Well, we certainly stepped in it, judging by the "blogstorm" over Nick's post this past Friday. Over the past 24 hours scores of highly respected voices have chimed in on Microsoft's campaign, and I wanted to take the time to read as much of it as I could, really listen, and figure out where I came down in all of this. I've seen broadsides at FM and its partners, and also significant posts of support. I value it all, I really do, and I'm learning from it all as well.
Before I dive too deeply into this, I want to say that I take full responsibility as the CEO of FM, for any lost trust, and for any damage this has done to anyone involved.
Second, to be clear: I personally thought it was fine to lend my voice to the campaign, just as I did with Cisco and Hakia, and for the record - and speaking only for me - I still do. I always post when I join these kinds of conversations - here's my Microsoft post, for example. If you've read my writings on conversational marketing, you know that I believe deeply in the idea of bringing marketers into the conversation of a site. I wrote:
I've argued for more than 15 years that all commercial publications are conversations between three core parties - the author, the audience, and the advertiser. The best of these have a robust shared grammar, a voice that all three parties understand and respect. At Wired, for example, we ran a survey asking readers the major benefits of reading the magazine. "The Ads" came up near the top. Why?
Wired had a very strong editorial voice, one that readers strongly associated with and felt passionate about. Sure, it was not for everyone, but what great voice is? It may be hard to believe, but advertisers are people too - and many of Wired's advertisers were readers of Wired, and they also felt passionate about the markets and ideas the magazine represented. In fact, many of our advertisers not only shared Wired's point of view and enjoyed its voice, they felt - through the products and services they created - that they were actively participating in the conversation Wired represented - they were participants in a grand conversation about the digital revolution and its impact on society.
So a funny thing started to happen. The advertisements started to adopt the grammar and voice of the magazine. Now, some of them were admittedly lame - cheap attempts to copy the design and buzzwords for which the magazine was (in)famous. These ads were off key, pretentious, they lacked integrity. But far more hit the right notes - the added to the conversation, they understood the mores and values of the Wired conversation, they respected the dialog, and they threw in their two cents appropriately. Hence, the ads became an important part of the benefits of reading Wired, and the survey results showed it.
Wired was a great example of marketers joining a mediated conversation in an appropriate, valuable way. Why, I wondered as I puzzled out FM, can't that idea be extended and deepened online? After all, as the Cluetrain taught us, your ads need not simply be a declarative statement frozen in time, as it must be in television or print. Online, the conversation can continue, it can deepen, and it can take its own course.
Microsoft was attempting something new, certainly something entirely new for the company, in any case - it was inviting authors into the marketing conversation. We tried to do it in a way that was transparent, that had integrity, where no editorial space was purchased. Clearly, a number of prominent voices believe lines were crossed, including several in the FM family. Well, that's OK, in fact, that's how we're supposed to learn - by listening to voices we respect. And I've learned some things here, more on that in a minute.
But let's step back for a minute first and examine some of the assumptions in the criticism so far. Microsoft was trying to do something new, but the overwhelming presumption behind many of the critics of this campaign has been that Microsoft was being evil. That it was trying to pull the wool over our eyes. That it was, in short, a bad actor. Why? Why this knee jerk assumption that an important character in the conversation happening in our world is evil, wrong, malicious? And that all the authors associated with the campaign are dupes, fools, schills? Are we really still stuck in 1996, where every single thing the company does is presumptively evil?
Come on folks, let's think this through a bit more. I give the company a lot of credit for trying something new. I know all the folks involved in this campaign, and they are not evil. They are not trying to dupe us. They are honestly trying out something new. They didn't think they were taking much of a risk: after all, similar campaigns had run for over a year - millions and millions of impressions against scores of sites - without any reader revolt or blogstorms breaking.
So...why now, and why Microsoft?
Well, I'll leave that thought for you all to consider. I do believe the campaign could have been executed better, and we at FM should have already publicly posted our principles on the best practices for this kind of marketing, calling for your input and refinement so we can ensure your trust. We had planned to do that next month, and we had already drafted our principles and were in the process of getting our author's input just as this story broke. Clearly, we'll get them out quickly so you all can help us do better.
Now back to lessons learned.
I think the main criticism of the campaign comes down to this: Never do anything where there is a perception that integrity was purchased. The question is, how to ensure that perception? I think in the case of the authors who participated in the Microsoft campaign, there are pretty much two camps. First, there are those who do not claim to be "traditional journalists" or who believe that their readers are sophisticated, and can judge for themselves whether their voice has really been purchased. They figure anything that is in the ad unit is understood to be an ad. If they participate in it, they disclose that by the fact of their name being in the ad. They honestly don't see what the fuss is about. Those in the second camp, after thinking about this episode, think they made a mistake about joining the campaign. They've stopped the ads running on their sites, and they won't do similar campaigns in the future.
I think there's room in this world for both approaches. But no matter what, I think the key, as Scoble says, is to disclose. Our draft principles say:
Appearing in Ads: If you lend your voice or name to copy in an ad unit (for instance, “My dream search engine would operate on my spoken word,”) disclose that fact and your relationship with the advertiser, if any, in a post or on a disclosure page.
I think that's absolutely right, and I wish all our authors did this before running the campaign. I think many did not because they thought that the ads would bear their name, and so disclosure would be self evident. I wish FM had worked more closely with authors in this case, considering all the possible outcomes and ensuring that they really thought through those possibilities before agreeing to be part of the campaign. We should have been more determined in asking each author to disclose the details of this campaign, and to consider their own comfort level with this type of campaign. I feel like we failed that group of authors, as well as our partner Microsoft, by including authors who, on second thought, wished they had not joined this particular conversation. To the best of my abilities, I will not let that happen again.
But to sum up, I refuse to declare conversational marketing a bad idea because of one storm. That's ridiculous. The creators and readers of this site and thousands of sites like it, along with commercial partners and new kinds of companies like FM, are helping to create a new form of media, one that will continue to evolve. One where all of us learn to trust not only the leaders of conversations - the authors - but also those who have been invited into the conversation - including marketers. That trust has to be earned and it has to be tended, but it's simply unfair to have a conversation where there is trust between author and audience, but advertisers are, as a rule, mistrusted.
So I, for one, want to say for the record that I trust Microsoft in this case. I truly believe they were trying to do something new, and I believe they had no malicious intent. I do not agree with those who regard marketers as a necessary evil. I think that approach reflects the worst baggage of traditional approaches to media, and I for one have dedicated my working life to eliminating it. Marketing can and should be useful, relevant, helpful, and add value to the conversation of a site. Did we learn nothing from the rise of Google and Adwords, after all?
To learn how to create new and useful forms of marketing, we have to try new things. If we step in it, we should step back, listen, incorporate lessons, and try again. That's what we'll do this time, and I look to you all for your help as we do.
