About two years ago, before I joined the communications department, we were approached by an agency pushing us to have their bloggers for hire go out and start blogging positive mojo about our then-new educational asset, Axia College. The original pitch was just that: bloggers, who aren’t our students, telling the blogosphere, MySpace-dom, Facebook-hood, and the rest of the world just how great it is to go to school with us.

I joined and was handed the contract. We’d spend a boatload with this agency specing out this contract that no one in the department really knew what to do with, so they passed it off to the only guy who had any skin in the game.

I had a huge problem with the arrangement, and I have the same problem now that it’s evolved and reared it’s head from Microsoft and Cisco. Valleywag has a good summary. Here’s a snitch:

Break

John Battelle’s ad network has roped in some of its star writers to an ad campaign on behalf of Microsoft’s “people-ready” catchphrase. In the ads, and the companion site built by Federated Media, Michael Arrington explains how his Techcrunch site became “people-ready“. “When is a business people ready?” asks Gigaom’s Om Malik. “The minute you decide to strike out on your own…” Other writers who’ve been paid to repeat Microsoft’s slogan include Paul Kedrosky and Matt Marshall of Venture Beat, as well as Fred Wilson, the blogger-investor.

The evolution is fairly obvious — in this case, these lassoed bloggers are shilling, and making it clear that they’re shilling, for an advertiser. On the surface, that should be the end of the discussion if you hang your hat on the “Truth in Advertising” mantra. Nick Chase tries to paint this issue with spit and polish in the Valleywag comment thread.

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.

Duh.

Then why do I still have such a problem with this mess? In my own situation, I tried to make this work. The first proposed change was to use our own stable of bloggers — current students of Axia college who might happen to have had blogs at the time. We couldn’t find enough of them, and the ones we did find couldn’t blog for beans.

Then we thought about having the agency stable of bloggers go back to school with Axia to legitimize their shill. Of course, they wanted to be paid hourly for their time in school, their time studying, their time writing papers, their time thinking about school, and so on.

As you can imagine, the whole pitch was suddenly loosing its luster. I cancelled the program.

I cancelled it because the methods did not meet the objectives of the program. The pitch was all about creating a discussion with our prospective students. But no matter how you spin it, there’s no way to create a legitimate, authentic discussion when that discussion starts from the voices of those who are not students, are not experienced, are not authentic.

Commenter Filament nails it far more eloquently than I ever did:

This is only “conversational” in the sense that a chat with Tony Snow about Bush’s record is a conversation: only technically. What you’re doing is creating the false appearance of conversation to make money.

This whole mess smacks of a key learning that so many companies are failing to learn. Companies formerly accustomed to building relationships through the brute force of advertising dollars don’t know how to translate their wares into anything more transparent than tin foil. You can’t blame Microsoft for giving it a shot. They’re not architected to know any better.

It’s harder, as with all things, to do it right. It’s harder to actually build an army of flag-waving maniacs sreaming from the rooftops about your organization. Leaders have to shake the trees, clear out old-media thinking and build the army the right way, from the beginning. Otherwise, you’re building a Potemkin Village, and your conversation is nothing more than vapor.

On June 29th, Apple will launch their next great evolution. The iPhone will hit Apple and AT&T Wireless stores with great hoopla at 6:00 p.m. and the world market for handheld devices will change again. This is what Apple does — change market dynamics.

But there’s raw beauty in the iPhone campaign that comes from lessons learned over the last decade of Apple advertising. This is as unadulterated a product marketing mix as I’ve seen in the market in very long time, and the point it serves to prove is thus: EB White had it right — “Simplify, simplify, simplify.”

The “Switch” campaign was considered (mostly by me) to be a critical success and a business non-starter. But it was the first time that Apple attempted to tell their story transparently, and that was an important move. It taught them the power of the unadulterated user’s voice, the untarnished message. They were already making powerful, beautiful products. The “Switch” campaign sold the experience, sort of.

The iPod “Sillouhette” campaign drove the message further, selling the outcomes of the experience, linking the product to the feeling you get when you use it. It was beautiful and compelling and engaging, and sold the experience, sort of.

The iPhone capitalizes on everything the first two campaigns delivered so well, and drives the messaging completely naked. The broadcast advertising is nothing more than a screencast on using features of the product. Their print and outdoor focus on dates. Their 25 minute introduction to iPhone uses Young Steve Jobs to deliver transparent, real world use cases to demonstrate the device.

All this is to say one thing: tell your story. Rely less on agency steerage and paranoia and more on your own instinct. You’re the only one that knows your customer the way you know your customer. The closer you get to mirroring their experience in your messaging, the closer you’ll get to communicating your product or service to the unititiated.

Stick to the simple truth.

John Harwood was an interesting choice to have kick off the Chautauqua season, and the week one series of discussions on ethics and the media. His focus, in a sort of round-about way, was that political party polarization both feeds, and is fed by, the drive for viewership of a sensationalism-hungry media.Harwood refers to parties as “brands”, and says that in the political sphere, these brands have done nothing but solidify, cementing public participation in a binary system. This simplification is driven by the notion that people, by-in-large, want to know what they’re getting in a particular candidate or party.
Historically, Harwood contends that this calcification in the party systems stems from Barry Goldwater’s opposition to the Voting Rights act in 1964. The dems became the pro-civil rights party and the republicans the anti-civil rights party. From then on out, you knew what you were getting. If you wanted smaller governement, fewer services, larger civil defense, and focus on waning deterioration of social values, you were a republican. If you favored increased federal services and gun control, enironmental protection, and abortion rights, you’re a democrat.