The Sprint "payola" comment, and why it's total bullshit.

I read this BuzzMachine blog about Sprint contacting influential techie bloggers, offering to give them a new phone for free in the hopes of getting some feedback on new features. This is just one of many similar examples of big companies attempting to reach out to the blogger... a person they know can be mysteriously influential, but haven't quite figured out how to interact with.

(Others similar attempts have included McDonald's, and this Forbes article details what worried marketers and branders call The Attack Of The Blogs.)

So far, Sprint's is the best execution I've seen on the part of a corporate PR department. There was no "beg", not even an ask for coverage. Props for that, though this sort of polite behavior should be obvious.

One of the comments that followed Jeff's blog, though, is ridiculous, and inspired a response from me. This guy refers to Sprint's clever strategy as ""payola" and "unethical"".

Payola?! This is good communications, pure and simple. Look, I understand and agree that Sprint hopes influential bloggers will say something good about the new phone, and that the fact that it is free MIGHT help their case. But playing the "human nature" card is anything BUT "unethical". Men like breasts and asses. Women, particularly single ones, wear clothes that subtly accentuate these features. Is that unethical? Women dislike potbellies. Men who want these women to talk to them spend time in the gym, working off the 6-pack of Coors in exchange for a 6-pack of desire. A moral sin? Hardly. The truth is, we're all selling something, but we can choose what we buy.

Sprint is no dummy. They seriously weighed the consequences of as many bloggers or more disliking this new device as liking it. (As Jeff mentioned, freebies only go so far as to raise an eyebrow - after that, the device/service does all the work in developing brand loyalty). And Sprint had to consider that bloggers are likely to hate being contacted by a corporate giant, as the concept of blogs are rooted in consumer-to-consumer or expert-to-consumer or entertainment-to-consumer connectivity, not corporate-giant-to-potential-consumer, as far as the communications model goes.

What Sprint did was clever, and if done right, gives us an opportunity to improve our consumer experience with the company. If they were smart and did their homework (as I suspect they did) they knew that most bloggers would repost their “ask”. They might have even considered that they would get feedback about their brand as WELL as feedback about this new device. They possibly recognized the value in such dialogue, positive or negative, and that if they ask for it and then listen carefully, they just might learn something. (About their brand image, their service, their strategy, who listens to the experts they’ve contacted, and last but not least, the phone itself.)

Or maybe I'm giving them way too much credit.

Either way, I'm not offended nor victimized by this strategy. It's no manipluative ploy - we, and they, are smarter than that. And I'm growing tired of this upheaval from bloggers of late about such outreach from big companies.

I understand that the beauty of a blog is that we all get a platform to say what we think, unfiltered. The flip side, however, is that without any code of ethics or accountability for balance we can cause a ruckus amongst those who don't recognize flagrant emotional rants and we can thereby slowly chip away at the credibility of those expert bloggers out there who hold themselves to a higher (dare I say journalistic?) standard. I'm certainly no example, but I'm also not out in the ether yelling about conspiracies, ripping at companies, making recommendations or slinging mud at companies who are trying to start a dialogue with me, or even -- gasp! -- hear what I have to say. That's just silly.

I can recognize and appreciate that corporate America sees some value in the dialogues that go on in our world... and I've been carefully watching as they become smart enough to try to learn how to participate in it.

That said, having had a terrible experience with Sprint in the past, I wouldn’t use one of their phones if it was plated in platinum and someone was threatening to set my left foot on fire while pulling out my fingernails one by one and tickling me unless I used it. They are inflexible, their customer service people are testy and I always either went over my minutes and paid a month's rent for my cell phone or I under used my minutes and still spent a small fortune, with those minutes gone forever. And data sending was like watching paint dry.

Bad product and bad service will sink good strategy every single time. But if they are reading carefully, perhaps their product will improve.

Then we all win, don't you agree?