Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

David, I posted the following comment on Richard Edelman's site and would be interested to hear your views:

"What you say makes sense to me.

However, let's say some forward thinking company hires your agency to join the conversation on their behalf, to search for and respond to comments made about their products and shape the debate(s) in their favor.

Perhaps you assign a team of talented and professional researchers and writers to the account. Would they be anonymous fronts or would their links bring them back to Edelman PR? Or to the company who hired you?

It seems to me that the temptation is pretty strong to invent profiles of what the PR agency thinks represent 'cool' bloggers and watch them for a while as they put them out, keeping those profiles that seem to work in the high-ranked blogs, dumping those that don't; in effect, attempting to manipulate the debate, running the risk of being exposed for having a hidden and vested commercial interest and thus, zero credibility, which of course could cause the spin to backfire.

How would your firm handle it?"

Noel's scenario is interesting; it sounds like the worst of two worlds. On one hand, there's the fake blogging (and other forms of Net-fakery) used in some viral campaigns. The fakery is total, but it's generally designed with a built-in time limit - you build the buzz, then you drop the mask and get in the real product pitch before everyone walks away. On the other hand, there's the more stealthy approach to infiltrating marketing into conversations represented by BzzAgent. I find BzzAgent's approach weird and creepy - I found it hard to use the word 'infiltrate' in the previous sentence rather than 'pollute' - but they are actually struggling with questions of honesty and disclosure. (As I understand it, the BzzAgent model is now not so much "hey, you wear shoes too - but have you thought about insoles?", more "you know what, I do some work with a company that's given me some samples of a new kind of insole...")

Maybe a fusion of the two is possible; who knows, maybe dedicated marketing professionals will soon be sweeping the blogosphere with their insoles, sneaky bastids. I hope not, obviously. But I also wonder if deception on that scale is really sustainable. You could say that the development of BzzAgent echoes the 'viral' time-limit or safety-valve - after a while, people do actually want to start telling the truth. (Or: to stop selling and start talking. Conversations are not marketplaces; communities are not markets.)