Reaping the Snark-Winds*

I was talking to serious businesspeople about the blogosphere the other day, explaining what I saw as the potential to gain credibility and respect by connecting with bloggers who have a particular expertise, or who cover a particular niche.

We were on a conference call; the participants were also on the Internet, and we were telling each other about sites we found.

One of the others on the call interrupted me to say, “I found this headline,” which was something to the effect of “Those Cocksuckers Should Die.”

“Yeah, well, there’s that element too,” I said sheepishly, feeling for a moment like I’d accidentally taken a client to lunch in a strip club.

If you are a blogger, there’s no one censoring you. At least up ’til now, the companies that host blogs don’t step in and say “mind your language,” or “that’s libel.” And if you’re really angry about, oh, George W. Bush, or Joe Lieberman, or Hillary Clinton, or Howard Dean, sometimes all you want to do is curse at them, and blogging lets you do that.

If you’re a bit more clever, perhaps you don’t just curse, you get “snarky” — a kind of mean-spirited cleverness. Some snarky sites are funny, but some of them get a little dark. Not that journalists of past eras were models of courtly behavior. But, for a lot of writers, the ability to set one’s own standards equates to no standards.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.

But the recent episode involving the political satire site Protein Wisdom shows how a playground without monitors can sometimes degenerate. Protein Wisdom’s Jeff Goldstein strikes many conservatives as hilarious. His politics are a little less harsh than Ann Coulter’s, but his taste for the outrageous outpaces hers by quite a bit. Some left-wingers are drawn to his site like the proverbial moths to a flame. One of them was Deborah Frisch, a college teacher out of Arizona.

Here’s a Protein Wisdom post that summarizes the fray. Basically, Ms. Frisch lost her mind, deciding to react to Goldstein’s outrageousness by posting weird, obscene and threatening remarks about Goldstein’s 2-year-old son. As a result, she is no longer teaching college in Arizona. Many conservatives rallied to Goldstein, relating to his concerns as a parent. Some (not all) leftists agreed; Hirsch was way out of line. She herself apologized, somewhat equivocally.

The sober, witty law-prof blogger Ann Althouse, though a moderate conservative, is no fan of Goldstein’s. She assesses what happened this way:

I agree Frisch has a big problem. She’s the weakling who entered a drinking match with a man who can drink you under the table. She lost control. She paid the price — a big one. Goldstein’s you-talked-about-my-child move is a strong one, but it’s a move nonetheless, made by a person who likes to play the game… hard. He’s not a victim. He’s one of the people who has advanced himself in the blogosphere by making it hostile and ugly. Like all of us, he is capable of being hurt by a genuine crazy. But why not just delete the trolls? Why rile them? Some of them really aren’t playing with a full deck. Why push weak people until they lose control? It’s an ugly game, and I think Jeff knows he plays it.

Standing back from this, what I see is a inherent feature of putting the power of publishing in individuals’ hands without barriers to entry of any kind, and combining that power with the power of social media to create conversations within and across various blogs. When the only control is self-control, in an environment like this, that’s no control at all. When a snarky blog that permits comments avoids evokes this kind of ugly incident, one might eventually see that as the exception, not the rule.

It’s no reason not to play. But it’s a reminder that the blogosphere is far from Paradise.

*Corrected, thanks to an alert reader, to get Ms. Frisch’s name right throughout, 7/12.

There is No Such Thing as an Anonymous Blog Comment…

…as the following PR career-suicide maneuver proves.

Jeff Jarvis, one of the best and most credible bloggers about the impact of the blogs on the news media, wrote a post yesterday about Dell Computers’ new blog. A big part of the blogosphere would have been wondering what Jarvis might say about Dell’s new gambit, because it was Jarvis’ bad “Dell Hell” experience with the company’s much-maligned customer service department that demonstrated the power of viral blog posts to impact business, and the powerlessness of conventional PR techniques to counter it.

Jarvis’ lengthy comments about Dell’s blog are worth reading, but for now, I’m more interested in Dell’s reaction to them. It came at two levels. First, on the blog itself, this rather ungracious response:

Yesterday was the first official day of Dell’s one2one weblog and already Jeff Jarvis and Steve Rubel were kind enough to tell us what we’re doing wrong. Thanks for the feedback, guys. We’ll keep working to get it right.

As Tony Soprano’s mother used to say, “Poor you.” Or, as an old boss of mine would say, “Now tell us what you really think.”

So that’s what one of Dell’s PR people did. Tell Jeff what he really thinks. Anonymously, he thought. Here’s how the comment looked:

Chris Says:
July 11th, 2006 at 1:29 pm

Hey Jarvis

I honestly think you have no life. Honestly? Do you have a life, or do just spend it trying to make Dell miserable. I’ve been working with Dell the past three weeks researching trashy blogs that worms like you leave all over that frigen blogosphere and I cant (sic) honestly say that Dell is trying to take a step towards fixing their customer service. They hire guys like me to go on the web and look through the blogs of guys like you in hopes that we can find out your problem and fix it. But honestly I dont think you have a problem Dell can fix. Your problem is you have no life.

Jarvis looked up Chris’ IP domain and, guess what. The comment came from GCI Group, which is in charge of the a PR campaign for Dell entitled Rebuilding Corporate Reputation Through Grassroots Efforts. No kidding.

This episode illustrates a lot of things.

First of all, there is no such thing as anonymity if you post on blogs. Time and again, this fact has been proven, to the great embarassment of the poster. My favorite example involves Cathy Seipp and Nikke Finke, two LA writers who don’t like each other. In a comment on Cathy’s blog, Nikke objected to something Cathy said about her. Then there was another post minutes later from someone claiming to be Nikke’s lawyer, threatening a suit. But the IP address showed they came from the same computer. And of course there’s Michael Hiltzik, the LA Times writer who posted anonymous comments on his own blog and others, praising himself and bashing his foes. Patterico busted him the same way.

Secondly, there is just no telling how stupid some people can be. I mean — if you’re at work, take a look at the people around you. Is there anyone who you think could do something so stupid one week after your client started a blog? It calls the sincerity of Dell’s blog into question. Plus, what incredible ignorance of Jarvis’ role! He’s not just some crank with a hard-on for Dell.

Are you sure nobody in your shop would do something like this? “Are you feeling lucky, punk?”

But the most important lesson for PR people is one of the first ones I ever learned. It’s almost a Zen koan: “Don’t believe your own press releases.” Another variation is “Don’t get high on your own shit.”

PR people owe their clients loyalty, but not blind loyalty. You need to be the benevolent outsider looking in, giving a candid, confidential assessment of how things really look to the target audience. In most cases, your client is already defensive enough; you shouldn’t be egging them on or throwing yourself in front of moving trains to prove your love for them. Doing that is bad practice. Just because the client responds like a puppy being scratched on the tummy doesn’t mean you’re giving them what they’re paying you for.

“Chris” sounds like a guy (gal?) who ordered six rounds of the Kool-Ade. But his post is going to cost his client a lot of money and time.

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis hears from GCI’s Digital Media practice. “Chris” is “a summer intern who got caught up in the emotion” around Jarvis’ Dell Hell tales. Jarvis sees a link between Chris and “Customer Service John” from AOL. To me, there’s a difference. “Customer Service John” followed his company’s policies, and got burned purely because the exposure of AOL’s practices demanded a sacrificial lamb.

“Chris” is an example of lax supervision. Allowing an intern to “get caught up in the emotion” means someone failed to communicate the meaning of professionalism. Allowing an intern to speak for the client means someone was giving this kid too much latitude. Where were the adults? Off pitching new business?

But Jarvis makes a valuable point. The days when a company and its PR people could clamp a lid on employees, and expect to control its image through a “spokesperson” are over. Says Jarvis:

Every one of your “customer service” employees and every one of your “public relations” employees in every encounter represents your company. That has always been the case. Only now, we can record their actions and report them to the world.