BuzzMachine

Can we stop seeing it as news when some company opens up an island on Second Life? The latest is an insurance company there. Oh, wow. That’s so cool of them — and of the reporter who falls for that press release. I’d be far more impressed if the people in Second Life created their own community of insurance interest and proved they actually cared.

Martin Moore covers an debate in London. Resolved: PR has a duty to tell the truth. Voting for that proposition: 124. Voting against: 138. The motion fails.

That is, of course, if they’re all telling the truth about this.

Well, we shouldn’t be too surprised. But we should be disappointed in our fellow man. To put it bluntly: This is a surprisingly candid admission that TV is the lying profession.

Now there’s an argument that the PR person has a duty to the client, not the truth.

But that then raises the question — as other events have lately — of whether a PR person can be transparent and, indeed, credible. This would seem to say no.

Yet I also believe that in the age of links, PR takes on a new duty. I want to link to a company’s (or a politician’s or a government’s) site and find its company line and the facts and figures it has. We can all now link directly to such source material and we expect it to be credible; we are not discounting the truth because it came through a flack. The responsibility is quasi-journalistic: it’s about filling in facts and positions.

But if we can’t ever trust you and know whether you are telling the truth — if you don’t see that as a duty — then why bother with the site? (via Martin Stabe)

Congratulations to Jason Calacanis and Michael Arrington — and the FTC — for saying on PayPerPost’s ass so that they now require disclosure.

My Media Guardian column this week brings together what I’ve been saying here about the ethics of buying buzz (registration-free link here). Snippet:

The growth of blogs and what is ingloriously labelled “user-generated content” has spawned a new commercial practice: word-of-mouth marketing, the dark art of trying to manipulate the public to buzz about your brand. Call it what you will, it’s still just PR - and as a journalist, I’ve never been a fan of flacks, for it’s their job to spin, the reporter’s to unspin, and the public’s to be spun.

But now the internet opens direct access from PR people to the public, who can now publish themselves, letting everyone avoid those pesky gatekeepers in the press. And that’s fine: the web massacres middlemen. But what the flacks and marketers don’t realise is that they also take on a new responsibility in our reordered architecture of information. Now their credibility actually matters.

Zero Boss has a great — unpaid — post about ReviewMe.com, which tries to clean up the PayPerPost model — slightly — by paying bloggers to review products but insisting that they reveal the payment and also insisting that advertisers pay for positive and negative reviews. It is still an attempt to buy our editorial voice. They may not tell us what to think but they tell us what to write about. Sorry. Still fails the smell test.

: I’m likely writing my Guardian column this week about all these pr kerfuffles and the new responsibility of pr. So please do add in your thoughts to these posts.

I just got off a most amusing press conference call with Dell announcing with much fanfare its new ethics policy for the blog world in association with WOMMA (see the two posts below).

I sensed that the reporters on the call found it as curious as I did that Dell thinks this is new and worthy of a big announcement. Isn’t it always a company’s policy, in any interaction — by blog, telephone, or letter — to be open and honest?

They try to argue that blogs are new and they need to teach employees how to be ethical in their interaction with them. Said the leader of WOMMA: “We’re making it easy to be ethical.”

I think my mother made that easy when she told me not to lie. And she didn’t belong to any Association of Ethical Moms.

In fact, I think it’s possibly dangerous to put up this elaborate construct of policies and guidelines and toolkits and announcements. The message to employees should be as simple as this:

Tell the truth.

Now I didn’t want to drag Dell through glass over my blog encounters with them and their ad agency. But on the call, I did ask — twice — what they have learned from their interaction with blogs, reminding them of what Dwight Silverman learned when they told him their policy toward blogs was “look, don’t touch.” I saw after the call that on the Dell blog, in a post that went up at that moment, Lionel Menchaca acknowledged that past: “Dell Hell happened just over year ago and while we’re pleased with some of the progress we’ve made so far, we know we’ve just scratched the surface.” Good on him.

On the call, though, the executives would not acknowledge that past or any lessons in any way. They kept insisting that this announcement was “not reactive but proactive” and that they were taking a “proactive leadership position.” (I hate that corporatespeak.) And that’s too bad, because a moment of honesty about Dell’s lessons might be more helpful to other companies than a hundred bullets on an ethics policy.

I also asked, by the way, about employees blogging and they said that employees could blog now and, in response to the question, they said that executives will blog, including Michael Dell. I look forward to linking to him.

PR, flackery, public information, press agentry, whatever you call it, its mission has always been spin: telling their side of a story. But in a world of links, in our new architecture of information and news, PR and original sources of information have a new role and responsibility. They can’t just spin anymore. They have to inform. In some cases, they even have to perform a journalistic function.

In the past, flacks could live behind the scenes, working stories and reporters and trying to push their client for coverage or get their angle into coverage. They were hidden. That began to change when a highly competitive, fragmented media world made access to celebrities — of show business, business, or politics — more valuable, putting the PR person in the role of gatekeeper. The press had until then acted as the gatekeeper to the public; now the flacks guarded the gates to the more valuable asset: the stars.

The dynamics have shifted again thanks to the internet, for now links and searches can take us directly to the source of information: a company’s, politician’s, or government agency’s site. This sounds like nirvana to the flack: direct access to the public, bypassing those damned reporters and editors. Fine.

But this also places a new responsibility on these original sources: We’re going to expect them to tell us the truth. We come to them seeking information about a product or a pubic stance or an action. If they give that to us, then great. They earn a place in that new architecture of news and information. But if they fail, if they give us incomplete or false information or try to hide behind spin that can always be unspun, then they risk new penalties: We won’t trust them, their products, brands, and clients and we will warn all our friends at twice the speed of spin. There are new penalties for misbehavior.

So this isn’t just about a new ethic of information necessitated by the link and search. It is also about a new form of self-interest for those who say they are in the business of public relations and public information. We’re the public and now we can not only come to you directly, we can penalize you directly when you lie to us.

That is one of the morals of the Edelman Wal-Mart blogging mess: The agency tried to hide in the old ways of PR but once exposed for its manipulation ended up doing more harm to itself and its client(s) and brand than if it had just done nothing. That was the message I would have tried to deliver to the Word of Mouth Marketing Association if I’d decided to go (see the post below) but I decided it was not the right venue and that it would deliver the message from the negative side.

There is a positive side to this message: Now that you have direct access to your public and now that the public can come directly to you for information, then give it to them: competely, honestly, openly, easily. If you have a good product and service, if you treat your customers with respect, then that becomes the best public relations you can have.

When I turned down the Word of Mouth Marketing Association’s invitation to be the guy to deliver 40 lashes to Richard Edelman after his PR firm’s Wal-Mart blogging fiasco, I said I’d explain my thinking. So here is my essential argument:

You cannot buy our word of mouth. It’s ours. You cannot buy buzz. You have to earn it. The only way to get either is to create a good product or service and to treat your customers with respect by listening to and being open and honest with them.

That’s it. No trade associations needed. No conventions. No codes of ethics that people sign and then find loopholes through. No star chambers for errant marketers. Just tell the truth. It really is that simple.

If you want to market, then do what marketers do: Buy ads. The nice thing about an ad is that it
is a transparent act of marketing. An ad comes with its own borders around it: You buy space or time to tell your story to my public, who can tell that you bought it and can then judge whether you also managed to buy my integrity and soul. The ad, by its very form, puts that relationship clearly out in public. Ads also support news and entertainment, and have for a century or more, and so I hope they also start to support blogging, vlogging, podcasting, and all that. When you don’t buy an ad and try to influence us behind the scenes, for money or not, then you get in trouble. And you should.

Markets are conversations that you can’t have without us. And we own our end of that conversation. If you try to buy it, you are trying to compromise our integrity, honesty, openness; you are trying to corrupt us and our media and we will judge uyou accordingly. If you try to hide what you’re doing, you are lying to us and we will catch you. And it goes beyond that: If you try to sell what you know about us without our involvement, you are stealing the wisdom of the crowd and we are the crowd.

That’s why I object to the notion that there can be a word-of-mouth industry. It’s our mouth and please don’t try to put words in it.

Now the folks at WOMMA say they stand for doing things right and folks I know said I should give them a chance. I’m sure they are nice and earnest. But, frankly, I didn’t see it as my job to tell them how to tell us stuff. I do not want to start a parallel practice to media training: word-of-mouth training, the science and art of manipulation. God help us.

And I did not see how I could win ending up on stage with a professional spinster; it’s like going on The Daily Show thinking you can be funnier than Jon Stewart. If I’m blunt and direct and say I can’t understand how Edelman et al could have fostered this screwup, then I’m likely to face a hostile crowd. If I try to probe how Edelman’s organization could have so cavalierly ignored his own word and whether that came from a corporate and industry culture of spin and loopholes or from other orgaizational problems, I’d be playing the company consultant and I really don’t care to. If I don’t zap him with sufficient voltage, I’ll be seen as a sell-out. No win. So I chose not to go.

There was one reason I did consider going and that’s in the next post I’ll write, above.

Give me your word of mouth, please. The Word of Mouth Marketing Association just emailed me to come to a confab they are having in December to question Richard Edelman about his firm’s Wal-Mart blogging fiasco and more. No holds barred, they say. I’m not sure I want to do it. I don’t much like the fact that there is a Word of Mouth Marketing Association; I don’t want them buying our mouths and thinking that they can rent buzz and our opinions with it, corrupting the space. I have avoided the organization in the past. I also don’t want to be seen as a soft-ball pitcher. Nor do I want to be the convenient snarker. Then again, it is a chance to get warn and scold. I told them that I would ask your advice. With one exception (he/she knows who she/he is), I want to hear from many, not only with advice on whether I should do this but if I do, what my goals should be.

: LATER: Here is the WOMMA questionnaire: Are you cricket?

Edelman PR is throwing water on its own PR fire following the fakey Wal-Mart blog. Richard Edelman outlines a series of steps they’re taking. I’d say it’s really quite simple and can be boiled down to this: Tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Lie, hide, fake, fool, or buy people and you lose. And I’m not being smart-assed. It really is that simple. And the more complicated you make the rules, the more loopholes you end up building in. It’s just like Mom used to say: Tell the truth and everything will be fine.

In the Observer, Peter Preston notes that the internet is beating the bejesus out of London’s tabloids. And at Eat the Press, Rachel Sklar notes that news now spreads faster than a flack can pick up a phone:

. . . the news about Gibson’s drunken anti-Semitic tirade was broken online and disseminated immediately via the internet, before traditional print outlets had the chance to do their reporting and, more importantly, before Gibson’s people had a chance to react and spin accordingly . . .

The internet is often acccused of making news spread too quickly, before journalists and editors can vet and verify — fog of war, and all that. But Rachel finds the considerable advantage of news outrunning spin. Sometimes, news is best served raw.

For those following the Strumpette saga, “Amanda” has exposed her/him/their self in the comments below:

If you did just a little research, you’d readily find that there are 5 people that write for the character “Amanda Chapel.”

Why a character? Two reasons:

1. It provides us a platform (brand) where we are able to draw attention to some of the hypocritical issues that presently plague PR.

2. It’s safe. This shields us from ad hominem arguments which are a mainstay of net discussion. See, in the “flat world,” Jeff can rally 6 million people (as with Dell) with pitch forks and torches very well. Regrettably, that comes without any real depth. That, by definition, is a mob. Mobs like hangins.

Our motive is simple to check the blog hype, especially in PR, and to do that without retribution.

Kind regards,

- Amanda

PS Regarding Edelman… They get our attention a lot because they are some of the most prolific blog advocates in PR. We’ve come to call their “Me2Revolution,” the Me2CommieBastards.

He/she/they are still trying to take the easy way out, though. I emailed “Amanda” and said:

I still want to push you on the anonymity/pseudonymity of “Amanda.” Yes, it’s cute. Yes, it lets you go hyperbolic. But as PR (communications) professionals, I’d think that you’d want to get credit for your ideas. Or to put the question another way: What does attacking the ideas of others do for your business?

They complain about bloggers being snarking mobs but then they create a character to do nothing but snark from behind a veil.

By the way, the assumption from all the prior sleuthing is that Amanda is a creation of at least one person in this bunch.

: I still prefer Rex’s theory, from the comments below:

Just a theory: Nick Carr is Amanda Chapel. Or maybe Nick is John Dvorak.

: The Amandas respond in email:

We are our words. The motivation is exclusively within the art. However, Guernica, Strumpette is not?

Oh, gag me with a PR schwag pen. I don’t buy it. Art? Hardly. Amusement? Why? I still don’t see the business motivation from a bunch of flacks so clearly is intent on protecting big business. Perhaps this is just their last will and testament.