David Strom and Doc on Marqui

<![CDATA[David Strom has a long and thoughtful piece about the Marqui sponsorship program. Doc adds his five cents on what needs to happen to take the buzz to a relationship level.
Just for the record, if I were being “paid to blog about Marqui” I would not be doing this. There’s a lot of misunderstanding about this program out there—it’s as though few of the critics read the contract (disclosure: I wrote the thing and Marqui’s lawyers added the stuff about the paid leads, which I have problems with and do not pursue with my blog)—but both David and Doc have read it and see the deal isn’t all the bad things alleged by some. That said, I don’t “blog about Marqui,” rather I treat it as a sponsorship and if that doesn’t work for the company, then they can take their business elsewhere and more power to them. That deal, which is the one most folks reacted negatively toward, would have been blatantly unethical; as it is now, the Marqui program stretches things in new directions, may even be unethical if the blogger chooses to treat their writing as an undisclosed marketing message, but it’s progress.
What I’d like to add to David and Doc’s comments, though, is that this is not a final form of what sponsorship deals will or should look like. It’s an experiment, a much needed one. It is an experiment for the bloggers and the company. Doc’s admonition to “purge the old mass market lingo” is correct, but it ignores the fact that this is hard to do for most companies. Marqui took a huge risk—$180,000 is a lot of money for a company at its stage of development—and this is an incremental step in the right direction. If we can preserve the basic principles in the Marqui contract as this process continues, I believe we’ll have accomplished something significant for the small publisher looking at blog technology as a tool for getting their own creative talent into the world with the hope of earning a reasonable return. Those principles are:

1.) Encourage transparency: The blogger is encouraged but not required to disclose that they receive the payment and to set apart Marqui-related messages with some visual tags. It’s pretty clear that someone who shills a product is going to be punished by readers, so disclosure is the best policy. Of course, Marqui also touts its relationships with bloggers on its own site, so the deal is on the record there, too. There’s no hiding in blogspace.

2.) Confidence: To be blunt, I put this language in to make both sides more comfortable. At the time, we were moving from “blogging about Marqui” to a wider definition of the relationship, and we also wanted bloggers to really think about what they were getting into. In reality, this language is probably overstated, because it reflects the same basic decision by a publisher to display advertising that is “good for the community” in their publication. Every publication has limits for what it will advertise and there are a few laws that restrict what may be advertised; Marqui wants feedback to be, at least, constructive, so the idea of confidence in the product was a critical compromise, but it’s a definition that can be handled differently by each blogger.

3.) Freedom to say anything: Marqui wants feedback, but it put no limits on what that feedback might be. This is critical to the ethical integrity of the bloggers or any publisher. The obscenity and defamatory language portions of the contract were inserted by Marqui’s counsel and, I think, unnecessary, since the company should know the general character of the bloggers it sponsors; at the same time, here is another juncture where old forms of publishing and new are running into new legal challenges, so Marqui rightfully wants to insulate itself from legal liability. If it were a blogger’s contract, an indemnity clause would serve the same purpose, offering the advertiser protection from the publication’s liability.

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4.) Periodicity: Like any marketer, Marqui needs to know what frequency their message will appear. The Marqui badge is defined by size, but not content. This is a real break with advertising, which is subject to the advertiser’s approval. So, changes for both sides come on this point. The reason for textual mentions is that many blog readers never actually visit the blog but receive the blogger’s writing through RSS; the weekly mention of the relationship is both a form of disclosure and an assurance of periodic exposure to the blog audience.
These relationships (between bloggers and sponsors, not what Doc was talking about, between marketers and audiences) will continue to evolve. I think we laid a solid foundation for a reasonable and ethical blog/sponsor relationship.]]>