Scobleizer - Latest Comments in If you are going to sell your soul…

Re: If you are going to sell your soul…

Wade — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 12:53:43 -0000

You know by puting up a post like this you know seem more credible, and thus more advertising dollars. very clever.

Re: If you are going to sell your soul…

qthrul — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 17:37:47 -0000

Ah... I appear to have answered my own twitter.

http://twitter.com/qthrul/s...

Re: If you are going to sell your soul…

David Spark — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 20:54:28 -0000

Hey Robert:

The reason people think this is an old conversation because it harps on the whole theory of transparency which we've all beaten over the head until the horse I believe now has been cremated. The reason you need to still bring it up is because the overwhelming majority of advertising is based on spin. And prior to these extremely open conversations we have on the Internet most would not disclose.

I have my own custom publishing business (http://www.sparkmediasoluti...) for traditional and new media. And I often speak for many different companies PLUS I work as a journalist (http://www.sparkminute.com). The bottom line is I'm transparent in any case as to who I represent. And if I ever do a story as a journalist about one of my clients, I disclose that behavior. A reader or listener determines the value of that communication. It could be, "Hey, he's an insider and he's got some great information." Or it could be "He's a shill for the company, and that's why he's plugging them." It's not for me to form those opinions, it's for the readers to form them. All I can do is disclose.

Re: If you are going to sell your soul…

John M. Hightower — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 05:02:03 -0000

Thanks for your response, Robert. I appreciate it. One of the reasons I keep up with your blog is that you take your commenters seriously and value your credibility above money. That's far too rare these days; glad you have those "old school values." :-)

Re: If you are going to sell your soul…

vinnie mirchandani — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 01:50:36 -0000

Scoble, they can join the world's youngest profession

http://dealarchitect.typepa...

Re: If you are going to sell your soul…

Robert Scoble — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 01:02:34 -0000

Vinnie: except I know of a bunch of CIO's who blog. So, wonder what happens then? :-)

Re: If you are going to sell your soul…

vinnie mirchandani — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 01:00:39 -0000

Robert, sorry I disagree...last year I blogged...

"In the 1970's when CIO's wanted to know what to buy, they asked IBM.

In the 1980's when CIO's wanted to know what to buy, they asked Andersen Consulting.

In the 1990's when CIO's wanted to know what to buy, they asked Gartner.

In the 2000's when CIO's want to know what to buy, they ask each other."

For a fleeting moment, it looked like bloggers would be an independent source of input, but we are whores too...no wonder CIOs only trust peers.

Re: If you are going to sell your soul…

Robert Scoble — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 17:20:02 -0000

It's worth $96,000 to me not to have to worry about who owns my soul today and/or making the experience here worse for my readers. I'm sure I'd have to add some ads here to make that kind of money and put them in my RSS feed. I might even have to make my RSS feed partial text, which is what a lot of the "pros" do to make their paychecks. That's not worth $96,000 to me.

Re: If you are going to sell your soul…

LayZ — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 16:57:59 -0000

@38. And who said anything about keeping the money? I 'm sure $96K would be a welcome donation at any charity.

or a John Edwards campaign fund raising dinner ;-)

Re: If you are going to sell your soul…

LayZ — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 16:49:17 -0000

@38 "LayZ: I’d rather not take money for something I do at least on part on my own time. My day job is my video blog and that’s what I’d like to get paid for. That’s what Seagate sponsors. Maybe I’m making a bad economic decision, but that’s between me and my family, not yours to make."

I never suggested it was my decision to make. It clearly is yours. I was simply pointing the economic irrationality of your decision. Again, you bitched in the past about not making over $100K when you were at MS. So, it seems irrational for you to bitch about that, yet leave a potential of $100K on the table simply BEcause you don't want to take money for something you do "on your own time" So clearly blogging on your own time is worth more to you than $96K a year.

Re: If you are going to sell your soul…

spragued — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 16:01:03 -0000

Robert,

You are so right when you say it's a public relations disaster. Their sin was minor -- what's killing them is the way it was framed by Denton and their public implosion.

Why it almost makes mainstream media look good!

Re: If you are going to sell your soul…

Robert Scoble — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 15:27:36 -0000

John: well, disclosure goes a long, long way to making a variety of sins "acceptable." If you really are disclosing everything then at minimum your readers can decide for themselves whether or not you're doing something that pisses them off. To me that's a HUGE step toward treating your readers with respect.

Is it all you should do? No, clearly there's some things I wouldn't do. I won't sell my content stream (my words) down the river. Why not? Because I don't want to lose the little credibility I have. My credibility is worth more to me than the money I'd get from an advertiser.

But the first step to this industry, if you can call it that, to getting more credibility is disclosure. On that point there is no wiggle room with me.

Re: If you are going to sell your soul…

John M. Hightower — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 12:59:37 -0000

Maybe I'm misreading this part of what you say, but you seem to be saying (my interpretation) just disclosing makes it "acceptable."

Here's case in point: you disclosed about that company which gave you your new pricey phone, then said a lot of good things about them and recommended people consider doing business with them.

Are they reputable? Do they treat their customers right? Are they reasonably priced and do they have an excellent service?

In other words, in the things which make a real difference, are they top-flight, and how did you come to that conclusion? Or would you recommend a service just because they gave you a free expensive phone you wanted?

If you'd gone into detail about why you'd picked their service and their qualifications, I'd read it with interest. But just because they gave you a free pricey phone isn't any reason for me to consider them, and it makes me wonder a bit about you too. Brings up a question in my mind which wasn't there beforehand.

If you'd even written about both the pros and cons of the company after accepting their gift, I would have responded differently. But as it came across to me, I just read them as people who knew who to give gifts to effectively.

Just my opinion.

Re: If you are going to sell your soul…

BlogReader — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 11:31:03 -0000

Almost everyone I know reads TechCrunch, or GigaOm, or Valleywag. How do I know that? Because at dinner parties, or whenever I meet geeks they bring stuff up that was discussed on TechCrunch

I can't believe Nixon was elected either, I mean everyone I talk to hated the guy.

http://valleywag.com/tech/s...

Sums up what I think sbout this spokesblogging. Just more corporate crap in a new medium. Why are you defending this Scoble?

Re: If you are going to sell your soul…

Mike D — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 03:54:05 -0000

I really didn't pay much attention to the People-Ready storm until I saw some of Arrington's remarks. They really rubbed me the wrong way.

From this post...
http://www.crunchnotes.com/...

Mike Arrington:
"It isn’t a direct endorsement. Rather, it’s usually an answer to some lame slogan created by the advertiser. It makes the ad more personal and has a higher click through rate, or so we’ve been told. In the case of the Microsoft ad, we were quoted how we had become “people ready,” whatever that means. See our answer and some of the others here (I think it will be hard to find this text controversial, or anything other then extremely boring). We do these all the time…generally FM suggests some language and we approve or tweak it to make it less lame. The ads go up, we get paid. This has been going on for months and months"

First of all, I'm shocked that he is so openly mocking the "lame" campaign that he participated in. If I was Microsoft, I would be very pissed. Second, he seems to be admitting that his quote wasn't even his words. This reminds me of the classic PR 1.0 technique of a software vendor writing up a quote about how much a customer loves their product, sending it to that customer for approval, and then running the quote in a press release as a customer endorsement when we all know that it's the software vendor putting words in the customers mouth. What happened to authenticity?

Re: If you are going to sell your soul…

Rick — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 03:33:43 -0000

Even disclosure only works if you're (seen to be) credible and trustworthy in the first place. And if you want your words, and therefor your disclosure to be credible, never, ever sell your words and your name together in the same package.

When you started working for MS, the words with your name on it were still clearly your words, even if heavily influenced, but the source and nature of that influence was fully disclosed.

If people start spouting phrases like "I was People Ready when...", they're no longer using their own words, even if the typed out the sentence themselves.
That undermines their credibility in a way no form of disclosure can compensate.

Re: If you are going to sell your soul…

Robert Scoble — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 02:51:24 -0000

>it seems you are not impressed with the “Birth of Conversational Marketing”.

Conversational Marketing started more than six years ago.

This is just an example of a company that didn't use this medium very well. We'll have lots more examples of that over the next few years as companies bumble along and try to insert their foot into the conversation but end up sticking it in their mouths instead. Heck, I'll probably make 1,000 mistakes over the next few years too. It'll give Valleywag something to write about but we'll all survive.

Re: If you are going to sell your soul…

Robert Scoble — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 02:48:57 -0000

LayZ: I'd rather not take money for something I do at least on part on my own time. My day job is my video blog and that's what I'd like to get paid for. That's what Seagate sponsors. Maybe I'm making a bad economic decision, but that's between me and my family, not yours to make.

Re: If you are going to sell your soul…

grungee — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 02:39:35 -0000

Isn't the old adage true anymore?

Don't believe everything you read.

If you can't tell the difference between advertising and true enthusiasm for a product then you really have some problems.

Re: If you are going to sell your soul…

Stephane Rodriguez — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 01:42:50 -0000

I don't buy that, Scoble. A lot of bloggers are in this to get influential with stuff they know and do that isn't disclosed. Take Loic Le Meur for instance. He moved to SF for this reason, and that's by the way in contradiction with "the world is flat", "genuine spontaneous long tail", and all that. At the end of the day, it's just marketing sluttery, just that blogging/pinging improved the network. What people like Loic Le Meur, and you, won't say too openly is that just about every day their power is not to disclose, their power is to disclose when they feel the need. Kind of replicating journalist embargo. I think that's how some people like you, whose core business is really networking behind the scene, is trying to disrupt tech journalism this way. This is not very genuine, the goal is really to tear down this industry.

Re: If you are going to sell your soul…

LayZ — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 01:40:40 -0000

"It’s incredibly difficult to turn down $8,000 a month, or even $2,000"

If this is true, and unless you are seeing more value in turning this potential money down, you are making a very irrational economic decision. Weren't you also complaining that you made less than $100K a year at Microsoft? Why would you turn down $96K a year for just showing up? I could see your point if you doing something morally questionable, but I don't think text ads rise to that level. So basically you are saying your "A-list status" is worth more to you than a potential of $96K a year?

Re: If you are going to sell your soul…

JoeDuck — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 23:48:01 -0000

Right. Disclosure matters and was deficient in this case. You helped pioneer the case for the blog conversation and it seems you are not impressed with the "Birth of Conversational Marketing".

Re: If you are going to sell your soul…

Dawn Douglass — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 23:33:11 -0000

Actually, I just remembered that one of my first posts here was about my son joining the Marines, and Robert kindly wished him well and said he appreciated his service. That will be four years ago in August.

Re: If you are going to sell your soul…

Dawn Douglass — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 23:25:01 -0000

DaveD, I have no idea what you're talking about.

I've been making comments in Robert's blog for what? two years? Why shouldn't I still, just because Robert wrote a post or two about me?

I don't get it.

Re: If you are going to sell your soul…

Matt — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 23:11:53 -0000

Scoble, you are so special.