Malik, Arrington and Battelle: X-22, come in

What would possess a collection of online publishers and venture capitalists to pimp a Microsoft advertising slogan?

Valleywag today reported about a site tied to a Microsoft ad campaign where the likes of Michael Arrington, Om Malik and others seemingly lend their support to the "people-ready" catchphrase.

I sent e-mails both to Arrington and Malik and--surprise, surprise--heard nothing back. (Obviously, they are not yet sufficiently "Coop-ready.") Microsoft was still checking for me into whether money exchanged hands. But even if not a single shekel exchanged hands, I must wonder about the absence of common sense. Why would ostensibly independent voices come across as Microsoft shills? If they were hoping for a free dinner with Bill Gates, there are smarter ways to go about it.

The site, ginned up by John Battelle's Federated Media offers brief bromides on how respective authors summoned their people readiness. Check out the site for yourself, but for my money, the most interesting vignette (albeit in an altogether bizarre way) was supplied by majordomo Battelle himself. To wit:

"This may be controversial, but I felt that I learned how best to manage people when I had to go through the wrenching process of laying off scores of people in my business, and when I had to fire very senior managers who were no longer a fit for my company. In the process of doing this, I learned how best to hire, and how best to set expectations, and how best to let people go - it's never fun, but if a person is not working out in your business, it's usually true that your business is not working out for them as well."

Well, my people-ready bubby, can we "tawk?"

Turns out the "senior managers" that you fired (and hired?) didn't have a clue about running a business. Or so thinks your former boss, Pat McGovern, who in this March interview points out that the Industry Standard purchased quite expensive CRM software and had to eat $120 million in fixed costs per year.

"It was a hopeless situation. The gap between costs and revenues was too large...The paradox was that in 1999, we were approached by Time Warner and Hearst, who wanted to buy the Standard for $400 million or $500 million. But [then-CEO] John Battelle had a plan to be making $1 billion a year by 2006, wanted to take the company public, and planned to make a tender offer to buy Dow Jones. It was a plan for world domination, and we should have taken the money from the magazine publishers and run."

Ouch.

So whose fault was that, big guy? Let me suggest a tweak to punch up your touching coming-of-age recollection. Perhaps something along the lines of:

"OK, so I blew more millions in IDG-denominated dough in one of the more mind-boggling failures of dot-com insanity. But hey, those boozy Friday rooftop parties with the fancy sushi were well worth the price of self-knowledge."

In the meantime, I'll be keeping an eye out for more advertorial from this posse.

[JoeDuck1]

Ouch!

Holy Suchi putdown, Bat(telle) dissing man! Were you one of the spurned editors at Standard?

[John Battelle]

Well Charles, Not Exactly

First, check this for how accurate Mr. McGovern's memory is:

http://battellemedia.com/archives/003491.php

Second, here's FM's response to the story, from Neil Chase, who runs author services and came from editorial at the New York Times:

Nick,

Welcome to the birth of conversational marketing.

It's making people like you and me, who came from the world of traditional newspapers, have to learn about three-way conversations. We have already witnessed the evolution of the two-way conversation among authors and readers that is replacing old-fashioned one-way journalism. Even our old employers (yours at the Financial Times, mine at The New York Times) are now actively bringing their readers into two-way conversations.

So the next step, naturally, is for marketers to want to join the conversation. It can be done in ethical, responsible ways, and FM's authors are among the first to figure out how to do it.

In the case of this Microsoft campaign, the marketers asked if our writers would join a discussion around their "people ready" theme. Microsoft is an advertiser on our authors' sites, but it's paying them only based on the number of ad impressions delivered. There was no payment for joining the conversation and they were not required to do it. They're not writing about this on their blogs, and of course several of them have been known to be pretty hard on Microsoft at times as reporters. They're talking about the topic, and readers joined that conversation.

We're carefully expanding conversational marketing based on all kinds of new ideas that are coming from authors, marketers and our sales reps. We're drafting a set of principles for conversational marketing that will help everyone, inside FM and across the industry, frame the discussion about how we do this the right way. And we're taking care at every step of the process to make sure we don't compromise the editorial integrity of our authors.

You're right to be skeptical; we should all be watching carefully to make sure we do this right. We certainly are.

Best,
Neil Chase
Vice President
Federated Media Publishing

[charlie cooper]

McGovern redux

Thanks for the feedback, John. I'm familiar with your earlier post
on McGovern's supposed revisionism. Everyone's entitled to an
opinion but the man's track record over the course of the last
three decades is pretty darned good, wouldn't you agree? I
would be the last to doubt his business smarts.

I'm unclear what Neil Chase is trying to say in the quote you
reposted. This episode has nothing to do with the evolution of
media away from the "old-fashioned one-way journalism" he
alludes to. If "conversational marketing" is going to be
considered a public good, he has a lot more explaining to do
before he convinces me. I see nothing to applaud when they add
their voices to a "conversation" on an advertorial that takes its
lead tune from a Microsoft advertising slogan.