Slashdot Mirror
Leaked Microsoft Dossier on Journalist
Ludvig A. Norin writes "Wired journalist Fred Vogelstein blogs about how he accidentally got hold of a dossier on himself produced by Microsoft's PR firm, Waggener Edstrom. While it's not unusual for PR people to create background files on journalists, it's notable that this one leaked, and got commented by Waggener Edstrom's Frank Shaw and Wired Magazine editor in chief Chris Anderson. Makes for an interesting read — there's lots to learn from the inner workings of the Microsoft PR machinery." Someone please send me mine? I bet it's really friendly!
But, CmdrTaco, the summary (no I didn't RTFA) is about journalists?
I wonder how microsoft feels about the leak. If anything it will be a bargain chip for cheaper rates when it comes time to pay their outsourced PR firm.
.... if Microsoft's PR firms do the same thing with sites like Slashdot? Do they keep track on what certain users say? Do they keep track of what topic are posted?
That would be interesting to know IMHO.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
You'd really appreciate this, then:
http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1747610
This guy needs to realize that he is also corrupted by the power that his writing has. For instance, saying "It also was strange to see just how many resources are aligned against me" is a complete giveaway of how highly this guy thinks of himself and how purposefully biased he is that he thinks MS's concern and attempt to show him things that might sway his opinion in the other direction is somehow being "against him".
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
In your Microsoft "Dossier"...
10. Does not know what "checkdisk" is for.
9. Thinks WINNT is still useful.
8. Very Cheap: (s)he likes White Castle. Buy hamburger and get a nice article.
7. Cheap: (s)he likes Wendy's. See above. A tad more expensive.
6. Reminds me of RMS, only cleaner.
5. Reminds me of ESR. Gun nut.
4. Has a fanboy penguin T-Shirt, talks about Gentoo. Still uses WinME.
3. Steve Jobs byotch.
2. Dines with BillG and SteveB regularly. Treat with caution.
And the number one thing you don't want to see in your Microsoft PR Dossier:
1. Open Source Communist Agent. Terminate with extreme prejudice.
[Yes, this is a shameless attempt at being funny. Mod down accordingly.]
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
I'm not seeing anything sinister here.
I can only *wish* my PR and markettings guys did this good a job on their briefing materials before sending me into a room. I don't do much press, but I do the occasional analyst and a fair number of customers, and knowing the lay of the land before you walk into that room is critical.
Who in there is friendly?
Who in there is looking for an excuse to hate you?
What are folk's pet issues?
The more information you have, the better a job you can do with your pitch (and fundamentally most corporate to press communications are a pitch at some level or another). Once you reach a certain level in an organization though, you're sufficiently removed from the ground game that most pitches you walk into largely cold. The local rep knows what's going on, but you don't, so they have to brief you. All you know without a packet like this is that you've been flown out to Akron to talk to John Doe from ACME inc.
My underlying point being, I don't see anything remotely sinister here. Rather I see an efficient PR organization doing its job.
It was a briefing memo for the PR encounter. Of course it'll talk about the journalist but that doesn't mean they watch his every move - it just means they read up on him for when they're going to cross paths.
It's a bit chatty in places - and this sort of work will always be subjective - but it reads to me as a good professional briefing by an efficient PR outfit.
Wow, whoever put that file together, and it was a prep for a single phone interview on top of a general dossier, is top notch. If only I had a staff to put together stuff like that for my phone meetings!
I don't see the big deal here. Microsoft needs top notch PR people, they have an image issue as can be seen by the blatant anti-MS posts which consists of half the comments on any article dealing with Microsoft. Knowing this, no company wouldn't do their utmost to prepare their executives for an interview. As far as I could tell the summary was fair and provided in depth coverage. I'm somewhat amazed at the level of preperation that goes into these interviews and would like to know if they did it any time someone talks to the press but talking to someone from Wired and getting a positive article out of it surely is worth the effort that you hit on the right points. Not every company can afford it but I don't think Microsoft can afford not to.
/offtopic (sorry)
What exactly is this whole: 'Slashdot's dead' stuff all about? I'm really interested to hear what's so wrong with this place that you still grace it with your presence. As can be guessed by my userid I am new here, and really like this site.
/ontopic (sort of)
Although that doesn't detract from the fact that CmdrTaco probably isn't the subject of a Microsoft dossier. That's particularly evident if you read the pdf linked in the article. It's all about how to best manipulate the journalist into writing stories that are pro-Microsoft, how to avoid talking about sticky issues (is Ballmer really the missing link between humans and apes?), and notes on the journalists interviewing techniques. I'd wager CmdrTaco has never had an opportunity or need to interview a Microsoft representative.
The dossier itself is tame and probably a standard practice for large company PR firms:
Interesting, but hardly inflammatory. A dossier on CmdrTaco would be pointless and would probably consist of just one sentence: 'Hates Microsoft, avoid at all costs'.
I'm going to transform myself into a mighty hawk. Either that or I'll just go and work at Dixons, haven't decided yet.
Briefing for your call with Wired is below. We want to keep it short and not offer any new avenues to him - Fred has done plenty of reporting here and it is time for him to stop and just write the article.
Microsoft PR Person:
This guy DOES look for sensationalism and tension where there is none!
The PR guys did their damn jobs. Good for them. There was nothing sinister in there at all.
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
I don't see many people saying this is sinister, I think most people are just interested in what type of information MS follows.
And you're right, everyone does this. Do you think a politician just blindly goes into a press conference? Do you think a coach randomly chooses people to ask questions? So yeah, this is pretty much business as usual, but still pretty interesting.
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
The only story here is that this information ended up in the wrong Inbox.
As has already been remarked by others above me there is nothing sinister about anything said in the briefing document. It's candid in places, perhaps a little chatty in others, but overall this what you should expect if not hope for in this kind of document. If a reporter has a history of "digging for dirt" then that's what the document should state.
It seems a bit disingenuous to me to take Microsoft to task over something like this when it is the standard practice in any PR-conscious company, you can bet that Wired probably has similar documents flying about that offered guidance about individuals in companies who are easier to coerce, more likely to reveal sensitive information, etc.
Ok can someone let me know if Hell has frozen over, Slashdot appears to think an action that Microsofts done isn't evil and I know which I thought I would be seeing first
I totally agree. My first thought, before even finishing reading the memo, was, dang, how do I get these people to work for me?
Makes me wonder whether the "leak" was accidental, or they were getting free publicity
Speaking of, if you like this stuff, you should watch the BBC sitcom Absolute Power.
What surprises me about this PR analysis is that none of it -- not one word -- is dedicated to selling the journalist on the quality of Microsoft's products. Not their web products, not their development environments, nothing. At a minimum, they could have said something like "Channel 9 will help us show developers how we make the best development products."
If you're going to make a video blog for developers, I'd think you would focus on the quality of your development products.
Instead, it's all a bunch of internal politicking about transparency and alleviating fear. Is that how Microsoft makes money these days? Selling transparency? Alleviating fear?
I think I've got some synergy and some new paradigms for sale too, guaranteed to be content-free.
CmdrTaco: Mostly Harmless
Some folks may not be impressed by this but after reading the whole thing I have to applaud M$ PR firm. They do their research extremely well and prepare the employee so thoroughly for what is going to transpire that I'm in awe. I've never worked for a huge company with a "good PR machine" and I've given interviews before -- what I wouldn't have done for this kind of prep!
What exactly is this whole: 'Slashdot's dead' stuff all about? I'm really interested to hear what's so wrong with this place that you still grace it with your presence. As can be guessed by my userid I am new here, and really like this site.
/. seem to fall into a few categories. You've got the pro troll, whose sole job is to talk shit everywhere, so he can be easily ignored. You've got the old-timers who got pissed off when this site grew from a chummy little linux hangout into what is is now. These people can safely be ignored as well. While you can easily argue that /. has changed, it's a lot harder to say whether or not the 2007 edition is any better or worse than the '97 version.
/. got sold off to VA (or whoever it was), nothing on this site can be trusted, the editors are all paid shills, etc. Some of these criticisms have some actual validity, but bitching about them constantly on main page articles is just wasting everybody's time.
Beats the hell out of me. I like it here too. The people that bitch about
Last, but not least, you've got the idiots who seem to think that ever since
I'll take this opportunity to welcome you here, as well as mention that we're not all crazy, there are a few pools of sanity in the great ocean that is Slashdot.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Agreed. Nothing special here. A large number of Slashdot readers (myself included) don't mind being reminded from time to time that almost everything Microsoft does has a significant amount of skulduggery behind it. All companies seek to promote their products, all seek advantage over competitors, all cooperate with others only when it benefits them in some way. Microsoft it seems has made an art-form of doing maximum damage to others even when the resulting benefit to themselves is only minimal (if detectable at all). The company (seemingly) sees the world as a zero-sum game, they want all the marbles and want everyone else to have none, end of story. The Google motto "Don't be evil" is a direct reference to Microsoft. Even the company's (MS) most generous charity work (which hardly existed until the company had amassed more money than they knew how to spend) seems more like a trick to recover some level of respectability than a real attempt to do good. In a recent Dilbert cartoon (http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dil bert-20070316.html) Dilbert asks his boss "When we are done hosing our own company can we start hosing the competition?" His boss replies "Our customers are next". (It would have been funnier and more on-target if he has said something like "Our customers come FIRST!") But the message is the same, that there are companies, just as there are individuals who seem to delight more in doing harm to others than they do in doing good for themselves. Ballmer is rarely quoted as "Our product will be better", but instead likes to go on record saying "We will destroy them!". Any other company would have recognized him as a PR disaster long ago, but for Microsoft, his excesses go unnoticed as they would nowhere else. I found this quote from the PDF more interesting:
Now for the /offtopic...
My guess is that Slashdot readership is down, although I haven't seen any number on how much. It used to be the only thing of its kind, and quite frequently a link from a Slashdot story would take down, or slow to uselessness even fairly robust servers. Many forums have come and gone and had little impact on the size of Slashdot readership, but two things have recently (I'm guessing) for the first time had a noticeable impact: Digg, and the popularity of RSS feeds. About all I can say about Digg is that I tried it and didn't like it very much. I like having a top-level selection process for stories (even though I don't always agree with what Slashdot selects, or when) rather than the "pure democracy" approach that Digg takes (or pretends to take). I don't get my view of science from radio shows that run at 1AM, or my view of history from Oliver Stone movies, but my guess is that many Digg posters can't distinguish between "West Wing" and a documentary on the White House. People have been trying to "game" Slashdot for years, with mixed success, but in Digg they have found a system much easier to game, and by and large I think the typical Digg user is more interested in the game tha
Mark Martin, the Wagg-Ed guy who wrote most of that briefing document, is a detail-oriented pro. I've had plenty of contact with him, both during the work day when we're on opposite sides of the fence, and after-hours, when we stop thinking about work and have friendly conversations (often over a drink or three) about sports, family, politics, and other non-controversial topics.
:)
The only thing surprising to me about this "story" is that anyone is surprised to learn that Mark is just as good and thorough a researcher as the reporters he deals with all day long.
I would not be surprised to read one day that Mark has left Wagg-Ed and started his own PR agency -- and I would be even *less* surprised to learn that most of his clients were open source-based companies. He is often Microsoft's point man in their "Why proprietary software is better than FOSS" PR efforts, so he has an exceptional grasp of FOSS benefits. This knowledge will serve him well if and when he decides to leave the Dark Kingdom and join the Forces of Goodness.
- Robin
Wow! Microsoft's PR group really goes the extra mile to analyze and try to control a situation. Under the "Expected Q & A" section where they give the questions that they think will be asked and supply the PR approved answers they seem to have forgotten one:
Q: Have your answers been scripted?
A: No, we here at Microsoft believe in spontaneity. It is the true source of our innovation.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!