The Tale of Little Weasel and Big Weasel
June 3rd, 2008 |
This is the tale of two corporate spokespeople who committed online ethical gaffes. Neither of these stories is breaking news, but together, they represent an interesting contrast between two markedly different ends of the social media ethics spectrum.
The story of Little Weasel is one of anonymous blog commenting run amok. On January 29, a popular Irish blogger, Sabrina Dent, blogged about her experiences with Moli, a Dublin-based start-up that Dent described as “social networking for grownups.” She writes that she was impressed by the service which emphasizes its privacy controls in its marketing. She says upon sign-up that Moli “broke her heart.”
“For all the positioning and talk of ‘protecting your privacy’ MOLI fails at the most basic hurdle. Because it doesn’t cloak new joins; in fact, it has to be displaying them somewhere, because within 15 minutes of joining, the spam started.”
Here’s where the fun begins. A visitor to the blog, Hawk5721 (hereafter known as Little Weasel) left a comment in support of Moli “MOLI is awesome. Exactly what grown ups and business have been waiting for.”
A little snooping by readers of the blog revealed Little Weasel’s comment came from inside Moli. When confronted on the blog about his identity, Little Weasel left this obtuse comment “As far as where i work of course i want to stick up for the company that is going to change the market place.”
At that point, commenters let loose with vicious character attacks, obscenities and name calling. Obviously, Little Weasel had received some counsel, as he decided eventually to reveal that he was actually Moli’s Director of Customer Service, in a no longer anonymous comment:
“Please accept my apologies for using my personal alias when commenting to you about some mis-information I believe you blogged about the company. It was my responsibility to include my company name and title. In the future, I will include my name and title in all posts about company information.
In my capacity as Director of Customer Service, I simply wanted to address, in an informal way, some of the issues that you raised which are well intentioned but do not accurately reflect how privacy works on MOLI.
My email is ddifiore@moli.com and I would be happy to address any additional questions that you may have.”
Obviously too little too late. Five months later in fact, Little Weasel continues to receive blogosphere beatings for his gaffe. In fact, we discussed this case study last week at a PRSA panel in Mountain View.
His behavior was inexcusable, but so was Dent’s and that of the visitors to her blog. I will not reproduce here the foul language and names used to describe Little Weasel, but they would shock all but the coarsest of us. In their own way, all of the people who attacked Little Weasel are guilty of a similar ethical violation: using the relative anonymity of the blogosphere to behave in an incredibly uncivil way. If you were to unleash this kind of vitriol in a business meeting, you would find yourself on the street in ten minutes.
As to the original issue, a couple of things are clear. Little Weasel should have known better. He made a gross error in judgment. He was deceptive. He broke a cardinal principal of social media ethics and when confronted, he dug in and continued the deception.
Little Weasel was not guilty of astroturfing, as Dent asserts. Astroturfing is not a single act of misrepresentation in a blog comment. It is a bogus grassroots campaign, an organized, broad based effort at deception, and there is no evidence that Moli embarked on any such thing. This was a single albeit incredibly stupid act by one ill informed person.
Little Weasel did apologize, a bit late in the game, but the merciless beating on the blog and elsewhere continued. This is because, for some, our friend Daniel stopped being a person and became a case study and a stand-in for all companies that don’t “get” social media, privacy, authenticity, etc.
What else can Moli do at this point? They need to do a little internal social media training. They need to keep Little Weasel off of the blogs for a bit. They need to ask themselves how their positioning as a company concerned with privacy affects how they need to conduct themselves in the blogosphere.
Personally, I think Little Weasel has learned his lesson, and I lost all sympathy for Dent and her supporters once the name calling and obscenities were unleashed. I’m not sure who committed the worst of the ethical breaches that took place here.
Enter Big Weasel
Big Weasel is John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, who came under fire last year when it was revealed he used a pseudonym to make derogatory comments about competitor Wild Oats in Yahoo finance forums at a time when Whole Foods was in discussions to acquire Wild Oats.
While investigations were under way, and the company was under the spotlight, Big Weasel took time off from his blog and his other “online diversions.” Now that he’s been cleared by the courts and the regulators, Big Weasel is back with a sweeping blog post explaining why, despite everything that happened, it was OK to do what he did.
My first reaction: shut up John. I lost a lot of respect for Mackey and Whole Foods when all of this came out last year, and I am losing more with this return performance. It’s like finding out that the founders of Ben and Jerry’s had been hanging out with Eliot Spitzer and were referred to in court documents as Clients 10 and 11 respectively. He does apologize in the post, but with so much justification that the apology gets completely watered down.
Let’s look at some of what passes for Big Weasel’s reasoning. In defense of his failure to disclose his identity on the Yahoo forums, Big Weasel (or more likely his corporate communications people) writes:
“In online communities such as Yahoo!, the use of screen names is the normal custom as it allows posters to totally engage in the various discussions and debates that were taking place there. An online screen name is a great ‘equalizer’ between people.”
Nonsense. This would not apply to the officer of a publicly held corporation. Admittedly, some 60-year-old truckers use screen names like hotteencheerleader472, to equalize things, but we expect more from someone in Big Weasel’s position.
“The true identity in the outside world is irrelevant for purposes of participation in these communities.”
Uh, not according to the SEC’s financial disclosure laws (aka “Reg FD“), or Sarbanes Oxley. Officers of publicly held companies have special obligations when communicating materially about those companies.
Big Weasel then goes on to claim an error in judgment. Again — hello? You’re the CEO of a publicly held company. Your campaign on Yahoo was carried out deliberately over a period of years. The fact that you hid your identity is damnable. Your suggestion that you misinterpreted the situation and suffered a monetary lapse in judgment is insulting to your customers and shareholders.
Big Weasel also asserts that he was simply exercising his First Amendment right to free speech. Any first-year journalism student knows that the First Amendment does not guarantee unlimited freedom to speak. It guarantees freedom of speech, which includes the right to be free from harmful speech.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., said in Schenck v. United States “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.” We also have laws against hate speech, and in commercial enterprises, against making misrepresentations of product superiority or company financial performance. These laws are designed to protect consumers, and we know from the excesses and outright theft perpetrated on them by Enron and others during the dot-com bust, that such protections are necessary.
That Big Weasel would play to the obviously liberal bias of Whole Foods’ customers and shareholders with a First Amendment ploy like this is transparent (a new adventure for Mackey) and reprehensible.
I cannot believe that someone as smart as John Mackey, who built the Whole Foods empire, and has been at the helm of the company for 28 years, could not know he was in ethically dicey territory.
A 16-word comment on Big Weasel’s blog sums the situation up quite nicely: “A corporate officer anonymously posting about their own company and their competitors. Seems unethical to me.”
So, in the case of John Mackey, aka Big Weasel, I am unable to find sympathy. He has the public trust, and he represents a corporation who’s fortunes directly affect the lives of thousands of people. He is answerable to all of these people, and to the SEC, FASB, the FTC ahead of his desire to indulge his misdirected sense of justice or need for self expression.
If I ran Whole Foods corporate communications, I would ban Mackey for life from blogging or otherwise having any kind of direct social media presence.
Such are the stories of Little Weasel and Big Weasel. Both men committed ethical lapses, though clearly, of totally different magnitudes. Is one worse than the other? I think so.
Tags: Moli, Sabrina Dent, Whole Foods, John Mackey, astroturfing
| Sphere This |
I beg your pardon?
This piece is inaccurate. If you’d like to write about my “inexcusable behaviour” than kindly link to the post in question so that people can make their own assessments: http://tinyurl.com/2m6xqj
Second of all, by your own definition, astroturfing is:
“…not a single act of misrepresentation in a blog comment. It is a bogus grassroots campaign, an organized, broad based effort at deception, and there is no evidence that Moli embarked on any such thing.”
Except there is, as was highlighted in a follow-up post less than six hours later: http://tinyurl.com/29k8co
Daniel DiFiore, MOLI.com’s Director of Customer Service, used the Hawk5721 handle for nothing except the posting of booster comments from June to January (when he got caught) on sites including Digg, TechCrunch and GetSatisfaction.com, where he attempted to lure people from Facebook to “a great new site i found.”
Lawn, meet green. That is astroturfing.
Finally, Daniel did not decide “eventually to reveal that he was actually Moli’s Director of Customer Service” — he continued to comment incognito under his anonymous handle until AFTER I posted his name and corporate title in a second post: http://tinyurl.com/29k8co
If you would like to use my unearthing of MOLI’s astroturfing practices as an object lesson for PR professionals, please do — but I would very much appreciate it if you could get the story straight.
Thanks.
Comment by Sabrina Dent — June 3, 2008 @ 9:51 pm
I guess I am not surprised that any comment you would leave would have the same uncivil, condescending tone of your original post, and the comments left on your blog. Your comment is interesting, and in places informative, but also includes a number of misstatements.
For example, I’m not sure what you mean by “kindly link to the post in question so that people can make their own assessments.” In my second paragraph I DO link to the same post you provided a link to. Did you actually read my post? Perhaps I should be begging your pardon. I am sure you regret the error.
In your post of Tuesday, 29 January, 2008 you comment “that is … Called astroturfing.” You made this claim BEFORE you had evidence that Mr. DiFiore was engaged in any organized scheme, yet you stated it at the time as a matter of established fact. You did not have sufficient evidence at the time you made the assertion, and that this later turned out to be an astroturfing scheme does not change the fact that you originally called it one without substantiation.
I was unaware of the second post, so I did not have that information at hand. You do not link to it from the original post, so it is understandable that I would have missed it, but based on the additional information, of course I agree that Mr. DiFiore was engaged in a deliberate campaign of deception, in this case, fairly called astroturfing. I was, as I said, reacting to the facts that YOU laid out in your blog post, which simply did not support the charge. I am sorry that your original post did not include all of the information needed to justify the astroturfing claim, but that is your fault, not mine.
Most of this argument, however is a red herring. We both agree that Mr. DiFiore’s actions were wrong, that he stepped well into unethical territory, and that he dug in and resisted doing the right thing for far too long. I made all of this clear in my post, so your objections to the precise language I used to describe Mr. DiFiore’s decision to apologize are not material.
It is also apparently important to you that you are credited with “unearthing” Moli’s practices, and I don’t dispute that either, though it is of no importance in this discussion.
What I object to most is the name calling and the deluge of obscenities that were rained down on Mr. DiFiore via your blog. I assume you support all of this, because either you moderate comments and approved these or you don’t moderate comments and didn’t delete them, so as editor of your blog, you endorse all of it. Either way, I find them highly disagreeable and out of proportion to the “crime,” and I know I am not alone in that.
I have learned nothing from your comment or a careful rereading of your blog that causes me to change my opinion. I stand by my original assessment that the behavior that went on on your blog in connection with this is inexcusable and that you hold some responsibility for that.
Comment by joel — June 3, 2008 @ 11:20 pm
Well, I’m sorry you consider my comment above to be uncivil. I consider it to be dispassionate, as I was merely trying to communicate a timeline of events here.
For the record, I moderate comments in my blog for spam and for libel; I do not moderate them for opinion. If I moderated them for opinion, I would have screened out the “You’re being a total b*tch, and way out of line. Stop blogging you f*cking b*tch” comment you can see on the post you discuss. Were your assumption that I endorsed all of the comments appearing on my blog correct, I would ipso facto endorse that one, and I think we can both see the logical fallacy in that.
So in case it is not clear: I have an open conversation policy. Putting a comment through is not an “endorsement” of the opinion, position or language of that individual on my part. I have no issues if people choose a different editorial approach to their comments, but that is mine.
As to being unaware of the second post and it’s companions, I’m confused as to how that is possible with a “careful reading” since both follow-up posts ARE linked to as updates from the bottom of the first post; the entire flow of posts is cross-linked. But then, I really didn’t see your link to my post up above, either, so apparently we both need glasses — or possibly longer attention spans, or both. In either case, I apologise for my mis-statement. I was wrong there.
And as to astroturfing, when I first used that term (in a comment to Dan, two hours after this all kicked off) I did in fact already know that that was exactly what he was doing. Throwing his fake username into Google turned that little nugget up in 0.30 seconds. You are correct that I did not substantiate that in the comment (and in retrospect, I accordingly cut too wide a swathe in the comment), but certainly had the evidence at the time.
I do neither want nor need to be “credited” with calling foul on MOLI. My sole concern is that when you do so, identifying me by name, that you are accurate. However it came about, I’m glad you now have a fuller picture of the events that look place.
We are, as you point out, really not very far apart on this at all; we agree that Daniel DoFiore’s behaviour was, shall we say, sub-optimal. The part where my feathers get ruffled is where you state that my behaviour was likewise inexcusable.
My language was not particularly salty, (I used the F word once), and NONE of my comments were anonymous. My comments are all ascribed to me, on a website with a URL that is my name and my business name.
Perhaps the real point of departure for us is that you think I should moderate and take responsibility for the content of my visitors’ comments, and I do not. Certainly I don’t want to make assumptions about your thinking, but I’m curious if that is really the root of this unforgivable transgression I seem to have committed.
Anyway, I’m glad that your comment policy, whatever it may be, allowed us to have this exchange. So, regardless of anything else, thanks for that.
Comment by Sabrina Dent — June 4, 2008 @ 12:42 am
Sabrina,
I appreciate your additional comments. I have tremendous admiration for you and now that I better understand your thinking, I believe you have been consistent and reasonable in your approach.
One of the drafts sitting in my blog posts folder is my formal comments policy. I have written social media plans and policies for many clients, and I also created the policy for Eastwick, the agency I worked at before going the independent route, but just recently decided I ought to have one of my own. I advise clients never to allow gratuitous obscenities on their corporate social media sites, but perhaps the rules are different for personal blogs. (It is hard to convey nuance in a comments box, but I am sincere in asking this question and not being antagonistic.)
In April, I wrote a column in which I used the word b***s***. A reader of this blog took me to task for it, saying that it was not in keeping with my audience and my role as a professional corporate communicator. I think it’s just a matter of personal preference, but I really don’t like posting profanity on my blog, whether in an original post or in comments.
I did notice that in addition to the various epithets directed at Mr. DiFiore, that you had approved the comment you mention that was aimed at you. I could see even before our discussion that you are consistent and transparent in handling comments.
I was too harsh in calling your “behavior” “inexcusable.” I suppose this is something that still needs to be worked out, whether a blogger is responsible for the editorial content (and I use the term quite loosely) of comments on her/his blog, or whether four-letter words are less important than they used to be and are now a natural part of our language when we are in heated discourse. I do think we tend to gang up on people who show poor judgment (or those who are immoral), and that sometimes the conversation goes a little beyond what I think is merited.
I too am grateful we were able to have had this chat, and I have learned much from it, including a heightened respect for you.
Lastly, I will be contacting my optometrist about getting the prescription updated for my blogging glasses.
Joel
Comment by joel — June 4, 2008 @ 12:27 pm
[...] constitute “a conversation.” Since I have been on Twitter, and have been writing for Talent Zoo, the number of comments on my blog has gone up. There are a couple of dozen regular readers of this [...]
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