Coding Sanity

I guess I must have been asleep over the weekend, but I just picked up on the huge storm of controversy over Microsoft's People Ready campaign and how it paid bloggers to write a whole bunch of empty platitudes about a crappy marketing-drone nothing-phrase "people-ready". Microsoft has once again used dishonest tactics to try and get nice comments and it has once again blown up in their faces. One wonders when they're going to start firing the marketing morons who keep coming up with such brilliant ideas:

"I know, why don't we surreptitiously approach bloggers, and pay them, in a deliberately round-about way to write nice things about our fantastic new campaign. If we get get caught, well... let's not worry about that, it'll never happen."

Honestly, it's not really Microsoft that's acting unethically, it's the bloggers that they paid. Some feel that they should not be held to standards of credibility and integrity, others are crying huge crocodile tears and are shouting mea culpa's. I honestly believe that getting paid to write content without disclosing it, puts all your content in doubt. Just as I will now always take anything posted by Auratius with a grain of salt, wondering who he may have lifted it from, I will also have my doubts about the bloggers in volved in this fiasco. Whenever I read anything of Om Malik's I will wonder if he accepted money to say something nice, especially given his evasions about it. "Conversational marketing", my foot, another crappy phrase; it's called advertising!

As I have pointed out, integrity and reputation are things that, once compromised, are gone forever. Never think that some arrangement will not come to light, it almost certainly will, and you can be pretty sure that it'll be cast in a poor light. In many cases, it's not so much the actions as the cover-up that people despise. I have no problem with bloggers being involved in advertising, as long as they disclose it. That disclosure allows their readers to easily determine whether something is purely the bloggers own idea, or just something he was paid to say. Needless to say the advertisers will always want the advert to be disclosure-free, well aware that it will have more effect that way, it's the bloggers personal responsibility not to put their reputation at risk.

Quite some time ago, Armand put Google Ads on this site to help support it, an aim which I wholeheartedly support. He puts a lot of effort into this site, and if adverts would help him support it, good for him. However, I had a problem; on my one post, decrying the insidious influence of Christian Creationism, Google Ads was bringing up adverts for creationists and Bibles. I thought that this was in poor taste and compromised my point, and I asked Armand if he'd mind if I switched off the ads on my feed. He graciously accepted my explanation, for which I am very grateful. Would I accept ads on my feed? Certainly I would, especially if they were for a good cause such as keeping dotnet.org.za afloat, however, I'd have to have some editorial control over the ads.

Should advertisers be blamed for wanting to have more effective advertisements? No. Should content creators and "opinion leaders" be blamed for doing or having adverts, should they be blamed for hiding their relationship with the advertiser? No, no and yes respectively. Should a company like Microsoft, which has made phenomenal efforts to help create and expand a blogging community be blamed for helping to compromise the integrity of that community? Yes. Once again, Microsoft is cast as a villain in the piece, and once again it's because they have engaged in practices of dubious virtue. Given the continual marketing missteps that they seem to make, I wonder if I am justified in speculating if the Microsoft Marketing department is being paid off by a competitor?

As I have said before, Microsoft's mistakes irritate me because I do have an incentive to see them succeed, I like their technology and I make plenty of money from their stack, and I get upset when they do stupid things that damage their reputation. I look at all the fantastic Microsoft staff us developers deal with and read on a daily basis, people who honestly go out of their way trying to improve the lot of developers, and I wonder how they must feel when they see something like this happen. Something that drags their reputation, by association, through the mud.