Microsoft Pays Bloggers to Tout MS Slogan

Stony Stevenson writes "In an effort to inject Microsoft's latest slogan, 'People-ready business', into popular usage (and no doubt raise its Google page rank), Microsoft asked a passel of A List Bloggers to write blurbs on what this meaningless phrase means to them. Michael Arrington, Om Malik, Fred Wilson, Richard MacManus and a handful of others happily agreed to churn out some mush for Microsoft, which it later used in banner ads. What it really meant to these guys was income. Redmond paid the bloggers for every user who clicked through to the PRB microsite. That caused other bloggers, lead by Gawker chief Nick Denton, to rightfully question their ethics. A spitball war has been raging ever since."

Comments

Nothing unusual

[Anonymous Coward]

Any blogger that supports their site through ads is making money through a marketing campaign. You can even pay Google to put other peoples' ads on your site for you. What's wrong with that?

Re:Nothing unusual

[ozmanjusri]

Isn't this what's been happening in most magazines now for years?

Yes, that's why bloggers were initially percieved as a breath of fresh air in an arena dominated by shills.

The honeymoon didn't last long, and now many of the journos who used to tout in the magazines have transferred their skills (and bad habits) to blogs.

Re:Nothing unusual

[pasamio]

But most magazines have the legal requirement to either mark that its an advertisement (ever seen those full page magazine articles with 'advertisement' placed somewhere on the page) or that they derived some benefit from it (e.g. an article a while back from Angus Kidman with the text "Angus Kidman travelled to Orlando as a guest of Hyperion" (http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/ 04/27/1224215)).

This doesn't have that sort of marking, there in lies the issue. Its not clearly linked with a company (e.g. blogs.microsoft.com) and it is them being paid off by companies. Cash for comment. Actually illegal in Australia (see John Laws on the same subject).

Thats the issue.

Re:Nothing unusual

[PopeRatzo]

No, that's not what happened. If you click through TFA, you'll find they actually lathered up Microsoft's ass pretty good. "People Ready is a way of life, not a practice." was one of the blurbs they wrote.

But they weren't really "A-List" bloggers. "Michael Gaizutis" for example, who wrote the blurb above. I've never heard of him. In fact, I had to read his name closely to make sure it wasn't some gag name like "Michael Hunt" or "Dick Gazinya".

Makes you think...

[oskay]

I wonder how much of this thing goes on that we *don't* hear about.

People-ready business

[bky1701]

To me, 'People-ready business' represents a new low in catch-phrase marketing. We all know 'can you hear me now', a stoned man saying 'dude we're getting a Dell', 'works out of the box' and the Vegemite song sucked. But new levels are being reached, requiring of extending the "int catchphrase_rating" to "long int catchphrase_rating". These levels are being reached by the one and only, Microsoft.

For a while now, Microsoft has been looking for a way to make money. Their business has been dying down not due to competition, but due to sheer lack of anything to sell. So comes Vista. With it's color-coded file explorer, OSX ripoff interface and Vista-only-for-no-real-reason DX10, they were sure they were saved.

This was not the case.

The hotcake Vista was predicted to be turned out more to be a segway, and (while ducking from flying chairs) the marketing department had to come up with a way to sell this new steaming turd. Enter 'people-ready business'.

I am not personally sure what this is intended to mean. Are they attempting to sell a business that is ready for people to use? Doesn't Mcdonalds fall into this category? Or is it an attempt to make people ready for a business? If so, what business? Microsoft?

Has Microsoft finally admitted to being the Borg? Is the next tag line, "lower your shields and prepare to be boarded"?

Who knows. This blogger is unsure.

/Waits patently for check

Re:Integrity demands crying foul immediately

[jollyreaper]

How bizarre that there is a "Word of Mouth Marketing Association." Isn't the whole idea of word of mouth advertising that it is not contrived by a marketing group? Reminds me of the Ministry of Truth. I had a bit of a dystopian idea in a story I wrote. This is one of those futures where there's only so much work to go around, only a fraction of the population has real jobs with disposable income while the rest of society is pretty much on the dole. Because the value of human labor is so cheap, people can now be paid to perform worthless and debasing activities just to earn a little extra over their dole income. Hell, you can already see that today with people paid to stand around outside holding signs for businesses.

Anyway, you know those commercials were two people meet in a checkout line, one of them coughs and the other starts up on this spiel praising the virtues of product x? Imagine that not being a commercial anymore. Millions of independent contractors work as "product evangelists", working hard to track down the people with jobs and create situations where they might provide a personal witness of how wonderful the product is. It's a mixture of stagecraft and spycraft, dressing like and passing for a jobber, speaking the gospel without coming across like just another evangelist.

Sick, scary future, right? Well, that's already happening in trendy hotspots. Marketing scumfucks pay beautiful people to be seen talking about and enjoying new products to start a buzz.

The CIA has robot assassin drones (i.e. Predator), PRAVDA proves more accurate than the New York Times, we've got slug-hunting robots that power themselves by digesting animal flesh, you do more time for copyright violation than murder, Russian spies are getting offed with radioactive poisons, we've got thought-controlled robotic limbs, voice recognition computers, several variations on the original Metaverse concept, the environment is on the verge of collapse, the US is discredited and reviled as a world power, the White House was overtly stolen by thugs who openly laugh at the law, corporations are gathering more power than ever... as much cyberpunk as I read as a kid, I never actually expected to be living in a cyberpunk future. I wanna be a street samurai.