Communication Overtones Comments
I wonder why Edelman didn't do a simple & quick blogger audit before the agency distributed the laptops. Edelman has many in-house bloggers. The PR people involved in the Microsoft campaign could have just asked them how they'd feel about receiving a free laptop to evaluate the new Microsoft OS. And the Edelman bloggers got many blogger friends who they could have asked - offline - whether they think it's a good move. Maybe Edelman did all that and went ahead well aware of the ramifications.
Somehow, I think, they didn't quite expect all that noise around their campaign. The fact that they sent out free laptops - even to "only" 90 bloggers - is not the problem. How they did it, is what brought on the controversy.
Maybe I'm a prude when it comes to PR ethics, something that comes from teaching it for 15 years, but this issue is pretty black and white in my book. If the free laptops don't influence bloggers' evaluations, they do influence readers' perceptions of those evaluations. If you want me to believe what you write about Vista, you need to tell me the laptop went back. I see no wiggle room on this one at all -- only rationalizations.
Edelman or any other PR firm wouldn't dream of sending this type of no-strings "bribe" to the mainstream media. Why treat bloggers differently?
For my my complete take: http://toughsledding.wordpress.c...-hotseat-again/
Hey Kami, I just commented to our good friend Leo that you've been on a tear recently with some really strong content. Keep up the great work and all the best to you and your family in 2007.
Todd
Tina and Bill;
Your comments got me to wondering how media companies, whose business it is to review items, handle this situation, I turned to ,a href=http://www.cnetnetworks.com/editorial/
disclosure.html
"the guidelines set forth by C|Net, one of the best-known tech review companies.
C|Net requires its employees to “refuse benefits that could cause the giver or others to perceive that CNET Networks is beholden to another company.” They also do not allow employees to keep products or services. They aren’t allowed to keep hardware for more than six months and they must close any free accounts after the review is published. They allow employees to keep software, but it can’t be “resold or used for commercial purposes.”
Now, we must assume that bloggers see themselves as media, but we also have to give some credit to the readers. Will the bloggers who accepted these gifts, disclosed or undisclosed, lose any credibility with their readers?
Also, as a PR move, Microsoft has to ask itself,"Did this really achieve the objective we set out to accomplish, or did it bring out integrity into question?"
As a PR firm, I would hope I would flesh out those questions before I moved forward on an initiative. You can read my post about getting a spine to see how I feel about that. But in the end, it is the responsibility of the client to ensure their reputation isn't tarnished.
Thanks for your response Kami. I agree with pretty much everything you say.
The CNET policy shows that there are some guidelines in place on how media companies handle gifts. OK - bloggers might be a different breed but then there are many journalists among them. Microsoft and Edelman actually would have had a chance to help form some kind of blogger gift guidelines if they would have handled the wording around the laptop distribution a bit differently.
On the other hand, it allows other (= smaller, less prestigious) companies and agencies to set examples!
Tina; Well said, I do believe the trouble here was execution of the program. Stuff like this is done all the time with journalists, and while we want to resist treating bloggers as journos, per se, I think that it would behoove us to do so for reputation purposes. What a blogger chooses to do in response is out of our control, as it it is with journalists. I say treat bloggers like journalists, understanding that they won't necessarily return the favor by acting like one.
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