Chris Abraham

I believe that Edelman, on behalf of Microsoft and AMD, was completely transparent with all the blogger-recipients of those gifted sexy Ferrari laptops; I also don’t believe that Edelman, AMD or Microsoft demanded good reviews, merely hoped for the best. Via Wired, digg, MSTechToday, Laughing Squid, Scobleizer, istartedsomething, Slashdot, BL Ochman, Robert Scoble, Crunch Gear, WebPro News, WebMetrics Guru, Marketing Canapes, Tech Crunch, notgartner, and Ed Bott.

Edelman is in the business of promotion and Microsoft is in the business of sales; influencing the influencer is key in a new media Cluetrain market economy of tipping points and markets as conversation.

If you Don’t Have the Latest Hardware with Tons of RAM then Vista is a Pig

The biggest techies don’t often have the best gear. These Ferraris show off Microsoft’s pig of a bloated OS, Vista, in the light both Microsoft and Edelman demand. They may be guilty of trying to load the deck, but I doubt they’re guilty of bribery.

Although I only worked on the Online Advocacy team in Washington for three months, I was alway instructed to engage bloggers thusly, “Hi, my name is Chris Abraham, and I work for Edelman on behalf of Wal-Mart.” My responsibility was to be transparent to the blogger. After that, it was the blogger’s responsibility to pass it forward.

Edelman Needed to be Hands-Off Once the Delivery Was Made of the Laptops

One might say that it was Edelman’s responsibility, a la noblesse oblige, to review the bloggers and their blogs and to remind those bloggers who had yet to disclose their gift (the way that PayPerPost does now).

If Edelman did all the follow-up due diligence then the gift would be tainted. It wouldn’t be a gift. The product, software, and the chip wouldn’t be speaking for themselves. It would be as if the gift was, in fact, a bribe. Additionally, bloggers are not journalists. Although Edelman is required under their WOMMA and industry responsibilies, bloggers can do whatever we want. We’re not held to disclosure requirements since we’re private citizens.

The blowback here has less to do with Edelman, AMD, or Microsoft. It has to do with the bloggers. The bloggers who failed to be fully transparent broke trust with their readership. I discuss this in my article, Whether Journalist or Blogger, Honor the Trust You Have Been Given, “so, what he means is that the writer, be he a proper journalist or an improper blogger, is judged of course what he writes but also by what he does.”

If you demand transparency and disclosure, you could also require any number of things. I think, in terms of strategy, it is a better strategy to identify the influencials, the make the offer of the gift, to be completely transparent, and then to allow the recipient to either disclose or not. It is such a tar baby. Edelman would have been damned if it did or damned if it didn’t.

I Believe that Edelman did Exactly the Right Thing in the Case of the Acer Ferrari Laptops

What is Edelman’s responsibility when it comes to enforcing transparency? My responsibility to bloggers was to be transparent on three levels: my real identity, my real company, and the company for which I worked. The expectation here was that the blogger just might post my entire email online, so no funny stuff. (Yes, that example was shameful, that’s for sure. But I made all of those mistakes so that you don’t have to.)

Here’s another, another, and another.

UPDATE: Microsoft wants their laptops back.