'Having a conversation' that's actually about something 

The comment thread over at Jeff Jarvis's place really is a conversation, including some of the main players in the Federated Media /Microsoft blogger ethics affair.

Check out this comment by FM's chief, John Battelle, on a point that goes beyond the specific advertising ethics question:

"Is it somehow illegal for companies to be part of a conversation? I really find that presumption offensive. Why can’t companies, which as the Cluetrain reminds us are just made up of people, be part of a conversation, and invite leader[s] into that conversation?"

More about this on Battelle's own blog

Jarvis (trying to bring the topic back to ethics), replied that of course advertisers have a right to be part of the conversation but the question is how they get there.

While I, (the former flack who dropped out from the shame of it all), was drawn to Battelle's slightly off-topic question about vendors who want to be part of a conversation. I think we might not have seen so much indignation about this whole thing if the Microsoft campaign had been about something of substance, not just a vehicle for burning into our consciousness the dumb new overgeneralized marketing slogan, "People Ready."

It was an attempt to bring image marketing into a medium whose audience tends more to the practical in what it wants in commercial information -- features and specs, and concrete benefits and drawbacks, not feel-good catch phrases or positioning statements. An online crowd is more interested in talking about the specification tables in the back of the car brochure than the copy and expensive photography in the front that's supposed to put us in the mood and "help us" clarify how the vehicle dovetails with our lifestyles.

The specific ethics issues of the case aside, bloggers and their readers might not mind these commercial intrusions into the 'sphere so much if the conversations were actually about something.