The message I received from M80im, a PR social media company, ends by saying:

M80 encourages full transparency. We welcome you to let your readers know that M80 and Fox contacted you to offer information regarding The Onion Movie.

Excellent. I appreciate M80 making that clear and explicit.

The problem is, M80 and Fox didn’t offer just information. Yes, the message says that because I’ve written about The Onion, the agency wants to let me know what there’s an Onion movie coming out. I can have some artwork, etc. to post on my blog. But, then it continues:

Please email me back if you are interested in working with us in promoting The Onion Movie by posting information regarding the release date of the DVD. I can send you a copy of the DVD on the release date as appreciation for your post.

I recognize that the lines are smudgy. As my disclosure statement says, I sometimes get free copies of books — sometimes unbidden, and sometimes publishers offer to send them to me if I want — and sometimes I do blog about them. And I frequently get into conferences for free as some type of media person. But, the Onion offer feels too much to me like a straightforward pay-for-posting deal.

Does it to you? Tags: marketing pr blogging cluetrain

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Charlene Li, co-author of Groundswell and Forrester person, pointed to some good sites in her keynote at Community 2.0. The Starbucks suggestion box is nicely done, but I especially like the way Tivo participates in the independent forum, TivoCommunity.com

By the way, the Community 2.0 conference was an interesting gathering of people interested in various aspects of the various ways businesses build and are embedded in communities. [Tags: cluetrain marketing charlene_li groundswell ]

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I wanted to find out what Microsoft Expression Media — or, as Microsoft puts it, Microsoft® Expression® Media — is, so I did what any red-blooded Netizen would do: I googled it. The top hit is Microsoft’s home page for it. It wants to show me videos, but I don’t want to sit around while being slowly pummeled with Microsoft’s marketing messages. If I’m going to be marketed to, at least let me skim. So, I clicked on the “Why Buy?” link, thinking I’d get a features list. I just want to know what the product does.

Nope. That loads a popup that asks me to install Silverlight (oops, I mean Microsoft® Silverlight®)The popup conscientiously informs me that once installed, Silverlight “updates automatically,” where “update” means I am giving Microsoft the right to load stuff onto my computer without asking or informing me. In addition, the privacy statement says Microsoft will only transfer information it gathers about me and my computer to third parties if it really wants to. (The privacy statement puts it a little more formally than that.)

So, here I am, trying to find out about a Microsoft product, yet I’m being required to install software I don’t want in the first place, and that has the right to mutate itself without my knowledge. And to get this authorized virus, I have to agree to a privacy-violation agreement that scares me.

Can you imagine the snorting that would occur if a start-up company insisted on this?

So, take this as an example of either inept marketing or implicit bullying by a dominant force. Or both. [Tags: microsoft marketing silverlight ]

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This BoingBoing gadget lets you smash corporate shillery in a most amusing way.

[Tags: marketing games boingboing ]

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Francois Gossieaux reports on experiments described in Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational that show just how influential our expectations are: People who paid more for an energy drink were more refreshed by it and even solved more puzzles. Francois concludes: (1) “We are doomed,” and (2) “…who said that messaging was dead? The things you say about your product may indeed be more important that the product itself…”

Almost from the day the Cluetrain site went up, I regretted point #74: “We are immune to advertising. Just forget it.” We are so not immune. Branding works. We think of Volvos as safe and the Ford Fiesta as a car for young folks. We think of Coke as the original and Pepsi as the copy. We can characterize someone as a “wearer of Birkenstocks.” Branding and advertising in some important sense work.

Now, we certainly can undo some of the cognitive damage advertising and branding do. Market conversations in fact often are about the ways in which a product’s promises and sloganeering don’t live up to its reality. But that’s a lot different than saying we’re immune to advertising. We’re not.

I’d still urge companies to move their marketing away from messaging, however. Assuming the studies Francois cites are correct, our reactions to products do seem shaped by what we’re told about them. No surprise there, although it’s always depressing to find out what big dopes we humans are through no fault of our own. But, customers (= all of us) are going to increasingly resist and resent marketing that focuses narrowly on messaging — that is, on finding the simple idea they can pound into our heads over and over. Telling us your drink will make us refreshed or more alert may indeed make us more refreshed or alert, but treating us like freaking morons by droning the same words at us over and over will make your product less interesting to us. The real challenge marketers face in a world of online conversations is how to help us find what’s interesting about their products.

(By the way, although Francois an I have been friends and colleagues for many years, I just this morning realized that his last name uses each of the vowels just once.) [Tags: francois_gossieaux marketing branding advertising cluetrain ]

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Paul Gillin has posted draft chapters of his new book, Secrets of Social Marketing, for our enjoyment and, more important, our commentary. I haven’t taken a look at them yet, but I like to see people practicing what they preach, and Paul’s The New Influencers was good.

[Tags: marketing paul_gillin business ]

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authenticity: An industry consortium “sponsored” a course at Hunter in which students were supposed to create a fake blog to discourage people from buying knock-off fashion items. Jeesh!

[Tags: authenticity marketing cluetrain blogs sockpuppetry ]

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Harvard Business Review this month is running a “case study” (pure fiction) I wrote about whether companies can and should be authentic. The case study is intended to be even-handed in its presentation; it’s followed by expert commentary. They’ve posted the case on their Web site and have opened it up to readers for discussion. There’s also a video of Julia Kirby (one of the editors) interviewing me on the topic, on that same page. FWIW, I am not at all convinced that the term “authenticity” is helpful — or maybe even meaningful — when applied to business.

[Tags: marketing authenticity hbr ]

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Given Wal-Mart’s size and its heavy-handed approach to so much of life, the fact that it’s letting its buyers blog freely is welcome news. (Disclosure: I consult to Edelman PR, which has Wal-Mart as a client. But all I know about this is what I read in the linked article; I assume but don’t know that Edelman was involved. And, yes, this disclosure is now longer than the post.)

[Tags: wal-mart blogs cluetrain ]

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The official NFL Superbowl site doesn’t tell you when the game starts or what network is showing it, at least as far as I can tell. (I am not accepting the count-down timer as a way of telling me when the game starts. No math should be required for this.)

The HighBeam research service tells you everything about their pro vs. regular service except how much either one of them costs.

[Tags: marketing superbowl cluetrain ]

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