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What Happens When They Get It Wrong?
One of the most popular questions I am asked is if a startup should give their news to one outlet as an exclusive or if they should go to everyone. My response always starts with, "what if they get it wrong?" When you give your news to one outlet and they get it wrong, you are screwed. I am not talking about whether it’s a positive or negative story, but rather that they get the actual story wrong. It’s the reason why I think Y Combinator startups are continuously making bad decisions by going to their one outlet for all of their news.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen a number of stories that were just plain wrong. We saw it with the distributed user information by Last.fm. More recently we saw it with Jeremiah Owyang making claims about Mzinga which he had to later publicly apologize for. But the damage was still done – to what level is unknown.
This morning I read a post by Marshall Kirkpatrick from Readwriteweb which is titled, "How to Sell Your Soul on Twitter and Who’s Buying". The post describes that major Internet companies like Apple and Google along with Internet startups like Box.net are buying Twitter messages in a paid post style using the Magpie service. Marshall notes, "These popular companies just couldn’t resist paying off Twitter users to put advertisements into their Twitter streams using the new pay-per-tweet service Magpie." And he concludes with, "And to the advertisers out there – is this cynical scheme the best you can do to engage with all the new ways people are communicating online? That’s pretty bad."
Just one problem with his post that I caught immediately before I even finished and it seems his commenters also picked up on immediately as well. He is wrong. Very wrong.
It’s not the actual companies buying Twitter messages. The messges are bought by affiliates who try to grab quick income by pushing out their affiliate codes everywhere they can. There’s no real way for anyone running an affiliate program to catch all of the bad affiliates before they start spamming the world with their affiliate code. I know Commission Junction spends a lot of time on making sure they remove as many of the spammers as possible. You can’t hold what affiliates do against the company except in some very rare circumstances.
Mark Hopkins has similar thoughts regarding the story.
Marshall has since added a note that has no highlighting nor is an apology for jumping the gun without researching. I sure hope he (or Richard MacManus, the blog owner) will fix the story to, at a minimum, make the update stand out. Frankly the story should be deleted or completely reworked.
Now here’s where it gets worse for the affected brands. Marshall’s story hit the Digg frontpage (which means massive traffic for RWW) and has since been linked to by a number of sources. For example, CBS Interactive’s BNET site has a story written by Erik Sherman where he continues the misreporting. It’s shocking that a MSM site like BNET didn’t actually check out the links before they posted their article.
Update: Erik notes in his post that he did click the links, "Allen, but I spent a chunk of time clicking through links and seeing where they ended up."
So even if Marshall deletes or makes major changes to the story, how do we make sure all of the other writers also update? Everyone get a story wrong from time to time, the key is how it’s handled.
With more and more blogs needing more and more pageviews to stay afloat, will this trend of pushing out stories as quickly as possible continue? I certainly hope not.
Now let me get dead serious for a minute… what if it instead of Box.net, the story was about your startup?
I am going to work on a list of tips on how to handle when a blogger or journalist (including myself) gets it wrong.
[...] Marshall originally attributed the ads to major companies, which Allen Stern at Centernetworks pointed out was incorrect: the ads highlighted for companies like Apple were affiliate ads (RWW has since amended the [...]
[...] course, while the thrust of his article was entirely off-base (as noted by both Allen Stern and myself), this type of sponsored posting almost always garners major evil-eyes when it’s not [...]
marshall has one goal – get pageviews
You mention many aspects of what is wrong with tech blogging these days, Allen. Though, the trend of pushing stories as quickly as possible is not new. Often there is no research by writers, both of small and big blogs. Often they just repeat press releases. Blogs linking to the RWW story without adding any additional information proves that point.
Regarding Marshall, he usually knows his stuff and he is one of the few tech bloggers I regularly read these days. The problem with the Magpie story is, that companies have lost control about their promotion. And that’s bad. So the story sheds some light on that aspect as well.
That’s why I said delete or completely reworked to salvage your point. Although the idea about companies losing control over their promotion has gone on for as long as the Internet has been around and I am sure even before then.
I agree on your assessment of Marshall as well.
Yes, the story should be reworked. No disagreement here. :)
Seen this before. I worked with Marshall on a story; he refused to provide a correction even after a major print source (which was his source) formally retracted.
There’s no harm in admitting a mistake — especially when your source misled you. But if your ego won’t allow that to happen, well, your days as a credible reporter are numbered. Eventually people do notice.
After my initial reaction to the story, I went back and read the comments.(Approx 75 at the time). I’m glad I did! Besides being enlightening, they were easily the most interesting part of the post. It would be nice if I knew a little more about how affiliate advertising works, but I get the gist of it:-)
Well, I still have a problem with any company which would willingly allow it’s affiliates to do stupid crap in this manner, and not speak out against it.
Really why should they care? I’m pretty sure these companies made something off this, at least 1 person must have clicked on one of the links, made a purchase, and brought profit to the company and affiliate. I don’t want to hear a company say, “It’s not my fault.” Especially if they made any money in that method. Affiliate programs are the new Pink Contracts for SPAM.
what do you mean "willingly" ? trust me, all of the large companies I’ve dealt with hate dealing with affiliates who spam.
Sure they say they “Hate” it, but really they’re happy their Brand or name is out there in anyway and they are not exactly liable. They may not have actually said “go SPAM people”, but they haven’t publicly in a large forum or Ad spoken out about it or all the bad press surrounding the story. So ya, they are willingly letting things perpetrate and become a larger story, rather than stopping the actions cold in their tracks.
Allen, just about every company in tech watches twitter for mentions of their name. They knew about this long before i did. I consider you a friend but i think you’re just complaining because some of these shady ways to make a buck appeal to you. Im going offline for the weekend but would be happy to discuss with you on monday. Maybe we should do a point counterpoint post re responsibility for affiliates
"I consider you a friend but i think you’re just complaining because some of these shady ways to make a buck appeal to you."
Are you seriously kidding me? I loaded up RWW this morning, read your story, immediately realized they are/were affiliate links and was shocked that you didn’t see same. After your readers said the same, it was equally shocking that the update was so limited.
I am not sure you can make a blanket statement that tech companies watch their names on Twitter – and how do you know they aren’t already working on the issue? Who did you speak with at the companies to find out?
And please understand I am by no means saying I support Magpie.
Allen, why do you assume that I didn’t check the links before posting the article? I was clicking through on many. Are there differences in last numbers for something like Box.net? Yup – and don’t you think an advertiser or Magpie would want to track which ones were effective? So how do you *know* that they are third party affiliates?
Furthermore, as someone else noted, it doesn’t matter. The affiliates are part of the comapnies’ marketing strategies. If it bothered the companies, they could send a cease and desist to Magpie. If they don’t, then they’re supporting the activity. Or are you actually saying that companies like Apple, Adobe, Kodak, and Cisco don’t have people checking to see how their brands are being used on Twitter and checking the sources of traffic for pages on their sites? I’ve been in and around the industry and business in general to believe that for a minute.
Thanks for stopping by Erik – It is unfortunate that you believe that what an affiliate does can be drawn back to the company itself.
You added a note which is great but the note is so far down and buried, that people will read the entire article, see these companies as evil and hopefully read your note and see something different than the original.
If you did click the links which is great, why did your story not reflect this from the beginning?
I am not saying that Magpie is good or bad, just that affiliate spam is something that pierces the entire Internet, not just Twitter.
If this is so obvious, then why didn’t Scoble realize what was happening too? He was appalled at the way these companies were conducting their business. I’m sure he knows the business of blogging fairly well too. Besides, focusing on this peripheral garbage is diverting attention away from the more important issues. For example, why is this story getting so much attention? Personally, I think it has to do with honesty, or the lack of it in Social Networks. Rob Diana’s wrote about this in his recent post, “Sorry Twitter, Facebook is the Gold Mine”. http://is.gd/owHz For the record, I do believe and trust you on the affiliate problem, but I had to point out the Scoble inconsistency.
The story has legs because the marketing is largely happening under the guise of being genuine testimonials from real users. The fact that it’s not means that the marketing is to some degree deceptive. I’m covering it because I cover the tech industry on BNET and this is a story of how companies are doing business. As I noted in my story, Logitech is running the risk of getting smeared with the brush even though it seems uninvolved because the link is going to Skype. And even if it is largely affiliates doing this (and one of the comapnies emailed me this weekend claiming no knowledge of participation, even though links are going to its site), it’s still a business issue.
Something else that Allen Stern doesn’t seem to understand is that journalism has never been a process of getting the full and complete story before going to press, because there are time pressures and you may not be able to get all the answers in a reasonable amount of time. That’s why you do one story and then do follow-ups as things progress. Chances are that I’ll do at least one more follow-up story.
Erik – I understand more than you might think although bashing companies for doing something which they aren’t doing isn’t fair or right. Think about if someone called you out of your name (forget online) in your town and the word spread even though it wasn’t true. Make more sense now? Just because a person writes a blog does not give them the right to post whatever they want.
Had the story read about affiliates of brands using twitter to push out spam, fine. But that’s not what he wrote nor what he edited. This is where the issue is.
No, the issue is that the brands are associated with the practice. There are a few possibilities here:
1) The vendors know and don’t care.
2) The vendors know, don’t like it, but don’t do the obvious, like contacting Magpie.
3) The vendors don’t know.
From an industry point of view, which is the one I cover, as the BNET Industry blogs are about the business issues, not consumer issues, all three answers leave the same big question about the vendors: Why don’t they keep better track or take action to keep centralized affiliate sources from using their brand names in ways that reflect badly on them?
agreed on your possibilities.
let me add something else for you to consider – let’s forget about magpie for a minute and assume the magpie service didn’t exist
affiliates can still spam the heck out of twitter (which sadly im sure will be done more and more) – how can a brand be proactive to make sure their affiliates (the bad ones) never break the rules and spam the social services?
i think this is a topic worth investigating and discussing – because i bet we agree that as twitter grows, the spam (of all sorts) will grow.
It’s certianly a marketing consideration for companies, and I’m considering taking a deeper look at this at BNET, as it’s a natural topic there. The steps a company takes would likely be the same steps they take to actively ensure that their trademarks are used correctly (and under how trademarks legally work, they all have to do this). They check to see where the marks show up and make sure they’re not being ill-used. The smart and big ones are already doing this, as well as monitoring brand perception and reputation. I wouldn’t be surprised if they even outsource this type of checking. Then they go after the misuse. It’s not rocket science, and it’s at most an extension of an ongoing practice. (Again, I’m talking about the larger and more sophisticated companies here.)
OK, lets just save ourselves a lot of hassle here, and just remember that everything we’re dealing with right now was dealt with previously in the land of IRC and it’s terrific history.
IRC Networks split, OPERs move on, new ones form, rules change and are different per network, but ALL the reputable ones do not stand for duplicated flood traffic, SPAM or explicit advertising robots.
twitter will go this way eventually, oh wait, they kiinda already have identi.ca?
Now Twitter just need to realize these basic rules to implement and stop being there for the Companies and be there for the millions more Users they serve.
It’s pure silliness not to expect services like Magpie and PayPerPost to exist. Is it not the reader’s responsibility to decide whether a source is actually worth anything?
I think it takes a special kind of intellectually lazy moron to just decide ‘hippiegirljess’ is a source worth listening to for buying advice on anything without knowing something about them first.
Of course these services will get spammed. And it’s nobody’s fault but the people left relatively unmentioned in either of these articles– the uncritical reader of the tweet, and the tweeter without integrity. The tweeter is easy to deal with– ignore people that lie to you or sell their words. The uncritical reader, that’s the tough one, because they are ultimately the ones that make things like this pay.
The services will always be there in some form. Companies will always want to sell their product. And some people will always sell what they have of integrity or reputation. But I will repeat, it is a stupid, naive, and lazy moron that doesn’t take a second to think ‘why would I believe this’ when they read something.
Now a days techblogs and blog networks are like farming business.
Anyway, if we talks about the twitter then most of the brand are more interested into the buzz,out reach and their brand values.
Note:
1.Access use on purely marketing is never a good idea,you have to bother about the your follows and should stick on providing quality news and updates.
2.Most of the affiliates marketers purely use tweeters for product sales,which is another bad idea.
>> It is unfortunate that you believe that what an affiliate does can be drawn back to the company itself. < <
It is not a matter of believe, but a business fact. That's why big companies keep lawyers busy tracking down uses of trademarks and why they structure affiliate programs as they do. If the brand is caught in a questionable practice, then it affects the company. That is simply a marketing reality.
>> You added a note which is great but the note is so far down and buried, that people will read the entire article, see these companies as evil and hopefully read your note and see something different than the original. < <
I disagree. The article already mentions one company being dragged into this by having its name used. As I said in the note, all you can tell from many of the links is that Mappie differentiates different ones for the same product. That is more likely to mean that they're trying to track the effectiveness of different people on Twitter. Do the companies know about it? Maybe, maybe not. I've had one so far come to me this weekend claiming that it didn't, but that will be the eventual topic of a conversation with the company. But as much as you're claiming that some of us covering this story are assuming that companies know about it, you're assuming that they don't. To my mind, that's an even bigger assumption. From how I cover the industry, not knowing what's going on is a pretty significant story in and of itself.
>> If you did click the links which is great, why did your story not reflect this from the beginning? < <
It did. I wrote "Here are some of the high tech products and services I found touted like winners at a race track through Magpie-redirected URLs:" and the links on the page are the non-redirected ones. How else would I have gotten them without clicking through?
>> I am not saying that Magpie is good or bad, just that affiliate spam is something that pierces the entire Internet, not just Twitter. <<
I never said that affiliate spam is just on Twitter. The stories are about evidence of it appearing on Twitter, which is news.