
Ergo, it’s hardly a surprise that media owners, marketers and politicians wish to commandeer it!
Ultimately, it’s surely inevitable that the medium will segment itself into distinct communities with distinct protocols. Are all print media the same? Is Channel 5 comparable to BBC2, or BidUpTV?
Nope, but they happily co-exist to serve the interest of different communities. Some take advertising. Some are content-base. Some are interactive. etc etc etc.
Weblogging is just a medium, and it has lots of structural limitations. But ultimately, anywhere human beings interact, human nature will out. Let’s all just let it be.
At this stage of an emerging medium, it’s surely just fun to play.

btw I agree with you that “Death of the BBC, Death of Marketing, Death of Big Media” etc etc is a bit over-the-top, especially if you take the word “death” too literally.
I think these “deaths” are subsets of a much larger “death”, one, sadly, that is not hyperbole.
“Death of a level of social and economic security that our parents enjoyed when they reached a certain age.”
We live in interesting times.

Haven’t had time to read the other comments yet, but having watched Tom for the best part of six years, it appears he’s also got a lot more humble about the whole thing. This is good post. (Oh, and Hugh MacLeod: I’m afraid I stopped reading Hughtrain or cluetrain or whatever your blog was called a while back because of all the hyperbole! Done any good drawings lately?)

Comments are closed.