It seems almost quaint now, but there was once a version of the Internet ruled by influencers that were honest, high integrity folks who genuinely cared about the impact of their words.
Perhaps the most thoughtful of these was Om Malik, who passed away last week at the age of 59. Om was a colleague and a contemporary, and his site GigaOm was one of the earliest and most important partners at Federated Media, an early “record label” for bloggers that I launched in 2005.
I had read Om’s site for more than four years before reaching out to him and asking if he’d join our “federation” of early tech bloggers. He agreed, joining pioneering sites like Boing Boing, TechCrunch, AVC, and yep, this very site (hard to believe, but in the early years, Searchblog had more than 250,000 readers a month).
I think it’s fair to say that Federated was one of the very first platforms for “Internet influencers” – and certainly the first to wade into the somewhat murky waters of how to get quality authors paid through marketing partnerships. This all emerged in the early 2000s – a full quarter century before we got…whatever this is.
Om was a crucial thought partner for me as I attempted to square the maddening circle of what I called “conversational marketing,” which I defined as a new approach to advertising that acknowledged media had become a conversation, not a dictation, and for marketers to succeed, they had to partner with new forms of media driven by direct engagement with both publishers and their audiences.
I argued that this new era of conversational media was driven in large part by the rise of search, itself a new kind of “conversational interface” that had rapidly become the core driver of value on the Internet. (If you want to review a presentation about all this, here’s a link to a PDF of a talk I gave at Berkeley back in 2007).
Om challenged my thinking on any number of fronts, but crucially, he also agreed to work with me as we experimented with new approaches to publishing partnerships. One such experiment was a deal with Microsoft, which was looking to prove its relevance in the burgeoning world of blogs. The resulting campaign, called “People Ready,” sparked a controversy that still carries lessons for today. (It also led to new FCC regulations related to influencers – regulations that, alas, have been largely ignored.)
The campaign invited publishers like Om (and myself, as well as many others) to comment on Microsoft’s marketing messaging. If I recall correctly, the prompt was “What makes your business ‘people ready’?” Our responses were then integrated into advertisements that ran across the Federated network.
We’d been running similar campaigns for more than a year, and at first, no one noticed. But two months in, Valley gossip site ValleyWag decided to call us out, and all hell broke loose.
It was a shitstorm, and Om and I were at the center of it. Om quickly decided his integrity was more important than the ad dollars he was making with Federated, and pulled out of the campaign. Others, including TechCrunch and Fred Wilson at AVC, defended it. For about a week, “People Ready” was all anybody in the blog world could talk about. And while I probably aged a few years in that week, I also grew as both a CEO and as a writer.
The People Ready campaign is now a forgotten piece of Internet history, but as evidenced by the outpouring of tributes and grief, Om will be remembered well and forever. Long after Federated was sold and we both moved on, Om and I stayed in touch, swapping notes on the industry and comparing possible new investments. He was ever the true gentleman, and his writing on the state of our industry stayed potent until the very end.
Rest in peace, good sir. You are deeply missed.
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Thank you for this John. Very sad to lose his voice and his big heart.
❤️
What a legend in such a critical era of the internet. Thanks for sharing.