Other Thoughts on Sponsored Posts and Magpie [Buying Conversation]

I wrote earlier today over at SiliconANGLE about the idea of buying your way into the conversation. I know my friends Sean and Steven both aren’t big on the idea of Magpie in particular and marketing and PR invading the social stream in general.  It is, however, an essential piece of the social media ecosphere since business is the oxygenated blood that keep our social media toys alive.

Still, there are those pundits out there that are against this sort of commercialization on almost religious grounds, or at least with a fervor generally reserved for religious holy wars.

I think I made my point pretty well in the SA piece today, which was to say that buying one’s way into ‘the conversation’ is socially acceptable to most if it’s done courteously and properly.

But I must say I’ve always found it hypocritical and repugnant the way some A-Listers have publicly regarded paid posting schemes while currently making their living from said types of posts.

The Riot Act
Skip if you already know that they’re all guilty of hypocrisy.

For instance, ReadWriteWeb holds a weekly sponsored post called “Weekly Wrap-Up,” put on by Adobe Flash Media Interactive Server 3.5 most recently. This is particularly ironic, since just last month Marshall Kirkpatrick called a Forrester report encouraging sponsored blogging wrong, and termed it shilling. One wonders if this makes Kirkpatrick self-hating, or simply soulless, as he termed it a couple weeks ago.

Michael Arrington at Techcrunch has remained fairly silent recently about sponsored posting recently.  The last time he really broached the topic specifically was back in November of last year when he talked about Magpie rather objectively for his personal style. When it comes to sponsored posting, though, Mike Arrington is much less vitriolic about the topic, though no less fervent, calling it shilling.

This, of course, doesn’t stop him from running posts showcasing the many sponsors of his various get-togethers, demos and conferences. I haven’t noticed many specifically sponsored posts in several months, but I know they exist in Techcrunch’s history in one form or another. No disrespect to Mike, but I think he calls it “doing business” when he does it, rather than shilling.

Similarly, VentureBeat has made veiled references in what is generally evenhanded coverage to the negative feelings they have towards Izea, but still regularly post sponsored blog posts of their own.

Going beyond the “A-List,” what about Jason Calacanis?  In 2006 he made great waves when he said:

If you’re a blogger and want to keep the blogosphere pure I suggest calling these people–and the advertisers who are using them–out. Why can’t we know who the advertisers are on Payperpost? Are we to stupid too know? I wish someone would just out all the disgusting marketers who use this server so we can all shame them for their covert, evil efforts.

Hold the line bloggers!

Keep the marketers out of your posts and inside the ad units!!!

Meanwhile, his brainchild Mahalo seamlessly integrates sponsored links inside content within his answers search engine.

My former work-mate and big boss Pete has even gotten his licks in on Izea and paid posting over the years, but of course his blog Mashable continues to run paid posts as well.

The Sentencing Phase
Thankfully, at least for most of us, the fervor has been dialed back some.  Certainly Magpie has set off a lot of old irritations lately, but the teapot’s tempest seems mostly confined Marshall Kirkpatrick.

Part of the reason why a lot of folks are taking a second look at this is because of the work and vocal support from Chris Brogan.

Yes, Chris Brogan.  The dude who shaved his head last week.  The social media guru and all around nice guy who no one seems to be able to be angry at for more than a minute.

Nobody but Chris seems to be looking seriously at sponsored posting in a way that both makes ethical sense as well as business sense. Sure, there are some bright minds at Izea that I’m sure are working at it, but the social media thinkers and pontificators are all so struck with this “it must be evil” thing that they’re unwilling to even consider how you’d go about it in a way that could benefit a client.

It’s severely limited their thinking. 

Is it a dangerous path to advise a client down? Yes.  There’s a trillion ways to screw it up and suffer extreme blowback (particularly while there’s folks out there to blow back hard and fast – if it isn’t Marshall K, it’ll be someone).

But as I explained in my post today at SiliconANGLE, if you approach sponsored posting as a way to cordially buy your way into a conversation (as opposed to how it’s often approached by the non-savvy – a way to pay for the privilege of YELLING OBNOXIOUSLY IN MY EAR), it can be incredibly effective.

My guess is, though, that the majority of the response to this post will be centered around how I’m promoting evil in the blogosphere or the personality conflicts that may arise from me naming names. That just seems to be how we’re all wired on this topic.

Prove me wrong. Tell me your honest thoughts about paid posting and sponsored posts:

1. Is it wrong all the time?
2. Is it only wrong when Izea bloggers do it?
3. Is it only right when “A-List” bloggers do it?
4. Can it be effectively and ethically done on Twitter?
5. Can we have an honest discussion on the best ways for us and our clients to do it without getting our panties in a bunch?

Update: I wish I could say I spurred this post at NakedPR, but it was up yesterday and covered just this very topic. Thanks @DigitalSignals

Chris Brogan Gets a Haircut

You know it’s a slow news Friday when a haircut makes the news…

Chris Brogan, some time back, promised that if he ever made it to the number one slot on the Advertising Age Power 150, he’d shave his head in tribute to Seth Godin. Today, to keep his word and to benefit charity (the OLPC project), he’s having his head shaved in the middle of what appears to be a social media seminar for Citrix.

Here are the photos of the momentous occasion, taken from the live stream moments ago.

 

I Don’t Mind the Sneaking Around [Ad Cookies]

  Seth Godin put out one of his characteristically pithy blog posts today, tackling the idea of advertisers placing cookies on web surfer’s cache directories:

As discussed before, there are networks of companies planting cookies on your machine and tracking behavior across websites. That means you'll see an ad on one site based on what you did on another.

You can opt out for free. Here's the not very well promoted link.

You'll see a list of which members of the NAI are already placing a cookie on your machine and you can get rid or some or all of them.

To be really clear: I don't mind the cookie sniffing. I don't mind getting better ads. I don't mind the sites making money.

I mind the sneaking around part.

This is a topic I trot out from time to time, mostly because the objections to being advertised to come from the most surprising of places.  This is something I’d imagine Seth would have a better handle on than he seems to.

Given that this type of advertising relies on a very esoteric method of behavioral tracking, even for those that are particularly web savvy, I don’t know exactly how “up front” the NAI could be about this “sneaking around” business.

Should pages that contain ads from networks that utilize this method of cookie sniffing interrupt the web surfing experience to warn surfers that they’re being observed so that advertisements can be better tracked? Perhaps these surfers should have their email addresses all sniffed out as well, and be given notification that they can opt out if they like?

Perhaps it would be even less creepy if personally identifiable data was put together so that they could be given Twitter direct messages or Facebook / MySpace messages to opt out of this sort of tracking.

Or here’s an idea – there should be a surgeon general’s warning that sits in the bottom right corner of every display ad on the web: “This ad is targeted using cookies, which have been known to cause birth defects in pregnant fathers. If you’re paranoid about this, click here to receive ads you’ll care less about but won’t know a thing about you.”

Twittering From Outside the Matrix [Singularity]

You probably caught this story last night when the press release was issued – it first showed up at ReadWriteWeb, and then made the rounds on the gadget blogs today.

What it is, though, is the first and only system to allow someone to Tweet completely hands free.  The interface functions by taking brain scan readings while the user stares at the letter on a screen.  When the message is fully formed, they stare at the word “twit,” and it goes out to their Twitter account.

I do have some video I haven’t seen elsewhere that shows the system in action – it’s a bit slow, but surprisingly effective.  I imagine as they refine the process, the accuracy and speed will increase, but for a proof of concept, it’s particularly interesting and worth a look.

Download the MP4.
Subscribe in iTunes.

Denton, TX Broadcasts Mugshots via Twitter [Rizzn the Hardened Criminal]

Yes, that’s me, the hardened criminal mastermind, over to the right.  In 2000, I was arrested in Denton County, TX for about five separate traffic violations that at age 21 I was foolish enough to believe would simply go away. Most of the tickets were accrued during my teenage years, and a few of them I’d never even heard of.  Still, sitting them out in a jail cell probably taught me a few valuable lessons (like: it’s easier to get out of jail if you’ve robbed a Walmart or ran over someone while drunk than it is if you’re in for a sticker on your car with the wrong date).

Why bring this up?  Why embarrass myself?  Well, I just learned today via SlipperyBrick that the county of Denton in Texas is now throwing out onto the web all their arrests out by way of Twitter on the account @DentonPolice.

I figured it was only a matter of time before some enterprising person figured out it was all made possible by Denton’s super-connected policy of publicly searchable arrest records and mugshots, and tried to see if I was available at all to be surprised by it.

How fair is this system, though, that will serve to humiliate offenders who might deserve it?  Granted, I was personally guilty of my offenses, and I admitted to it and paid my debt to society.

But most people who are arrested, be it for stupid crap like me or serious crimes, are still afforded innocence until proven guilty. The wisdom in not only trumpeting out their crimes via the megaphone of Twitter but keeping their records publicly searchable for almost a decade is highly questionable.

On The Other Hand
Out of morbid curiosity, I did some clicking through the Twitter feed for the account to get an idea for what constitutes for an arrestable offense in the county just to my Northwest here in Dallas. Most of the crimes are pretty understandable – theft, battery, DUIs, and so on.

One caught my eye, though.  An attractive young girl, aged 24, was arrested in Denton county for speeding – going 72 miles per hour in a zone designated for only 55 miles per hour.

The comments were plentiful and incredulous:

melonball6 on April 18, 2009
seriously! a ticket would have been more appropriate.

johncajigas on April 18, 2009
a ticket wasn't enough? seems a bit harsh.

CadmarHuxtable on April 18, 2009
Arrested for less than 20 miles over? Sucks for you lady.

dave204 on April 20, 2009
Are the Taliban in charge of Denton police? Its like something from the Middle Ages in Britain! "Caught watching TV" will be next!! Get real..

nikkoblam on April 19, 2009
that's crazy to arrest someone for speeding? weird too. thank goodness i don't live in Denton!

ldswinney on April 19, 2009
Arrested for speeding? Damn, Denton cops are strict.

 

It brings another possibility to mind – this Twitter account is recieving a fair amount of press coverage, both in the blogosphere as well as mainstream media websites and TV broadcasts.

It’s very possible that the extremely harsh nature of Denton County Justice becomes common knowledge outside the DFW Metroplex (and believe me, there are areas of Denton County that you don’t want to go to if you’re just having a bad luck day – Lewisville cops – well, just don’t get me started there).

At some point, it’s going to become a PR problem for the county, and they’re going to need to take a look at how putting this information online could damage them.  Just in the last hour day, I’ve noticed about five arrests for simple traffic violations (with fines for the five folks surpassing $10,000 total).

It’s clear that a large portion of the county is funded on the backs of overly harsh sentences on petty violators.  Denton used to have a national reputation as a haven for artists, musicians and other sorts of social misfits and interesting people that Austin is known for.

They’re in danger of having that reputation replaced by the appearance of being the traffic Gestapo.

@PeterDrew’s Buggy Black-hat Software [The Beauty of Twitter]

Today, the best thing so far about Oprah joining Twitter impacted my life. Very succinctly, a spammer, black-hatter, and otherwise unsavory web character that goes by the name Peter Drew joined Twitter and started promoting his presence there with a vengeance, in an attempt to cash in on some of the Oprah-Twitter Mania.

The guy has ridden the bubbles throughout the years with the goal of pure exploitation.  When blogging turned into a phenomenal thing years ago, he wrote software that made splogging on a massive scale literally a click away.  When YouTube started making headlines, he created software that downloaded from people’s channels, and allowed you to re-upload it as if it were your own.

When the Google Knol came out, he wrote software that used the system for pure self promotion and SEO plays.

So now that Oprah is on Twitter and pushing it into the mainstream? Of course he’s pushing software that will somehow exploit the system in ways John Reese never dreamed of.

He’s calling his new thing “Brute Force Social Media,” which sounds about as antithetical to how social media works as it can possibly get:

To gain a lot of followers like I have, if you
know me, you know we automate everything we
do online that makes our lives easier.
see
http://www.brute[redacted]  to
start gaining tons of followers, so you
can start stamping out your content and
get your Voice online like never before.

Why is this a good thing?
Up until now, this winner among winners has been operating in the shadows.  I signed up to one of his sites years ago (during his blogging phase), because I had a large blogging network at the time (around twenty authors), and the software as it was described in the marketing verbage sounded like it would help me automate some of the routine maintenance I had to do.

Of course, once he had my email address, I was locked into his mailing list, and I received updates every time he figured out a way to game the system and defraud advertisers out of money by creating junk content, somehow.

Every email contains a link to unsubscribe, but any time I used it, it seemed like the emails I received from the man only multiplied. Instead of one email a week, I’d get three or four.

That he’s on Twitter, now, is great!  I can ask him flat out and in full view of the world why I can’t get off his mailing lists.

Sure, he’s probably doing a bit more damage to start with. He’s polluting the tubes with his nonsense, and folks are probably buying his junk (which is why he’s still doing it)…

… but since sunlight is the best disinfectant, I can’t imagine this continuing.  I’ve been on his mailing lists for at least four or five years, and I haven’t seen a single proposal from him that seemed on the up-and-up.

I ask again, Peter, in full view of the world – how do I get off your lists?

Disgusting Dominoes Dudes: Call and Response

Earlier this afternoon, Steven sent me a video. It was the corporate response from Dominoes to what was apparently a pretty embarrassing videoed incident that may or may not have occurred at a Dominoes restaurant.

I hadn’t actually seen the video in question.  It, as it turns out, involves those new sandwiches that are on special and boogers.

The videoed response compelled me to watch the original, because of the clear level of sincerity and regret that the corporate response was from Dominoes president Patrick Doyle. Watch for yourself.

Given the response, particularly if you weren’t familiar with the original incident, you likely had a lot of the same reactions I did:

1. What was the content of this original video that made it so gross?  Was it 2girls1pizza?
2. What’s the deal with this rash of corporate scandal?

The answer to question one is “no,” because it wasn’t nearly as bad as I was lead to believe by the response. Nothing I’d want have done to my food, but nothing nearly as bad as I expected.

The answer to question two is far more interesting.  Between #AmazonFail, DiggBarGate, TinyURLs are Evil, the Facebook crisis of the moment, and #motrinmoms, it occurs to me that social media is going to quickly gain a reputation for being the bane of corporate existence.

Dorrine Mendoza touched on it somewhat today in the comments to a piece by Steven Hodson entitled “The wrong people are promoting Social Media,” when she said:

Being relatively new to social media/networking myself, do you think that people like me don't know we're supposed to feel empowered? I find issues like #AmazonFail, Domino's and the case of the mommy bloggers and Tylenol (Was it Tylenol?)* to be what another person described as, "storms in a teacup."

I see the overall benefit, and even the power in the result. What I don't understand is the motive. Why make such a big deal out of these things? Is it because for so long we've been taught (as consumers) that we don't have any power and still aren't sure how to use it effectively?

There are times, when I'm reading stories like the ones I mentioned above and I'm embarrassed to be a part of the social media community on one hand, and on the other, curiously hopeful.

* That was the #motrinmom’s fiasco.

For someone so new to social media, she makes a salient observation. In it’s infancy stages, we’re about as hyperactive and ill-conceived in our calls to action as the French were when they were hot for democracy, and ran around executing everyone they could find with a drop of royal bloodline in their body.

As I and others like Clay Shirky noted, much of the blogosphere went off half-cocked about the #AmazonFail incident.  It’s being alleged that Jon Engle’s case, which caused most of the weborati to unite and decry the DMCA as well as a number of stock photo outlets, that the case wasn’t as clearcut as previously imagined.

This is likely not to abate until the whole of society becomes so used to thinking critically about all the crazy stories that are pitched daily (targeted towards all our hotbuttons) that we have the good sense to call shens once in a while.

Essentially, until we become media savvy as a culture (New Media savvy, that is), we’re going to create a very unpleasant landscape for the corporations.

This is different than the first time around, when the ‘net was new.  The community was thinned, somewhat disconnected, and dominated by newbies.  This time around, the newbies and unsavvy are just as plentiful, but the tools in place are designed to connect them and make them strong.

My hope is that the always on nature of these new tools will provide a trial by fire.  The general populace needs to get burned a few more times by things like #AmazonFail or the whole Obama is from Kenya thing, so they’ll remember the lesson not to believe everything they hear.